Pajibagirl Joins the Cannonball Read

Hi kidses.

2010-07-10T12:50:00.000-04:00

Wow, my blogging has fallen SO by the wayside. This was brought to my attention by a friend a few nights ago, when he asked me when I was going to post something new. So, here goes.

Let's get business out of the way - I'm obviously still doing the Cannonball thing, since there are new reviews being posted on Pajiba nearly every day. It's gotten a little harder to switch up the rotation, but there are some troopers out there still going strong. I promise you I will update the main page tomorrow, since I'm stuck in the house with some sort of mutant summer bug. I feel terrible that I haven't done it sooner, but by my calculations I spend about 45 hours a week at work, not counting the two hour commute. It's pretty draining. Still that's no excuse for neglecting the Read, and I apologize to the participants and to my boss DR.

I've been doing other stuff too...blood drive, beach holiday, random evenings in my sister's garden, three hour car inspections...hell, I don't know where the time goes. I'm looking for a new job; rocking the single life again; trying to figure out what I'm doing with the rest of my life and what I want to be when I grow up. All of my friends and family are hitched and raising offspring, so I've been subjected to a litany of "When are you going to meet someone? Aren't you worried you won't have kids? Don't you want a husband?" Why, thank you, well-meaning family and friends. I'm just going to drink a bleach cocktail and stick my head in the oven, thanks. You've reduced the meaning of my life to the sum of my left ring finger and my ladybits.

Ah, it's all so confusing. Maybe it's the early 30s blues. Maybe it's exhaustion. Maybe I missed the boat when I was younger - it could be true that you only get lucky enough to really fall in love once, or that could just be a Nora Roberts romance novel myth. All I know is that I have to make the best of what I've got, and I'm going to work on that every day. Starting today. While I lie on my couch and ignore my throbbing ear canal.

This is me doing my fun job. Kind of.

2010-06-20T13:29:00.000-04:00

I did a review for Pajiba, just like what's in my job description. I got a copy of a really awesome book called Firefly: Still Flying from the good peoples at Titan books, and on top of the review, we're giving away three copies to the winners of the contest that Dustin made up in honor of the book. If you want to read the review, go here.

The other part of my fun job is running the Cannonball circus. I have to tell you something. The participation level has dropped off a lot, but I'm not complaining, for swearsies. I just want you to know that we're going to keep running reviews by the same participants over and over unless the field widens. On that note, we have a new participant who joined about a week ago - The Other Nicole. Game on, Other Nicole!

I know that I have to update the tallies on the main page, and that's going to happen this week. (I'm not a liar; I just work lots - the interwebs at the office won't let me on Pajiba, which is how I do the updates and keep score, etc....it's complicated.) I also owe you the list of superstars who finished at 52, and I'll be getting to that as well.

Now, cross your fingers that I don't have to work more than 45 hours this week; otherwise, my eyeballs might just bleed out of my headspace.

Well, hey, y'all.

2010-06-13T16:23:00.000-04:00

Do you know how disgraceful it is that I haven't updated this here blog in literally MONTHS? I should be ashamed of myself. To use a cliche, it's not you, it's me. More accurately, it's not you, it's my job. Those ridiculous damn spreadsheets have taken over my life and I'm clocking in hours that would make a first year law associate blush.

Back to the point. I am totally keeping up with my little Cannonballers thanks to the miracle of Google Reader, but I haven't had time to update the main page, and I'm sorry. I promise I'll try to get to it this week. I also have a Pajiba review due that I haven't handed in yet either, so I'm slacking all over the place.

One last thing - I want to ask the Cannonballers a favor. Right now there are a few diehards who are reading and reviewing like nobody's business, but I feel like I'm seeing the same names over and over again, and if that's the case, there are going to be reviews by the same names being posted a couple of times a week, and then some people are going to call shenanigans and favoritism. So if you got a little behind, no big deal, but toss in a random review here and there so we can put your name in lights. C'mon, do it for me.

Have a lovely week, kids!

In Memoriam

2010-03-25T18:02:00.001-04:00

On a day when we're all remembering, I just wanted to do something I never do - a re-post. This is what I wrote 364 days ago when I finally got my head around the fact that my friend was gone.

Say Goodnight, Not Goodbye

Holla

2010-03-21T15:21:00.000-04:00

If you didn't know by now, I am spending the weekend in Boston, so I'm not updating the Read until I get home. My laziness is legendary.

Anyway, this is just a quick one to let you know that of course I haven't forgotten, I've just been busy and will update the main page on Pajiba either tonight or tomorrow night (barring any work emergencies). I'm guessing that we're going to close in on a thousand reviews by the end of April, honestly. I need to buy more Visine, but I'm loving every minute of it. I really am so excited by the way that y'all have gotten so into it, and I especially appreciate the incredibly insightful discussion and thoughtful consideration shown in last week's comments on Alli's review of Impossible Motherhood - this is the kind of thing that I aim for when choosing reviews, and the commenters delivered.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the body of work being churned out is impressive. I love checking my Google Reader and seeing new reviews. I've begun reading books recommended by the Cannonballers, because your tastes and choices are divergent and your opinions are compelling. So thank you, every one of you, for being a part of this.

MIA

2010-03-14T09:35:00.000-04:00

Hi kids! I know I haven't given you a new update for a few weeks, but, you know, life gets in the way. I am still reading every review and the Cannonball is going strong over on Pajiba. We even had our very first winner, the lovely Ms. Jen K, who heroically kicked ass while serving in the military. (We've got another active duty soldier, the impressive kingsmartarse, who is currently sending us reviews from the deserts of Afghanistan.)

While we're discussing kingsmartarse, I need to address what happened last week. One of his reviews was posted and had to be pulled because the comments were degenerating into a flame war. Some people still think it's okay to attack the Cannonball Readers and their reviews. News flash: it's not. I deeply admire those of you who jumped in to defend the review and the reviewer, mainly because I can't. As a staffer I need to stay out of the fray, but I've said before and I'll say it again, don't fuck with my Cannonballers. The fact that a review had to be yanked (although I agree with Dustin's decision to pull the plug before it got even uglier) makes me sad and angry. You guys are doing an amazing job, and you're a community of book lovers who have banded together in the spirit of fun and charity. When someone takes it upon themselves to denigrate that, I get fired up, and a fired up Nicole is not a good thing.

I just want you to know that I'm in your corner, and that any concerns or issues with reviews should be directed to me via email or Facebook message, because I'm the one who picks the reviews. I welcome feedback, because I want to make this the best competition that it can possibly be. Feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment. But don't, don't, don't mess with my Cannonballers.

Now that's what I call awesome.

2010-02-28T12:07:00.000-05:00

Hi kids! It has been a busy couple of weeks in Cannonball Read Land. (We should totally make a board game and sell it to Milton Bros. We'd be rich.) Cannonball Read Day was a huge success two weeks ago, and this past week the Pajiba Book Club discussion of Lolita was a hit! I just want to say, again, how great everyone is doing, and how much I appreciate everything that you guys are bringing to the table. You've given Pajiba a whole new facet and more depth and I don't even think you know it. I tallied up your total reviews late Friday and guess what? You guys have posted 786 reviews in just under four months. That is ridiculous and outstanding and it makes me want to do a happy dance in my robe.

Now, I want to clear the air just a bit. Some people have been sad in the pants because I was being a little bitchy (or a lot bitchy) about the lack of participation on some fronts. I do actually have a reason behind the bitchface. We've got the superstars, listed below, and superstars are awesome. That said, I don't want them to get ALL of the spotlight. I'd love to feature you even if you just write two reviews this whole time. My goal at the outset was to rotate as much as possible so it wouldn't look like I was favoring anyone or snubbing anyone. So, even if you know you won't make it to 52, just post one or two reviews so you can see your name in lights over on the mother site. I really want to just share every one of you with the world. Sorry for being a dick.

Did I just get sap in my coffee? Damn.

Okay, here are your superstars:

Jen K - 49 (!)

Malin - 28

Pinky McLadybits - 31

mswas - 27

carrie - 26

Snuggiepants the Deathbringer - 21

Vikky - 20

Jelinas - 20

Prisco - 19

dene - 18

Rusty - 18

Janel - 17

KingSmartarse - 17

jeremy feist - 15

Caroline - 15

Sara - 15

Baby, you're a star

2010-02-18T20:24:00.000-05:00

Yes, yes, I'm late with my update. (I iz a rhyming FOOL!) I already told you I was taking the weekend off, and I've been too knackered to tally. So I figure tonight is going to take me two hours to get through everything.

Remember, if you still have zero book reviews by March 25th, you lose your spot in the read. That's nearly five months into the competition. More than a third of the way in. And while I do love you all, let's face it, I don't need to spend time reading about your breakups and makeups and family problems and mental issues. Not that I'm not sympathetic, I am, but for the love of Job just post a damn review. It's not fair to the others. Some of you begged to join and I had to turn you away. Not fair.

Here's something else I want to address: You may have noticed by now that some of the participants have had multiple reviews posted. That's because they're prolific. They're reviewing like mad, and so they give me more to work with. Stop drinking your cherry Haterade and read a book.

Ok, enough bitchface. (I've only managed eight hours sleep in three nights.) Here are your superstars:

Jen K - 46 (!)

Malin - 28

Pinky McLadybits - 27

mswas - 25

carrie - 24

Vikky - 20

Jelinas - 20

Prisco - 19

Snuggiepants the Deathbringer - 19

Janel - 16

dene - 16

Rusty - 16

jeremy feist - 15

Caroline - 15

KingSmartarse - 15

The overall total? 741 reviews!

Well played, my friends. Well played.

My fake CBR

2010-02-16T21:05:00.000-05:00

I'm totally going to cheat, but here's the link to my Goodreads page: Nicole's Goodreads.

I'll be posting mini-reviews over there and keeping this for my Cannonball job. And other reviews I might post, like The Yellow House.

I hope you like it.

The Big Reveal

2010-02-15T16:47:00.000-05:00

If you haven't figured it out by now, today is Cannonball Read Day over at Pajiba. All book reviews all day. Go check it out!

The Yellow House by Patricia Falvey

2010-02-14T02:35:00.000-05:00

Note: Per FTC regulations, this is a review of an advanced reader copy that I received free from the Hachette Book Group. This book will be released to the public on February 15th.

I admit, with my lack of Irish heritage and slim understanding of Irish history, that perhaps I was not the best audience for Patricia Falvey's The Yellow House. I honestly couldn't be certain if the plot of the book was something that was common in families during the time of Ireland's "troubles" or if Falvey merely packed in many elements of that time period in order to create and maintain the drama and forward movement of the story.

Eileen O'Neill is the daughter of a farmer and a housewife in the early part of the twentieth century, growing up in a happy home with her older brother Frankie and younger sister Lizzie. The lovely mountain Slieve Gullion can be seen from her home, and Eileen finds comfort and joy in the mountain, thinking of it as a mother figure. All is well in the yellow house, with love and music, until the day Lizzie goes to the fever hospital and their mother comes home without her; Lizzie is gone. As the rumblings of the Irish revolution come nearer, Eileen's mother leaves them with Frank in tow, and later suffers a breakdown which puts her in the hospital for the duration of the book, with Frank's Protestant grandfather raising him. When her father is killed by English loyalists, Eileen flees with her baby brother Paddy and takes job in a mill in a nearby town to save money to fund her dream of one day reclaiming the Yellow House for her family and reuniting them.

This is where I felt the need to suspend my disbelief. Eileen becomes a labor reformist, forges a relationship with the wealthy son of the Protestant mill owner, becomes a talented fiddler with the Ulster minstrels, marries a Catholic seminarian-turned-rebel, participates in IRA activities, swears in Gaelic, and gives birth to a daughter named Eoife (Eee-fa). I'm sure if tattoos were in vogue back then she'd have had a shamrock tramp stamp.

It is an engaging story; I just found it a tidge unbelievable. More outlandish things happen, and there is a happy ending. Falvey's writing is beautiful, almost lyrical, but as I said, I had no prior knowledge of the subject matter. However, Falvey intrigued me and I'd like to read more on the topic.

Big Pimpin'

2010-02-13T13:30:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note to mention that the first installation of the Pajiba Book Club Discussion will be taking place on February 25th. The first book is Lolita by Nabakov. You don't have to be a Cannonballer to join in, just read the book and tell the Pajibaverse what you think!

A very, very special thank you and tip of the hat to Mr Yossarian, who will be helming the discussion. He rocks the socks.

Laters!

2010-02-11T20:47:00.000-05:00

This time tomorrow I'll be leavin' on a jetplane to spend the weekend in L.A. where there isn't four feet of snow on the ground, no one steals my parking spot, and a cute boy is going to sex me and take me to dinner.

Therefore, I'll be on hiatus over the weekend but we've got your surprise on Monday! Keep reading!

See you on the other side, brother.

Honor Roll

2010-02-09T21:05:00.002-05:00

I just want to celebrate the Cannonballer's who have been reading/reviewing rock stars. Here they are, just for kicks. Make sure you add them to your Google readers or bookmark their blogs.

Snuggiepants the Deathbringer (17)

Jen K (40)

Rusty (15)

Teabelly (carrie) (20)

Brian Prisco (19)

Caroline (15)

Malin (26)

Pinky McLadybits (25)

Vikky (17)

mswas (22)

Well done, my friends. Well done.

Joining the Cannonball Read...sort of.

2010-02-07T21:56:00.000-05:00

I'm going to be honest; with running the official CBR and working and trying to write reviews for Dustin, I'm not going to be able to officially participate, but I would like to post the books I've read/am reading since the start of the CBR II. Thank the Lord for my goodreads page. I'll start updating tomorrow night.

For now, it's time to enjoy the Saints win, pick out tomorrow's work clothes, make sure my Wellingtons are by the front door, have one more beer, and go to bed. Gotta get up early to navigate this snow shit.

Love you all. Also, please keep sending (or START sending) recommendations!

P.S. - I'd really like some more commenters to validate my existence.

Here's your roundup, y'all

2010-02-06T16:45:00.001-05:00

I rambled earlier, but I owe you a total for the CBR, so here you are:

662.

Yep. Six hundred sixty two reviews written and posted since 11/1/2009. Did I tell you I lost my Visine? For serious. It's not in my medicine bag. I have to read all those reviews without eyeball lubrication. (The first person to make that dirty yet witty wins a prize.) I have your President's Day surprise pretty well wrapped up, so you just have to wait a week.

Honestly, kids, I don't have much to say today. Maybe the snow is making me sleepy or something. I'm watching the Discovery Channel and I love all these aminals who sting and bite and chomp people, as long as those people aren't me, of course. Tomorrow is Super Bowl Sunday, so I'm going to drink beers and dedicate them all to Jamiepants while I watch the two best teams in football battle it out (and yes, I totally called this SB matchup back in September).

Oh! I'm not updating next week, because I'm going to be away for the weekend. Behave yourselves. No hookers, no drugs. Keep reading!

(Not this blog, entry, goober. It's over. Well, no one reads this thing anyway.)

Well, this is interesting...

2010-02-06T11:33:00.001-05:00

I think...I think I'm going to join the Cannonball. I've been thinking on it the last couple of weeks. I still read like crazy. What do you all think?

It's another snow day! I have a laptop, my phone, books, movies, and a fireplace. I have the best blanket ever. I'm so happy right this minute.

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl. Who Dat? I'm pulling for the Saints.

CBR roundup post to follow.

Another rare midweek post

2010-02-03T01:23:00.001-05:00

I know! I'm a posting fool. Here's an update on the CBR:

I've already mentioned that if your total is zero, I'm skipping your blog on the weekly tally roundup. I'm taking it a step further: if, by March 25th, 2010, your total still stands at zero (not one, not two, etc.) I'm removing you from the Read. It's only fair to the other partipants, and at that point I'm guessing you feel either too behind to start, or real life got in the way, and I do invite you to regroup and join us in Year Three.

I love my readers, but like I said, with the reviews mounting daily, and the fact that I spend about seven or eight hours total on this a week, plus holding down a very demanding full-time job and dealing with some health issues, I need to streamline.

Now hop to it, keep 'em coming, and wait for our President's Day Surprise (2/15/10)!

Things.

2010-02-02T01:11:00.000-05:00

Stolen from Meg at Hobocamp:

Things You'll Never Hear Me Say

Hockey is the best sport ever.
Paying student loans gives me a sense of accomplishment.
I'm too tired for sex.
Sweatpants are the worst clothing ever.
Let's go for a jog!
Vibrators are gross.
Sorry, I don't drink.
Reading is SUCH a waste of time.
Can we stop at Taco Bell?
Eh, proper grammar is overrated.
Only losers and cat ladies read bridal magazines.
Pass that dutch.

Things I thought you'd never hear me say, yet now I am saying them:

I hate driving.
Pilates is awesome.
I might move away from Philly someday.
My boobs are getting bigger!
Cream cheese is gross.
Shit, I forgot to take my vitamins today.
Some nights, I actually sleep.

I do not have a clever title for this week's update post.

2010-01-31T11:25:00.002-05:00

It's true. I had a long-ish week, and my brain kind of turned to oatmeal, and I tried to come up with something clever, but lo, it was not to happen.

Anyway, let's get down to brass tacks, as my mother would say - you know, I have a LOT of sayings, and I get them all from my mom. I'm going to give you a little list of them at the end, for funsies.

How many books could a Cannonballer review if a Cannonballer could review books? Well, as a collective, the answer is:

638.

To tell the truth, I'm sure that the number of books read by the participants is hovering around 700; I only tally reviews, kids. For the sake of full disclosure, and I've said this before, if your current review total on the main Cannonball Read page at Pajiba, I don't bother to check your blog on the weekend when I update. Sorry. Also, if for some reason your total on that main page doesn't match your review number on your blog, let me know and I'll fix it. I spend something like four hours on this per weekend, but I am bound to make mistakes. The original point - I know that you reading fools are reading; it's just my job to keep track of the reviews.

What else? I need to buy/borrow books myself. I want to read The Other Queen by Phillipa Gregory. No, I don't know why. I just do. Also, can we talk about the fact that the Free Library of Philadelphia, the oldest library in the country, with an extremely extensive collection and branch system, does not have one copy of A Season of Night: New Orleans Life After Katrina? I have wanted to read that since Jamiepants reviewed it for last year's read. Dammit. I'll have to find it at B&N or just order the sucker online, because it's currently at the top of my Goodreads to-read list. I need other suggestions. Who wants to tell me what I should read? Don't be shy!

Ok, let's wrap it up, I have shit to do. I'll leave you with sayings I learned from my mom:

- That just doesn't cut the mustard.

- Let's get down to brass tacks.

- This place looks like a bomb hit it. (True story - when I was a kid, I thought a "bomhidit" was an actual thing or place, because she runs those words all together in a Philly accent - as do I.)

- Patience is a virtue.

- This isn't your flophouse.

I'm sure I'll come up with some other ones later. Ciao! *rides off on Vespa*

Surprise!

2010-01-29T20:00:00.002-05:00

Just a little heads up - we're going to be doing something a little interesting and new over on Pajiba for President's Day. If you're a Cannonballer or Cannonball fan, stay tuned!

Tally ho.

2010-01-24T12:48:00.001-05:00

Hello, class. Welcome to your weekly Cannonball Read 2.0 update. Who would like to take a guess as to how many total reviews we have? You, there, in the back - get your finger out of your nose and pay attention. This is Very Important Stuff.

All right, you lazy good-for-nothings, I'll tell you. Since November 1, 2009, the Cannonballers have written 599 reviews.

Why are you sitting there? Put your GODDAMN HANDS TOGETHER AND APPLAUD! These people are amazing.

I know we've already talked about the slackers, and I'm not dwelling on that, because I am attempting to have a new positive outlook on life and trying to be happy and shit. Instead, I would like to take this week's post as an opportunity to salute the warriors who are tearing it up like nobody's business. Our current Readin' Raiders are:

Jen K - 36 reviews

Malin - 23 reviews

PinkyMcLadybits - 21 reviews

mswas - 18 reviews

carrie (aka Teabelly) - 17 reviews

Prisco - 17 reviews

So there you go. I like to single people out for being awesome, because being awesome is really all we have in life. I strive for it every day. Most days I succeed, but that's just because I'm me.

All right, Miss Nicole needs more coffee and some quality time with her couch. Miss Nicole is going to try to ignore the fact that her stupid Crackberry doesn't want to behave and refuses to connect to the internet. To quote the great Miss O'Hara, "I won't think about that today. I'll think about that tomorrow."

Class dismissed. Have a great week, and be awesome.

Bonus post!

2010-01-18T19:08:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in yesterday's blogspot, there is a new CBR contestant. Welcome, welcome, mister jim of the lower case! Dedicated reader jim (otlc) missed the original cutoff but kept his blog going anyway, and asked if he could make a contribution at the end if he reached the goal.

You'll recall that in my "Interlude" post I expressed disappointment with the readers who were falling behind or not bothering to participate at all. One of the Cannonballers volunteered to give up his spot to someone more deserving; in fact he asked specifically that I give his spot to jim. I refused, saying that he was an integral part of the CBR and Pajiba. Then, truth be told, things got a little ugly.

I don't tell tales out of school, but it started on teh Facebook. I had some issues with some of the "Pajiboys," feeling that their comments and constant sexual remarks and innuendoes were not something I was comfortable with. At the new year, I did a friend purge. It was not directed at Pajibafolk; it included others I had friended because it seemed a good idea at the time, but with whom I was no longer comfortable having access to some of the more detailed parts of my life. I'm a sharer. I don't hold back. Who you see on the FB is who I am.

At any rate, this CBRer/Pajiboy was one of those cut. I had no more patience for his petulance, mood swings, apparent drinking problems, and inappropriate remarks. He was, quite simply, too much. So I cut him, but left him in the CBR because he deserved the spot. Then he made a few childish and petty comments about me on other friends' walls and status updates, and I'm a grown damn woman. I don't play games, and this isn't the schoolyard. Therefore, I honored his request and replaced him.

You guys read the blog. You know I have a lot going on right now. You don't know what's under the surface, but it runs deep and choppy. I'll get through; I always come out on top, but in order to do that I needed to cut some of the negativity out of my life.

So let us put this in the past and move forward. CANNONBALL!!!

Wow.

2010-01-17T15:19:00.000-05:00

Greetings, friends of mine. How was your week? Mine was long. Conversely, my weekend was far too short. I don't like that. Nor do I like when juice wears tights. But that is neither here nor there. Am I rambling? *looks at coffee cup, sees that it's empty* Oh. I'm rambling.

CANNONBALL! We have a total of 553 reviews. That, y'all, is a LOT of reviews. Additionally, the response to the daily CBR posts on Pajiba has grown, and I love it. I do. I have no idea why I do, since I have fuck all to do with it, but I get such a little thrill out of clandestinely reading the comment threads on my Blackberry at my desk. (As opposed to my blatant use of Facebook - not yet blocked - on my work computer. I'm bold with that shit. You want to pull me into a meeting Friday and tell me that I'm getting yet ANOTHER internal client? A huge one, with literally hundreds of providers and three divisions? Oh, I'm gonna Facebook at my desk, yes I am.)

See? I'm all tangential today. No, I'm not high. I'm tired, but that's par for the course. I think I need a B12 shot in the ass, for serious. Or a week on an island. Or a winning Powerball ticket. I've given up on the rich husband thing. For now.

I have $50 in B&N gift cards that I'm holding onto like they're made of platinum, for some reason. Why don't I spend the damn things? I think I'm going to hold off until right before I leave for L.A. so that I have good books to read on the plane and whatnot. Yes, I'm going to Los Angeles again. President's Day weekend. I burn through my vacation time just as fast as I accrue it, but it will be well worth it to get the hell out of here for a few days in February, which I consider the most pathetic month. Except for the fact that my braintwin Kolby's birthday is in February. That is really its only redeeming feature. Otherwise it's all cold and grey and oh my stars that bridge looks inviting; shall we jump off of it? I crave sunshine.

Anyways. Lots of reviews, more coming. New contestant. (Go look for yourself. I'm not your mother.) Paying off my library fines tomorrow so I can once again use my precious library card.

See ya next week! Need to go watch Tony Romo cry.

Who needs sleep?

2010-01-10T22:12:00.000-05:00

Well, the truth is, this girl. Facebook friends and the few followers of this blog know by now that I suffer from chronic insomnia. In fact, I have since I was a child of about 4 or 5. Last week I was awake for 28 straight hours. I drank so much coffee at work that day that I was itching like a leper by 5 o'clock. Back to original point: I had insomnia even as a young kid, which meant that I would stay up for hours reading by the glow of my nightlight. I just devoured books, because they took me out of my own head for a while and kept me company long after the rest of the house was asleep. I think that's probably where my deep affinity and lifelong attachment to reading began.

In a way, I don't mind the not sleeping so much (yes, I curse it at work, but it's something I have to live with, especially in the winter when my back aches so badly that sleep is impossible) because it gives me time to read and do Cannonball stuff on my NotSoSmartPhone. I slept a bunch this weekend (is that sleep debt stuff for real?), and watched football - please, please let's not talk about the Eagles, I might cry - so I neglected my Directress duties, but I'm going to catch up tomorrow night if I'm not too wiped.

Now I'm going to tell you a secret. In order to turn off my busy brain at night, I take some cool pharmaceuticals. Namely, a sleeping pill and a couple Xanax. Trouble is, they're not cutting it any more, and I find myself getting more snappish and irritable with everyone around me (I've said this before, and I'm not a sap, really, but God bless Freilich for putting up with my constant bitching and moaning. I wonder sometimes what the hell he's doing with me, unless he's a glutton for punishment or just enjoys the misery of others). So, I'm going to try the melatonin that everyone has suggested. I just need to check with the pharmacist to make sure it won't interfere with my other medications; I'm a walking pharmacy, don't you know?

Ok, how did we get off the topic of the Cannonball Read? I haven't tallied up the week's reviews yet, but I noticed an uptick, so that's good. I thought that the response to Jelinas's review last week was respectful and thoughtful for the most part, and I was proud to see that the readership of Pajiba was accepting of a point of view that is quite different from the norm in that little corner of the interwebs. I still get pissed at the negative comments, mainly because the CBR participants are doing this for fun and a good cause, not because they're getting paid. Look, if you want to attack the staff reviews, by all means, do so. We can take it. But don't fuck with my kidses. Seriously, I know people. I'm an Eyetal from Philly.

This little blog doesn't have many readers, but I'd like to pose a question born of my admission in the first paragraph of my childhood insomnia leading to my fanaticism for books: What got you started as a reader? Maybe someone will answer.

Have a good week, chickens.

Back to business...

2010-01-03T21:01:00.001-05:00

Okay, okay. The holidays are officially over, so it's time to get my ass back into gear on the Cannonball Read. Somebody has to wrangle you people. In fact, I'm going to tell you a secret: if your current review total stands at zero, I don't check your blog when I do the weekend roundup. If you can't be arsed to post, I can't be arsed to look. ("Wow, that Nicole really is a bitch! I can't believe she has a boyfriend who puts up with her! And friends who voluntarily speak to her!") It's true. I don't have time for bullshit, not with the working and the driving and the attempts at sleep and the need to drink beers and do laundry and scrub my toilet. Somewhere in there I need to squeeze in things like going to the drugstore and putting gas in my car and wondering how much longer I can go without an oil change (almost ten months so far!) and flying on airplanes. So, you see, I just don't have time to waste on y'all non-reviewers.

However comma, as we used to say in high school, I have all the time in the world for those of you who are doing a kickass job. Let me say one thing about the reviews posted on Pajiba - I love the comments that you kids are getting and giving. Except for this barf character, who needs a kick in the nards. Everything he says is negative, and I would appreciate it if one of you would just tell him to shut the fuck up. I can't do it because they blocked the site on my computer at work and I can't post from my Crackberry. I've already mentioned that I don't like people messing with my kids, and you adorable little Cannonballers are just like the children that my barren womb will never produce. (I just turned 31 and according to Dr. Oz my reproductive organs peaked at 27 so I'm going to have to steal a baby from the supermarket, then flee the state in an old Chevy, dye my hair red, adopt a Canadiadiadian accent, and work as a truck stop waitress in Des Moines.) (Shit, I just gave away my entire plan.) (In parentheses, no less.)

The point is, NO I AM NOT CRAZY, I am just reeling from the Eagles loss, and I'm loving the reviews you literate little buggers are churning out. Do you want to know how many reviews you've written, total? Well, with no further ado, here it is:

461.

Give yourselves a hand. Pass me the Visine.

Happy Holidays and junk!

2009-12-27T13:29:00.000-05:00

Hi! I've been really super busy with all of the present giving and present opening and visiting family and friends and stuff, so I'm just now getting around to my thrilling weekly post. What am I going to do today...

Well, I have to catch up on the whole Cannonball Read thing, which I've neglected for the last few days. I have laundry going, because I'm exciting. The Eagles are on at 4 (note: I had a ticket for the game. A surprise ticket. For the DENVER game. Wherein B Dawk returns. And had to pass it up because my spine is broken and stupid) so I'm going to throw on my jersey and watch that, and then I'm having my special "look at me, I'm awesome, let's celebrate me" birthday dinner that my mommy's cooking, and my cousin is coming and bringing my three favorite kids in the world, one of whom is Lolabelle, the most perfect child in the history of children. My goddaughter is just awesome and I love her so much it makes me sick.

After all of that, Seth will come home from the game, and we'll hang out for the rest of the evening, which makes this the best Christmas I've had in a very long time, because he's here, and that just makes me happy. Even when he's making fun of the fact that I ate two pounds of fudge, by myself, last weekend. And I'm off tomorrow. Win!

All right, let me go tally up these damn reviews. BYE!

Another year, another birthday

2009-12-21T22:20:00.000-05:00

As I look back and reflect on the last year, I find that I have a lot to think about. It was a good year overall, and my life is generally 95% better than it was at this time last December 21st.

On December 21st, 2008, my life was a mess. I was unemployed; job prospects were nil; my bank account was a joke. I was lonely. My family had fallen apart and my mother was unstable at best. And dammit, the Eagles had lost to the Redskins.

What a difference a year makes. That's trite, but true. I started a job in March - I don't love the work, but I have a great band of coworkers who make me laugh every day and put up with my bitchface. I settled my case and got rid of a lot of debt. Mister Dustin Rowles gave me the honor of a staff position over on Pajiba. I had a blast with my fellow Pajibans at Bacon East, and made great new friends. I met a cute boy. I traveled - Portland, Boston, Los Angeles. I attended my first Eagles game at the Linc, which was fantastic. I got the opportunity to run the Cannonball Read in tribute to my friend Manda, who inspired me beyond measure. My mom became, once again, the strong woman who raised me and made me who I am. My cousin gave birth to a gorgeous baby girl, whom I adore. I reconnected with old friends through the miracle of The Facebook.

It wasn't all roses and sunshine. We lost Amanda. I had to send my puppy (even at the age of ten, he was still my puppy) to that place where his diabetes and cataracts are gone, and his bones don't hurt anymore. I realized that the man who raised me was capable of destruction, cruelty, and mendacity beyond belief. He was not my biological father, but he was my father for many years, and that man was just a mirage. I watched my mother fall apart and become someone I didn't recognize. Those things were hard, but I got through them, and I'm better and stronger for them.

So here I am, a warrior in my own right. I'm blessed with beautiful, caring, witty friends. I have the best boyfriend in the world, who makes me happy every day. I have a job that pays the bills, another job that makes my heart happy, a roof over my head, and food in my belly. I have a fantastic rack and amazing hair. I am Nicole, and I am ready for the next chapter in my life. It's going to be brilliant.

Nicole loves a good snow day.

2009-12-19T10:44:00.001-05:00

Hi kids! You may not have heard, but it's snowing on the East Coast of America. I woke up to big ol' fat flakes coming down outside the window, which is basically God saying, "Nicole, my child, I love you. You don't have to leave the house today. Enjoy."

So what will I do with this early birthday present of a day? Cannonball Read stuff, mostly. Reviews need to be tallied. The CBR page on Pajiba must be updated. Next week's posts have to be chosen. The Facebook group needs to be monitored because Dustin would really like to put together a list of the Cannonballers' "Top Ten Books of the Decade" if enough people respond. This is all fun for me, because I love this thing. Since I don't have to leave the house, I can take my time and maybe even comment on some of the CBR blogs, something that I don't get to do nearly often enough.

Besides that, I'll drink coffee from my Gone With The Wind mug, lounge in my pajamas and robe, eat cookies, and read. I might even get caught up on my own reviewing. Later I'll see what's good On Demand and snuggle under my favorite afghan by the fireplace. I can appreciate the fact that my spine done got broked almost three years ago, because it exempts me from shoveling. (Lainey would be so proud of my silver-lining-finding.)

Last, but definitely not least, I can look forward to my birthday on Monday (PRESENTS!), Christmas next week (DAY OFF FROM WORK! MORE PRESENTS!!) and the fact that in seven days my awesometastic boyfriend will be here (SEX AND PRESENTS!!!) to visit.

Thanks, God. You are one cool omnipotent dude.

Just some thoughts.

2009-12-11T23:29:00.000-05:00

I hope I wasn't too harsh the other night. To clarify, I know exactly who is backed up because of school, families, work, illness, etc. I know who is reading. I know who is still trying to find their writing/reviewing grooves.

I also know who is not even mentioning the CBR. Who posts every day about shit that has nothing to do with it. I'm annoyed by that, but I'm easily annoyed. Just ask my sister, my coworkers, or my boyfriend.

Anyway. Dustin and I are working on smoothing out a kink in the official CBR page on Pajiba so that the updates are more current. I really do encourage those of you who have interwebs pals unfamiliar with the site to visit, even if it's just for the Cannonball reviews. We love new people. I cannot stress that enough.

As the read progresses, I'm trying to mix it up. Give a variety of genres, select books that I think will generate some higher volume comments, and rotate fairly among the participants. The more of you who write reviews, the larger the selection, and the better your chance to see you name in lights. Please, keep it going. I love what you've done so far.

I'm even considering jumping back in, unofficially, of course. I can totally do 52 in a year. And that's NOT counting my Pajiba reviews (on which I have been TOTALLY slacking).

Interlude

2009-12-09T20:39:00.001-05:00

I know, it's a rare midweek post. I'm so tired, and I'm so sick of staring at a computer screen, but there is something I need to get off of my chest.

Every day, I check my Google Reader. Several times. I star reviews that I think will work well on Pajiba, or that speak to me. I email Dustin my recommendations. Each morning I check the mother site to see the responses of the commenters; sometimes I comment myself. I am so incredibly proud of the work that many Cannonballers are creating.

That said, I feel that I need to express my disappointment with a few of the participants. I had to turn away at least a dozen people who wanted so badly to take part, and who have still set up their own blogs and are reading and reviewing outside of the "official" Read. One of these wonderful people has even offered to donate to the scholarship fund, from his own pocket, when he completes 52 reviews. On the other hand, there are some who clamored to join and haven't bothered to write a damn thing. Now, I know that real life gets in the way. There are jobs, and children, and chores and errands and holidays.

However. When you jumped in feet first, you made a commitment. To the Cannonball Read, to Pajiba, to your fellow readers. If you felt that you couldn't do it, you had the opportunity to back out and allow someone dedicated to the spirit of the Challenge to take your place.

I won't reprimand those who haven't posted a single review, or even read a book. Not publicly or personally. You may not even read this post. I've said my piece.

O Hai! I can haz new baybee.

2009-12-06T17:39:00.001-05:00

I really did intend to get more done today, on the reading and writing fronts, but since my favorite cousin had her first baby yesterday (OHMYGODSHE'SSOBEAUTIFUL) I spent a chunk of time at the hospital before tearing myself away from her perfect new baby-ness. I got some Cannonball Read business out of the way (you literate bastards have a total of 293 reviews, fuck me) and I am going to go back to visit her again because I adore babies and this is my new favorite baby in the history of the world and I only got to hold her for a little while yesterday and oh I'm rambling bambina SQUEE!

Now that I've gotten that out my system, down to business. As I had mentioned, there were 293 reviews as of last night. I love the response that the Cannonball Reads are getting over on the Pajiba. I admit, when someone makes a rude or derogatory comment, it takes all I have not to go flying in there and lay the smackdown on that fucker like a fired up mama bear. This challenge isn't easy, and the participants are really putting a lot of themselves into it. I dig the candid and thoughtful back and forth exchanges and discussions, because that's kind of the point of this thing. I cannot abide snarky "This review is shit, my second grader could do better" posts. You're not participating, are you? Then shut the fuck up. Do not make me bring the bitchface.

Ok, I feel better. Nothing makes me feel happier than seeing the Eagles crush a team, venting my thoughts about ignorant mofos, and then going to hold a new baby. A pretty, perfect, teeny new baby, who doesn't have to come home with me. See y'all next week! BYE!

Shameless Plug - Cannonball Read Part Deux

2009-12-01T23:15:00.000-05:00

Just a status update: as of yesterday the Cannonball participants had written a total of 256 reviews. All of which I've read. I may buy stock in whatever conglomerate makes Visine. Y'all are doing a yeoman's job, and with NaNoWriMo behind us and the winter looming - hell, who doesn't love to snuggle in with a book and a blanket and perhaps a hot toddy on a freezing night? - I'm anticipating an uptick in review volume. I love what has already been posted on Pajiba and I invite those of you who may not have followed the contest, or don't even know what the hell Pajiba is, to check out the offical Cannonball Read participants page.

I've been reading as well - since last Wednesday I read five books (and only ONE was a Nora Roberts!). Up next is Gaiman's American Gods, since Seth bought it for me when I was in L.A. and I promised I'd read it. I also have three Pajiba reviews to write so I'll probably bang those out this weekend.

Side note: I had the most amazing time in Los Angeles over the holiday. Nothing better than chilling with your favorite person, going book shopping at a HUGE Barnes & Noble, and watching football and Doctor Who episodes on the couch.

Turkey and Football and Books, Oh My

2009-11-26T13:27:00.000-05:00

Hello, chickens. A Happy Thanksgiving to our smug American participants, and a happy Thursday to the rest of you.

I am currently lounging in my pajamas, watching teh football in sunny Los Angeles. (They're forecasting possible snow in Illadelph tomorrow. Fuck that noise.) My life is good.

Yeah, I'm thankful for some stuff. Sister, mommy, job, roof over my head, food in my belly. Cool boyfriend. Awesome friends. Books. Coffee. The NFL. Pajiba. And you, Cannonballers. I'm thankful for you. You overwhelmed me with your response to our invitation to join Year Two, and you've entertained me with your reviewing shenanigans over the last few weeks. I look forward to cruising the Google Reader in the morning and seeing what new goodies you have for me, and I'm settling in for a long, bumpy, migraine-inducing, laughter-inspiring rest of the ride. Be well, and give thanks, whether you're a smug American or not.

Cannonball Read II: Killing Nicole's Brain, One Review at a Time

2009-11-21T20:27:00.000-05:00

I am being facetious, darlings. I love all of my Cannonball Warriors. You kids have been churning out some good stuff and making me glad that I took on this moderator/director/Head Bitch in Charge gig, and now I'm itching for a trip to Barnes & Noble before I head to sunny California next week. There is so much good reading out in the world! The books are calling my name, softly and seductively. I must make amends with the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Three weeks in, the overall review total stands at 195. Just take that in for a moment. Keep it going, boys and girls. I'll be lying on the couch admiring my pretty manicure and filling my brain with mindless television and a Nora Roberts novel.

Books + Football = Sunday

2009-11-15T12:13:00.000-05:00

Can I just tell you how incredibly proud I am of my Cannonball Readers? (Yes, I own your souls. It's one of the perks of this whole "director" job.) As I read through the reviews - often at work, because at this point I wouldn't even care if I became a ten percenter - it occurs to me how smart, insightful, and thought-provoking some of you kids are. Of course, I'm less generous on Saturday nights when I'm tallying up everyone's totals* and the computer is being bitchy and I just want a drink, dammit. Overall, though, you're kicking ass, taking names, and adding to my book wishlist.

I'm actually kind of jealous. I wish I could have participated myself, but with the job and the commute and the blog tracking and the fact that everyone in the office keeps passing around E1101, which is completely Purell-resistant, I haven't even had time to read much, let alone write my own reviews; I currently owe Dustin two Pajiba reviews, but don't tell him that. I'm hoping that this changes when I get a netbook. (Hi Santa! Can I sit on your lap?)

However, today is Sunday. Sunday means that I get to watch football all day and read during the commercials and the dumb halftime reports. I am going to throw on some yoga pants and one of my long-sleeved Eagles tees and kick it. Happy Sunday, kiddies.

*Currently the Cannonballers have a grand total of 144 reviews written. Well done!

I live my life in spreadsheets.

2009-11-08T14:06:00.000-05:00

Anyone who knows anything about the real-life me (specifically, the job held by the real-life me) knows that spreadsheets are the bane of my existence. Everything at the job is organized in spreadsheets; I actually have dreams featuring Microsoft Excel. No, I'm not kidding. Neither am I an accountant; it's just the way we keep track of providers, payors, what money is missing where, who needs to fix what to get the money back, why did that payor reject that provider, etc.

Anyway. Since I already live my life in spreadsheets, I'm using good old Excel to keep track of 101 Cannonball Readers. Which means that soon I'll be having nightmares about cell formatting and will probably need therapy.

On the serious tip, a lot of these participants are already going balls to the wall, and I couldn't be happier or more proud. Well played, friends.

D Day (Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love My Eyeglasses)

2009-11-01T11:57:00.001-05:00

Damn, kids. I didn't expect November 1st to sneak up behind me like that, but it has. (Spooky little bastard.) At any rate, today is THE day. Cannonball Read II: Choose Your Own Adventure began at midnight. I'm waiting to be murdered in my sleep by my Google Reader. It can happen, you know. Technology is insidious. What, you never saw the movie Pulse? That film freaked me and my sister out so much when we were kids that we still stand a good two feet away from the garbage disposal.

Where was I? Oh, right. Day One of Cannonball Two. Even if you're not participating, I would encourage you to visit Pajiba on the regular and check out the contestants' reviews, join the discussions, and maybe pick up a book, you think-for-yourself-er.

Top Ten

2009-10-26T21:06:00.000-04:00

So, my amazing friend Ms. Mix and Bitch had told me to rank my reads, but there is no way in hell that I can rank the 100+ books that I read in the last year (I'm counting my Pajiba reviews in that total, because I read that shit). However, I will give you my ten favorite books from Year One of the Cannonball Read. If you haven't checked them out yet, I invite you to - hey, why not add them to your list for Year Two? So, in order from ten to one, here goes:

10. Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes

9. Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

8. My Lobotomy by Howard Dully

7. Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult

6.   Paradise by A. L. Kennedy - This one didn't get reviewed, due to time restraints, but it knocked my socks off.

5.  The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson

4.  Beautiful Boy by David Sheff

3.  The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie

2.  Band Geek by Dustin Rowles

1.  Still Alice by Lisa Genova

*Honorable Mention - Columbine by Dave Cullen

(Actually, Columbine deserves to be #3 or 4, but I kept my Pajiba reviews separate, so it gets its own place.)

There you have it. You can check out ten of the eleven books listed; Band Geek is not yet published but I hope like hell that it is one day soon, because it's effing amazing.

It's Here!

2009-10-13T21:09:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm talking about Cannonball Read II: In My Pants (also known as Cannonball Read II: Electric Bookaloo or Mother May I Read With Danger? II). Check out the post at Pajiba and join in - don't be shy! Even if you're not a regular Pajiban *looks at Mel with purposeful eyes* you can play along! We have a Facebook group and everything!

Year Two, Y'all

2009-10-11T21:36:00.001-04:00

So, in the next few days, we'll be announcing the kickoff of Cannonball Read 2.0 over on Pajiba. My main goal is to get a LOT more committed participants involved. We want you to read! And have your reviews posted on the site! And become more literate and enlightened bitches and hos!

We're also doing this for Amanda. (Yes, I totally played that card.)

Stay tuned, kiddos. And start eyeing up that TBR pile you have hidden under the bed, in a cupboard, behind the terlet, wherever.

Cleanup

2009-10-06T20:54:00.000-04:00

Ok, friends, followers, and otherwise, I didn't make it to my target goal of 100 reviews. It was a lot easier when I was unemployed, but now that I've been among the workers of the world for nearly seven months, I've slacked. Add in the reviews I've done for Pajiba that I didn't count on this here corner of the interwebs, and I managed to come a little closer to that goal.

With no further ado, here is the roundup of the books that didn't make it to the review stage; I'm going to do my best to put them in chronological order, but they're books I read mostly in between:

Sixty Eight - Girls Dinner Club by Jessie Elliot

Sixty Nine - Stiff by Mary Roach

Seventy - Picture Perfect by Jodi Picoult

Seventy One - Rhett Butler's People by Donald McCaig

Seventy Two - The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Seventy Three - The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Seventy Four - This Can't Be Love by Kasey Michaels

Seventy Five - Lady Killer by Lisa Scottoline

Seventy Six - A Royal Duty by Paul Burrell

Seventy Seven - Regeneration by Pat Barker

Seventy Eight - High Noon by Nora Roberts

Seventy Nine - Blue Dahlia by Nora Roberts

Eighty - Black Rose by Nora Roberts

Eighty One - Red Lily by Nora Roberts

Eighty Two - The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Eighty Three - Key of Knowledge by Nora Roberts

Eighty Four - Key of Valor by Nora Roberts

Eighty Five - The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Eighty Six - Conspiracy in Death by J.D. Robb

Eighty Seven - Lucky by Alice Sebold

Eighty Eight - Daring to Dream by Nora Roberts

Eighty Nine - Holding the Dream by Nora Roberts

Ninety - Finding the Dream by Nora Roberts

Ninety One - Flowers on Main by Sherryl Woods

Ninety Two - Dispatches From The Edge by Anderson Cooper

Ninety Three - The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker

Ninety Four - The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

Ninety Five - Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult

Ninety Six - Paradise by A.L. Kennedy

Ninety Seven - A Mother and Two Daughters by Gail Godwin

So there you have it. Three books short. I couldn't finish Anna Karenina or if on a winter's night a traveler.

I'll still be writing reviews for Pajiba, and I'm running the next incarnation of the Cannonball Read. I just won't be participating, because I need to corral our next group of Cannonballers. Hope to see your lazy asses there; we're doing this in honor of Pink.

I only hope she's proud of me.

Title Sixty Seven: Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

2009-09-20T11:37:00.008-04:00

Yes, I'm cheating again. Shut it, fools. It was a rough week, and anyway Rusty already reviewed this.

"The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades — with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. But then neither is Teddy Daniels." - Barnes and Noble
My only previous experience with Lehane was Mystic River a few years ago, and I dug that book, so I figured this would be worth the read. Was it? Yes it was. I was completely immersed in the story almost from the beginning, the gears in my brain whirring as I tried to keep up with the pace and the twisting narrative laid out by Lehane. A couple of times, I found myself flipping back a page to re-read a passage or two, not because I was lost, exactly, but because I felt like there was a nuance that I might have been missing. Teddy Daniels is the good guy, and he has no idea who else is on his side. It could be that everyone is out to get him. Ghosts from his past won't leave him alone. He's a man on a mission. Then, just when everything seems to be resolving itself, Lehane comes up behind you with a two-by-four and nails you in the back of the skull. Everything that came before was smoke and mirrors, and holy shit, were you fooled.

I loved it. I read it in record time because I couldn't wait to get to the end, and when it was finished, I was satisfied. The conclusion isn't pat, but it's tidy, like a perfectly square box with a really rad gift inside.

Title Sixty Six: Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

2009-09-20T10:15:00.004-04:00

Ok, I'm totally going to cheat for a couple of posts, okay? From the author's very own Official Lullaby Site:

"Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a forty-ish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scene of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant or "culling song." This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction and once it lodges in Streator's brain, he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle, who specializes in selling haunted (or "distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover) and who lost a child to the culling song years before, for a cross-country odyssey. Their goal is to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic eco-terrorist boyfriend, Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family. "

This was my first Palahniuk. (No, you cannot revoke my Pajiba card for that. It's in the rules that I've just made up.) I didn't really know what to expect, so I wasn't really surprised when I was completely blown away. I mean, damn, this dude can write. And somehow make you totally uncomfortable while keeping you so intrigued that you can't put the damn thing down. There were passages that made me actually squirm in my seat but I had to know what happened. None of the characters are likeable. In fact, they're all pretty much creepy and I felt like I needed a shower after I finished. But it was good. It wasn't so much a novel as a living thing, breathing words and images. I won't ever read it again, because it's too dark for me, but it is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

Title Sixty Five: Star Bright by Catherine Anderson

2009-09-15T14:56:00.002-04:00

No. Just...no. I must have been high when I decided to read this. I mentioned it to a friend and he replied, "I would rather poke my own eyes out than read that." I may take it out back, put it on the grill, and set it on fire.

Rainie fakes her own death while on a cruise with her husband because he's going to kill her. She ends up working as a bookkeeper for a rancher dude in Crystal Falls, Oregon. Of course he's hot, and of course he sees her as a delicate flower that he wants to pick. They fall in love and all. His entire extended family foists themselves and their "aw shucks"-iness upon her, and she decides she'll marry him, but she has to divorce the psycho, who apparently killed his two previous wives to get their money, like he was going to do to Rainie. She gets her divorce, the FBI tries to use her as bait to get the husband, it doesn't work. One night, in a scene stolen right out of the movie Sleeping with the Enemy (which is discussed earlier in the book) the husband shows up in the backseat of Rainie's car and forces her to drive to her apartment - she won't live with Parker, the rancher, because he's Catholic and his family wouldn't approve and he's fucking THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OLD - and tries to kill her with a mix of Ambien and wine, and making it look like she offed herself. (Seriously? I can take a giant Vicodin for my broken spine and then go out drinking with Pajibans all night. This lightweight has a glass of wine and three Ambien and almost dies. Pussy.)

Whatever. Parker figures out that she was giving him clues on the phone, via talking about her HALLOWEEN COSTUME, and hoofs it over. Rainie uses the last of her strength to smash the wineglass into PeterExHusband's face. The paramedics come and get her to the hospital and pump her stomach. A couple months later Parker and Rainie get married.

I need Brillo for my brain.

Title Sixty Four: Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married

2009-09-10T19:11:00.002-04:00

Hello, dahlings. It is I, Marian Keyes. If you haven't suspected before now, I have actually kidnapped your adorable little Nicole and locked her in a closet so that I could take over her blog and promote my books. Here's another one!

On a lark, my heroine, Lucy Sullivan, goes with three coworkers to visit a psychic one evening after work. The fortune teller's prediction for Lucy is that she'll be married within a year. Lucy brushes this off with a "Bah!" That is, until her coworkers' predictions start coming true, and she meets the lovable, unemployed Gus, an Irish musician who charms his way into her pants and her pockets. Perhaps Gus is undependable and fond of the drink, but he's an artiste, moppets. He is a free spirit. Meanwhile, Lucy's best friend Daniel begins dating her roommate Karen, but this doesn't bother Lucy in the least because she simply doesn't find Daniel attractive.

You may be able to guess where the story goes. (I know, but dearies, I wrote it.) Gus turns out to be a worthless cad, Lucy realizes that her father is an alcoholic and that she's been beastly to her mother for years without understanding what the latter goes through, and Daniel is a dream.

Go buy it.

Note from the editor

2009-09-10T19:10:00.001-04:00

It doesn't look like I'm going to make it to 100 reviews, but I damn well will make it to 100 books. I'm pretty close. Anyway, for the three of you who read this on a semi-regular basis, I'm going to keep going. Hope you dig it.

Title Sixty Three: Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery by Norman Mailer

2009-08-30T17:57:00.003-04:00

So, the good news is that I finally found a cure for my chronic insomnia. For serious, every time I read this I fell asleep. I'm blaming Mailer for The Great Nap Debacle of Last Sunday, wherein I took not just one but two lengthy naps, and was awake till the wee hours, when it occurred to me to pick up the book again. Bingo. Out like a light. This shit is better than Xanax.

So anyway. I was feeling guilty about all the trash I've been stuffing into my brain lately, so I wanted to redeem myself. This Guy Formerly Known as My Stepfather had this for years, and was kind enough to leave it when he vacated the premises. I spotted it and said, "Nicole, grab that. You need to make penance for all that Nora Roberts noise you've been reading." In the future, the next time I tell myself to do something, could one of you hit me in the head? 'Kthanksbye.

This book is exhaustive. I mean, really and truly. I read all 791 pages, because I do not like to give up on books, but my stars, I was more confused at the end than at the beginning. Like, trying to solve a physics problem confused. I wasn't even sure where I was. (Extensive research led me to the conclusion that I was in my bedroom.) Mailer interviewed family, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues of Lee Harvey Oswald; he pored over and frequently references the Warren Commission testimony; he took excerpts of other books written about LHO; he incorporated letters and other writings, both to and by Oswald. Oswald's time in Russia, where he married Marina and had his first child, takes up nearly the first third of the book. His military history with the Marines is dissected. His job history is investigated. KGB and FBI records are made public. Mailer leaves no stone unturned in his quest to find the man who killed JFK (I don't even want to go into conspiracy theories). He not only delves into Oswald's past, but that of his wife, her family, and his mother. He goes back decades and decades to the beginning of the 20th century. He outlines the differences between various intelligency agencies and the perceptions of Oswald gleaned by said agencies.

The problem is, Oswald was a puzzle in life, and remains a series of contradictions in death. He was a failure who thought that he was something special; he renounced his US citizenship in Moscow (but not formally) only to return to the States a few years later, his experiment with communism a wash; he may or may not have been gay; he was a gregarious recluse. There's just too much information, and there is never a satisfactory answer to the question "Who was this man?" Again, this was no fault of Mailer's. It was just a question that will never be answered. No one could get a handle on Oswald before Jack Ruby put a bullet in his belly, so how could anyone possibly do it when the man's secrets died with him?

I'm going to keep the book on hand as a weapon for the zombie invasion. They're coming. Just you wait.

Title Sixty Two: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

2009-08-30T17:27:00.002-04:00

I read this lovely book about six years ago, and I wanted to see if it still held up. I'm delighted to say that it does, but it's also so bittersweet that I think I'll wait another five or six before visiting it again.

One evening, during a birthday party for a Japanese businessman held in a poor Latin American country (in the hopes that his electronics company will build a plant in said poor country), the Vice Presidential mansion is taken by terrorists; their intended target, the President, is not in attendance, and so the group must quickly formulate a new plan. They decide to take everyone hostage, including the evening's entertainer, world-renowned opera singer Roxane Coss. The first hours following the terrorists' arrival are filled with fear, confusion, and desperation, which Patchett transfers masterfully to the page. As time passes, the Red Cross brings in a negotiator, and eventually all women are released, with the exception of Coss, who chooses to stay.

Dozens of hostages remain, and the days pass. What began as a horrifying ordeal transforms into something unique: a small community of people, from all over the world, coming together and cobbling a satisfying little existence from the circumstances. Neither the terrorists nor the government will budge, so the experience lasts for months. In the meantime, Mr. Hosokawa, the guest of honor, becomes the chess partner of one of the Generals; Carmen, one of the two female terrorists, falls in love with Gen, Hosokawa's translator and aide; Vice President Iglesias becomes close with one of the young boys in the terrorist party and begins to plan a life, afterwards, in which he can raise the boy as his son; Coss begins singing arias every day for the delight and amusement of everyone in the house. They live in a bubble, a sort of hazy limbo, where the outside world ceases to exist and all that matters is their little group. None of them think any longer about the "after," because why would they want to? Friendships are forged, relationships flourish, talents emerge, and emotional bonds form. They don't need anyone but each other.

Of course, something like this can never end well, and the climax is heartbreaking and sudden. Patchett has breathed such life into her characters that they become real people, and by the end the reader cares as much about them as they do for each other. No one wins at the end of Bel Canto, and you will close the book with a sense of melancholy and dissatisfaction, but like the arias that Roxane Coss sings, just because something is sad doesn't mean it's not beautiful.

Title Sixty One: The Pact by Jodi Picoult

2009-08-30T16:18:00.003-04:00

Emily Gold and Christopher Harte were born, months apart, to parents who lived in adjacent houses and mothers who were best friends. Growing up, they were two halves of a whole, partners in crime, and as close as any two humans could possibly be. As they moved into the maze of their teenage years, it was only natural that Chris and Em take the next step and become a couple. After all, it's like they were made for each other, so what could be more natural or perfect?

That perfection shatters on an autumn evening when both sets of parents are called with horrifying news: they must come to the hospital immediately; there has been a shooting involving Chris and Emily. The Hartes and the Golds race to the emergency room, but it's too late for Em, killed by a gunshot wound to the head. Christopher has a scalp laceration and stitches. In the ensuing hours, tragic details will emerge: Emily and Chris went to the local park, where Chris operated the carousel in the summer, to fulfill a suicide pact. The gun that killed Emily was Dr. James Harte's. Chris fainted after Em's shot and before he could follow through.

It's not that simple. When Chris is charged with Emily's murder, an already tragic situation becomes catastrophic. What really happened that night? Melanie Gold becomes so consumed by bitterness, blame and rage that she turns on everyone, alienating not only her best friend, Gus Harte, but also her own husband Michael. James Harte withdraws into himself and avoids his wife. Chris's younger sister, Kate, is all but forgotten (the Christmas morning scene is downright painful). In the midst of all of this, defense attorney Jordan McAfee is trying to build a case that will let Christopher off the hook while asking his client to just sit down and shut up; meanwhile, Christopher needs to face the truth of his relationship with Emily, and ask himself how much she really loved him. The answer is devastating.

Picoult uses a combination of legal and emotional plotlines to frame her most successful works, and I would argue that The Pact is in her top three, along with My Sister's Keeper and Handle with Care. While moving through the present day, focusing mostly on Chris but keeping a good handle on the supporting characters, Picoult intersperses the details of Chris and Em's years together, from the day Emily was born and Chris shared her hospital bassinet, up until the night that she died and left Chris behind. In the meantime, everyone tries to put together the pieces of what, exactly, happened. Too many variables don't add up - the trajectory of the bullet, Emily's demeanor, her future prospects as a very talented artist - to label her death a suicide; however, if Chris loves Em as much as he, and everyone else, claims, he could never have killed her, because he doesn't want to live without her. Slowly, secrets are rescued from their hidden corners and pockets, and the answers eventually come together in a moving scene that has Christopher taking the stand in his own defense. The outcome and the answers are completely unbelievable, but they fit the novel to perfection. There is no happy ending, and the truth hurts everyone, but it's fitting. Life isn't always sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes it's a cold marble headstone and regret.

Title Sixty: The Last Cowgirl by Jana Richman

2009-08-30T12:34:00.003-04:00

I actually read this book months ago, and then re-read it after that. I'll put it on the stack of books to be reviewed, and then I take it off again and set it aside. I don't know why, but I just feel like I won't be able to do the book justice when I write about it. Then I realized that I need to get my ass in gear on this Challenge, so I resolved to do it. I apologize in advance, because the book deserves more than I'm about to give it. I just...I don't know how. I'm not that good.

Dickie Sinfield (only her father calls her by her given name of Darlene) had a normal suburban girlhood in Utah with manicured lawns and playing on the sidewalk in front of the house until the day her father decided that the family was going to move to a ranch outside of town so that he could follow his own childhood dream of becoming a cowboy. With the exception of Dickie's brother Heber, the family is less than enthused - Dickie misses her neighborhood and friends, her older sister Annie is horrified by the entire thing and spends her time out of the house or locked in her room, and their mother just quietly resents it. Her father's dream is only viable thanks to the efforts of two neighbors and fellow ranchers who would become more family than friends - Bev Christensen and Merv Nelson. A few years later, a local army base and the secrets beneath it would devastate all three ranchers, and Dickie would bolt for Salt Lake City as soon as she hit 18, where she would become a journalist and cut ties with her cowgirl past.

Dickie's story begins with the death of her brother Heber, an accident hushed up by the military base where he works - the same military base that played a role in the destruction of cattle herds decades earlier. Dickie is forced to confront the past in order to come to terms with Heber's death, and the story switches gracefully from the present day to Dickie's recollections of her youth, all told from her point of view. The novel ebbs and flows, unfolding at just the right pace. The plot folds in ranching, government research, environmentalism, Mormonism, family drama, friendship, betrayal, and acceptance in a fascinating way. It's not exactly a tale of redemption; it's more a tale of peace, and coming to terms with your life.

It's just so real. I think that's always been one of the best compliments I can give a book, because I want a story that I can believe in and characters I can know. I'm telling you, there is so much I'm missing here: Dickie's tumultuous relationship with Stumpy, Merv's grandson; her strained relationship with her father; the faithful details of cattle raising and ranch life; the pain of loss; Dickie's spiteful best friend Holly; the residents of Ganoa county and their uneasy acceptance of the military presence that provides jobs yet always casts a shadow of potential disaster. I just don't know how to incorporate all of my thoughts. This book is layered and thought-provoking and insightful and emotional. It's the book that any aspiring writer wants to create. It's lovely. I probably haven't made a very convincing argument here, because I'm babbling, but The Last Cowgirl is a gem. I hope that Richman keeps writing, because she has a fan here.

Title Fifty Nine: Play Dirty by Sandra Brown

2009-08-30T12:23:00.004-04:00

Ok, I'll admit that this book is pure trash from front to back.* It's totally aimed at bored housewives who love the Lifetime Movie Network. It's possible that it destroyed a few of my brain cells.

A former Dallas Cowboys quarterback just got out of prison - I'm not sure why he was in prison, but it had something to do with him throwing a game for the Mob or something, and gambling, and I don't know what else. Anyway, this cat, Griff Burkett, gets the offer of a lifetime when he gets out - the billionaire owner of SunSouth Airlines wants Griff to get Mrs. SunSouth pregnant. The old-fashioned way. Because Mr. SunSouth is in a wheelchair and can't get the job done. Griff will make a boatload of money if he agrees. So he agrees. Mrs. SunSouth is okay with it. They knock boots at several appointed times, and Mrs. SunSouth gets up the pole right as the two fall in love, which is sad because now that the rabbit's dead, they have no more reason to meet. Then Mr. SunSouth turns up murdered, Griff is the suspect, but Mrs. SunSouth loves him anyway and helps him run. They figure out who really did it, everyone is redeemed, it turns out Mr. SunSouth was a manipulative, crazy bastard so no real loss there, and everyone is happy.

Seriously.

*Disclaimer: I was high on perfectly legal, professionally administered drugs when I read this.

Title Fifty Eight: Being Committed by Anna Maxted

2009-08-24T19:20:00.003-04:00

Yes, again with the British chick lit. You shut your mouth when you're talking to me.

Hannah Lovekin prides herself on her lack of emotion; she believes that it makes her a good detective, and serves her well enough in her private life. The first sign of trouble comes when her boyfriend, Jason, proposes to her on a hotel bathroom floor, and she turns him down. This leads him to turn around and propose to his neighbor Lucy, which then makes Hannah decide she wants him back, even though he's kind of a puss. "Encouraged" by her father Roger to reconcile with Jason, Hannah goes through a sort of test course proposed by Jason in order to facilitate a reunion - she needs to be more feminine (the novel is written in the first person, and the description of a Brazilian had me putting down the book so that I could wipe away tears of laughter), she needs to learn to cook, she has to attend therapy in order to be more emotionally open, and she needs to find some closure with her ex-husband, Jack. The last proves the most difficult, since Jack left Hannah five months after they got married, at age twenty, because he believed that she cheated on him. Hannah has to spin a complicated web when she realizes that she's still in love with Jack, but needs to break off her engagement to Jason - he asked again after the Brazilian and the spray tan and the haircut and the dinner she made - in a delicate manner and return him to Lucy.

Things start to fall apart. Lies begin to spread, and with them truths come out. Memories of her own mother's affair, twenty-five years earlier, start pushing their way into Hannah's brain. She begins to see the people around her for who they really are: her parents, her brother Oliver and his wife Gabrielle, Jack, and her best friend Martine. Hannah starts feeling and it freaks her right the fuck out, but there's nothing she can do about it, and she finally begins to grow up.

Being Committed, like Maxted's other books, is a fast, fun read with a great central theme and a well-developed cast of characters. As the story branches out, it never becomes unwieldy; it just seems to evolve naturally. Maxted mixes humor with levity and creates an overall enjoyable experience. I dig it, and I'll read it again. And again.

Title Fifty Seven: A Final Arc of Sky: A Memoir of Critical Care by Jennifer Culkin

2009-08-24T19:02:00.002-04:00

So, we all know by now that I'm a sucker for memoirs, medicine-related books, and combinations of the two. (Look, are you reading a hundred books in a year?) So I went to Barnes and Noble one day at lunch, as I tend to do when my friend Lo is craving one of their pizza pretzels, and was trolling for something cool and came upon A Final Arc of Sky. In all honesty, I checked out the flappy thinger that tells you what it's about (my job renders me brain dead, shut up) and put it back. Then I wandered away, wandered back, looked again, wandered away, wandered back, and grabbed it. It promised me tales of Culkin's career as a critical care/emergency flight nurse, and I wanted the blood and guts and syringes and O2 tanks and flying while trying to keep a dude who wrapped his car around a telephone pole going long enough to make it to the hospital. I'm that kind of girl.

Culkin half-delivered. I don't even know if that's a word or if I made it up, but if you had to read spreadsheets all day you wouldn't be coherent either. There are some great tales of accident victims, medical type actions, and the general bad-assery of the job - I mean, for serious, it takes some titanium balls to do everything in your power to keep someone alive while you're flying in a tin can through a storm in Washington state. And that's your job. Like it's my job to look at spreadsheets, it was Culkin's job to keep people alive in the air. During 24-hour shifts. No fancy machines, no team of doctors, no Code Blues. Just a couple of nurses, a pilot, and someone with one foot out life's door. Do you realize how cool that is?

Culkin frames the story in vignettes more than chapters, and it lends a sort of choppy feel to the narrative. I also became disappointed when the story veered off into her personal life and followed the illnesses and deaths of her parents (her dad was kind of a prick in his final months) and then her own struggle with MS. Don't get me wrong, I admire her for speaking up about her own illness, but I think I was so tired of reading about her father that I just couldn't muster up the energy to feel genuine emotion. There were also a couple of chapters about her love of bike riding, and I just didn't care about that. I skipped them. They were, at best, tangential and, at worst, completely unnecessary. Culkin rounds out the memoir with a powerful chapter on a fatal crash and the deaths of the colleagues involved, even though she had gone on disability by that point, and how it affected her. She realizes that it could have been any one of them, and recalls the deceased with affection and respect. Then it just kind of ends.

Honestly, I wish I hadn't spent my money on the book, because it really only comes out as mediocre and uneven on the whole. I did use a coupon, though.

Title Fifty Six: The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper

2009-08-16T16:56:00.002-04:00

It is so, so rare to find a memoir that can blend fact, experience, personal and political history, and a conversational tone and deliver something so pitch-perfect that you can't put it down. I managed to read Cooper's lovely account of her privileged girlhood in Liberia, followed by her escape to America as a refugee and successful career as a journalist, in about three and a half hours (roughly the time it took for me to fly to Portland and back). It was that engaging and gripping; touching without being manipulative, and informative without being pedantic.

Cooper begins with a short history of the country of Liberia itself - the only American attempt at colonization - and traces her own roots back to the founders of the country through both her mother and father. The author neatly encapsulates the background and peppers it with enough details and anecdotes to keep it from becoming dusty or dry. Fast forwarding nearly a hundred and fifty years, Cooper describes her childhood as a daughter of a wealthy and influential family; her father built a luxurious estate in a secluded suburb of the city of Monrovia, a home that the family called "Sugar Beach." Cooper's parents, who already had children of their own, brought a poor native girl named Eunice to live with the family in order to keep Helene and her sister Marlene company. Eunice was treated well and loved by the girls as a sister, but the Liberian caste system prevented her from truly belonging to the family. Cooper evokes vivid memories of parties, private school, clothes from America, vacations, fancy cars, and handsome boys as she describes a charmed girlhood. Then overnight, a coup destroyed the delicate balance of Liberian life and families such as the Coopers were marked for death. Helene watched her uncle, a government official, executed on television. In a matter of weeks Helene, Marlene, and their mother refugeed from Liberia and fled to America as the world they left behind crumbled and burned, giving way to a new world where women were raped and slaughtered and children were orphaned and forced into militias. Eunice had to be left behind, and Helene didn't see her again for decades.

After the coup and the escape, the Coopers built a new life in America, but Helene was never comfortable, and they moved around quite a bit. John Cooper eventually went back to Liberia and died there; Calista and Marlene Cooper also returned but came back to the U.S. after several years. Only Helene never cared to go back. Helene dedicated herself to her studies and became a reporter at UNC, then moved on to a journalism career that took her to the Wall Street Journal and later all over the world, but she locked away her feelings on Liberia and focused on her new life as an American, preferring to forget her past, until she found herself in Iraq in the beginning of the war and narrowly avoided dying in an attack. Helene Cooper picked herself up, dusting herself off, and decided that if she were going to die in a war, it should be Liberia. Her decision brought her face to face with the horrors she never wanted to see again, but it also brought her back to Eunice, and gave her a second chance that should probably never have happened.

A story like this should be trite. It should make you roll your eyes and sigh derisively. The beauty of The House at Sugar Beach is that, instead, it makes your heart ache and your eyes tear in the best of ways. (I fully admit to crying a little while reading the description of Helene's father's death, although I was surreptiously trying to knuckle the tears away lest the air hostess ask me if I was all right and embarrass me on a plane full of strangers.) It made me wonder why I didn't know more about Liberia or the atrocities committed there, and it made me respect someone who took the pieces of a shattered life and rebuilt them while she was still just a child, and then had the courage to risk that fragile existence by going back as an adult. Cooper keeps it real in the best sense of the word, being matter-of-fact without being cold, being honest without being callous, and being true without being exploitative. The mixture of emotion and fact is beautifully balanced, and makes for a bittersweet story with the happiest ending it could have had.

Title Fifty Five: Sushi for Beginners by Marian Keyes

2009-08-16T15:42:00.002-04:00

I like Brit chick lit, we've established that. I dig the slang and the settings and the phrasing and the pace. I prefer Keyes' Walsh sisters stuff to her standalones, but the latter are serviceable enough. I feel like I've reviewed enough of her books here over the last several months that if I get all analytical it's just going to be boring, so to sum:

Lisa is a hotshot magazine editor based in London who is ruthless, bitchy, and almost guaranteed to snag a promotion and posting in NYC. To her shock, she's sent packing to the backwater of Dublin to launch an Irish women's magazine, Colleen. Lisa loathes everything about it but is determined to claw her way back to the top. She acquires a sexy new boss in Jack Devine and a doggedly loyal assistant in Ashling Kennedy. Keyes gives you interesting characters, and it's fun to watch them move through the process of launching a new magazine. Ashling is the most endearing, but Lisa becomes a sympathetic figure and is redeemed by the end of the book. Ashling gets betrayed by her best friend and her boyfriend, but lands on her feet. Jack smolders his way along and gets his own happy ending.

Really, I don't have much more to tell you. It's a fun book if you're into this kind of thing, and Keyes doesn't really hit wrong notes that often. Sushi for Beginners holds up nicely.

Slackergirl Stall

2009-08-14T23:36:00.000-04:00

Ok, I know I suck, but I'm-a blame work, a wonky home PC, and health issues, because while I'm known for my laziness, this is ridiculous. I'll be back on point real soon, because I'm still reading like a mofo.

Title Fifty Four: The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie

2009-08-02T16:38:00.002-04:00

Guess what? House wrote a book! I had to buy it. Those sexy blue eyes were just gazing at me from the back cover, whispering, "Oh Nicole, I've been waiting for you. Take me home." So I did.

I didn't expect it to be a great work of literature, and it's not. But what The Gunseller is, is a fun, fast, twisty romp of a spy thriller. Thomas Lang, ex-Scots Guard and general layabout, was drifting along just fine until the day he was offered a large sum of money to kill a wealthy businessman. Lang, of course, doesn't want the job, thank you very much, but he gets sucked into a tangled scheme involving arms dealers, terrorists, the CIA, a groundbreaking new model of fighter helicopter, and a pretty girl before he can even open a fresh bottle of Scotch. Blackmailed on several fronts, Lang is forced to be a bad guy, which he manages to do pretty well, but not without several layers of guilt weighing on his conscience and making him determined to find a way to flip the script on the guys holding the reins.

Honestly, the novel is a blast. The conversational tone made me picture Laurie, sitting in a leather armchair with a drink at his elbow, just spinning out this yarn while we relaxed in front of a fire on a chilly day. Lang is a fantastic protagonist, just a sort of everyman with some specially-acquired military skills who would prefer to mind his own business but has just a little more under the surface than you would expect. The plot double-crosses and then twists back on itself, but it's never too complicated to follow, with just enough sex and violence thrown in. The dialogue is organic and snappy and the characters given the right bit of nuance to make them interesting without taking over.

Go ahead, try it. Those eyes are begging you.

Title Fifty Three: The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

2009-08-02T16:01:00.002-04:00

Y'all, I love this book. As in, I would like to have adorable little babies with it. It's just so gorgeous and full of life. Henry and Clare's love story is so beautiful, and so breathtakingly painful, that you just want to crawl into the pages and watch it unfold before your eyes. The truest testament to Niffenegger's skill as a writer is that she makes that possible. Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire DeTamble are real people to me; they're old friends whom I love and can't bear to let go, and the end cracks my heart a little more each time I read it.

To sum: Henry is a time traveller. Not a TARDIS sort of time traveller; rather, he has some genetic malfunction wherein he disappears from the present and finds himself in various times and places. Nothing fantastical like 14th century France or present-day Mars, but it could be a parking garage in Chicago in winter, the Field Museum at night twenty years earlier, or the Meadow at the Abshire home during Clare's childhood. Henry can never tell how long he'll be gone or when he'll come back, and it's Clare's curse that she must wait for him, and that she can never follow.

Clare and Henry met when she was only six, and he materialized in her favorite play spot. Henry was already grown. Throughout her childhood, Clare is visited by various Henrys from the future, a future where the two have already married. As she grows older, Clare falls in love with this man, and there is never anyone else for her. One day, looking for information at the library where Henry works, twenty-year-old Clare sees him and the pieces of her life begin to click into place. Henry hasn't met her yet, but their fate is sealed. Within hours they are lovers, and within months they are married. As they settle into married life, Clare begins to see the magnitude of their situation, but it's what she signed on for. Despite the awful limbo in which she must exist, Clare loves Henry absolutely, and he loves her with the same ferocious one-mindedness. They can only belong to each other. I swear, the love just bleeds off the page, but it's not sappy or overly sentimental. It just is.

You've got these two people who want nothing more in the world than each other, but they know that they have to be careful and grab what they can while they can, because time is so fluid and they never know when it's going to run out. The narrative should be jerky, with its constant flashbacks and -forwards, but it's not; it's beautifully seamless and smoothly undulating. You can't help but drift along on the current. I even love the ending, which is so bittersweet, but again brings such a sense of reality to what should be an absurd premise. Nothing is perfect, nothing is forever, but when you have something beautiful, hold onto it with all you've got.

Title Fifty Two: Vision in White by Nora Roberts

2009-08-01T14:14:00.002-04:00

Shut up.

Four friends run a wedding planning business in Connecticut. Sassy red-headed photog Mac has no use for commitment, but she's great with the brides. She has a lot of baggage from her childhood and her parents, who treat marriage like it's a hand of bridge. Her mother blackmails her emotionally and her father ignores her. She just wants, as my friend Lauren would say, "a hot guy to bone."

Enter Carter, brother of a bride. He had a crush on Mac in high school, and he surprises her when she falls for him. He's an English teacher, back at the old alma mater, and he's bookish, smart, careful, and thoughtful - all the things Mac doesn't want. But folks, this is mass market paperback romance, so what do you think happens?

Mac and Carter fall in love. Wildly, madly, passionately. The sex is earth-shattering. Angels weep. Mac is able to toss aside her baggage and leap into the arms of her man. He asks, she says yes. Fin.

I needed a break from Anna Karenina, okay?

Title Fifty One: Behaving Like Adults by Anna Maxted

2009-07-20T19:01:00.002-04:00

Oh, British chick lit, how I love thee. Like candyfloss for my brain, you are. Maxted takes what could be a light, fluffy, and completely mindless story and gives it a heavy, serious layer underneath, and it works beautifully.

Holly Appleton believes in love. Even though she's just split up with her fiance, Nick, a grown man who makes a living by dressing as Mr. Elephant at children's parties and Febrezes his feet when he's too lazy to shower - which is most of the time - she is an eternal optimist and runs a hip little dating firm called Girl Meets Boy in London. In order to help Holly get over Nick (and give Nick some incentive to move out of their house), Holly's coworkers, sister Claudia and actor Nigel, convince her to go on a date with a prospective client. Little does Holly know that opening the door to Stuart Marshall, a successful lawyer with a ridiculous sense of self-worth and entitlement, will be more disastrous than she could have imagined; one night, after seeing Holly home from a party, Stuart rapes her on the kitchen floor. Nick walks in during the middle and promptly moves out. Holly spirals into a dark denial and depression and nearly runs her business and life into the ground while keeping her secret locked away.

Maxted has a gifted touch with the material. All of the characters, save Stuart, are likeable and real. She keeps the devastatingly serious subject of the rape in perspective at all times while letting the story unfold from Holly's perspective. It is never treated lightly, and the steps that Holly must take with the police and finally therapy are described frankly without being heavy-handed. The reader almost gets a sense of being in Holly's skin as she moves through her existence in the weeks and months following "that night," going through the denial, shame, fear, hope, and cautious return of optimism with her. The mood is tense in just the right places, with an unexpected turn for the better here and there as Holly realizes that she is surrounded by love and support.

There are times when she retreats, but she always moves forward again, buoyed by her friends and family. The plot is made more substantial and realistic by the supporting characters and their experiences with life: Nick, who discovers a family secret; Claudia, who is keeping a piece of herself separate; Holly's parents, who turn out to be more than she ever expected; Rachel, Holly's best friend who grew up in a posh English family but is delightfully filthy; and Nigel, who is so theatrical that it's nearly impossible to believe he's straight. The point is, life goes on, and Maxted makes that the central theme of the novel. Even when your world is ripped to shreds and you find yourself in a strange place where up is down and the sky is green, you have to keep going, because that's what life is about. It's about the good and the bad, and keeping each in perspective, and making the most of what you have. It's lovely.

Title Fifty: Black Hills by Nora Roberts

2009-07-14T21:45:00.003-04:00

Black Hills is just what you expect from a Nora Roberts book. Falling under the category of "romantic suspense," you've got Lil and Cooper, childhood pals who become teen lovers before going their separate ways. Lil fulfills her dream of opening a wildlife refuge in the Black Hills of South Dakota, while Coop makes his own way first as a New York cop and then as a private investigator before returning to South Dakota to care for his aging grandparents and taking over the family farm and horse business. Lil is still angry with Cooper for leaving her behind all those years ago and refusing her love, and she doesn't buy his excuse that he had to become his own person before he could be anything to her. Lil, for her part, doesn't want to admit that if Cooper had stayed she would probably have given up her dreams of being a world-renowned big-cat expert. When a series of grisly crimes leads to a connection to a string of missing and murdered persons, Lil decides she'll let Cooper take care of her after all, at least in bed. The bad guy turns out to be a whack job pseudo-Indian with a grudge against Lil for "desecrating the land" or some shit, since he thinks she, as someone with Native American blood, should be building shrines to Crazy Horse instead of running a refuge. Eventually Lil and Cooper fall back in love, the bad dude gets caught after almost killing Lil, and everyone is happy. That's how these things go.

The good: a lot of solid and interesting detail and description of Lil's field, likeable characters and loveable animals, and a decent backstory for Cooper, who is the son of a wealthy NYC lawyer who cut off his son when the latter refused to follow in his footsteps.

The bad: it's predictable as hell, everything ends in love and marriage (my GOD, does everyone have to rush to the altar these days?), and I tend to prefer Roberts novels where the villain isn't revealed until the end, because I enjoy trying to figure out who it is and prefer a surprise ending.

I'll read it again, and I've already lent it to my mom, who is solely responsible for getting me hooked on Nora in the first place when I was a teen. Blame her for my mass-market tendencies.

Title Forty Nine: My Lobotomy by Howard Dully

2009-07-13T19:08:00.004-04:00

What a sad, sad story. I've reconciled myself to the fact that memoirs are, by and large, sad. Most of them are a means for an author to purge himself of pain or atone for past sins, and that's all right. It's what keeps us reading, the thrill of living vicariously through someone else's abuse, addiction, illness, and sorrow while we're tucked up comfy and safe in our beds. For some reason, this book touched me more than the last few memoirs that I've read. I don't know if it's because Dully's anguish is rooted in childhood or because he is obviously just a simple man, a bus driver telling his story in order to stand as a voice for thousands like him without any affectation or sense of importance. The point is, it's a sad sad story but one very much worth reading.

Howard Dully's mother died when he was very young, and his father remarried a woman who was her opposite: where Dully's mother had lavished him with love and affection, his stepmother Lou treated him like a black sheep, punishing his severely for both real and imagined transgressions while his stepbrother and brother were exempt. Dully was also often physically punished, with great force, by his father. Howard was a mischevious boy, often in trouble in school and at home, but not malicious; were he a child today, he would probably be overmedicated on Ritalin for ADD when it seems that he was just a bright child (he used to disassemble and reassemble electronics when he was a toddler) with a vivid imagination and a dearth of intellectual challenges at school. His stepmother, however, couldn't stand Howard and tried various ways of removing him from her household; eventually she came upon the idea of having him lobotomized by the field's pioneer, Walter Freeman, who decided that Howard had been a schizophrenic from the age of four. Howard had no idea what was going to happen to him and the decision was made by his parents in a matter of days. After, Lou's campaign to get Howard out of her house was successful as he was bounced to foster families, relatives, and mental institutions. He was never allowed to return to the family home.

As Howard grew to adulthood, he moved from halfway houses and dead end jobs to homelessness, going from woman to woman, drinking heavily, marrying, divorcing, and fathering a child, but with no purpose. He was arrested time and again. It was only after years of such aimless existence that he realized he couldn't blame the lobotomy and decided to get his act together. He married a good woman, got clean, and got a steady job as a bus driver. Soon after he decided to research what had happened to him, Howard was contacted by two NPR producers who were putting together a segment on Freeman and the devastating effects that his cavalier lobotomies had had on his patients. After hearing Howard's story, the producers revamped the focus of the piece, choosing him as its center, and convinced him to interview patients, their families, medical professionals, and others, including his own father, who ultimately refuses to accept any responsibility or blame for what happened to his son. Eventually Howard became the voice for Freeman's patients as the narrator of the NPR piece "My Lobotomy," which was so well and widely received that the emails coming in after its initial airing crashed NPR's server. That program, in turn, led to the writing of this book.

Howard Dully uses an honest voice as he recounts and rediscovers his past. He is modest and candid, and the story is all the more powerful for it. At the end, you are glad that the adult Howard has picked up the pieces and rearranged them into a better life, but sad that the child ever had to endure such pain and absence of love. I'd like to give Howard Dully a hug.

Title Forty Eight: Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson

2009-07-13T18:48:00.002-04:00

Sweet cracker sandwich, this book is so depressing that it should come with a trial pack of Zoloft. The entire narrative takes on the tone of the damp, dark, mossy Oregonian forest in which it's set. It has a claustrophobic and chilly feel and frankly, has one of the most unsympathetic cast of characters ever. I'm not saying it's not good; it's certainly serviceable and has an interesting premise, but it gave me the feeling that if I ever had the misfortune of finding myself in North Fork, Oregon, surrounded by these people, I'd want to put the town in my rearview mirror as fast as I possibly could.

Ann Holmes is a teenage runaway who left home after being raped continually by her mother's boyfriend. She lives in a campsite and picks and sells wild mushrooms for money. One day during her picking, she is overcome by a vision of the Blessed Mother, who instructs her to return and to deliver certain messages to mankind. It's all familiar to a reader like me, who went to Catholic school for eighteen years and is well-versed in the stories of Fatima and Lourdes. At any rate, Ann is soon a celebrity on the Marian devotion circuit, and she's essentially taken advantage of by everyone: the campground neighbor who sees Ann as her moneymaking ticket to a winter in Mexico; the thousands of fanatics who throng to the woods and beg Ann for favors and intentions; the bumbling priest of the miserly local parish who tries, ineffectually, to seduce her. Woven throughout is the story of a pathetic community that has fallen victim to a sharp decline in the logging industry (the derogatory references to liberal treehuggers and the spotted owl abound), along with the tale of Tom Cross, a former logger whose life has disintegrated after his son was left a quadriplegic in a logging accident for which Tom blames himself - he was trying to teach his son how to be a man, not a pussy or a faggot. Tom and his fellow townspeople are essentially Northwestern rednecks: they hate women, Jews, gays, Indians, Asians, and pretty much anyone who isn't a white male quaffing draft beer at one of the local taverns. It's with Cross that Guterson gets sloppy; while I understand using one person to illustrate a human microcosm of the town, it becomes tiresome reading about Tom's preoccupation with sex and thoughts of revenge on everyone who has somehow wronged him.

Back to the larger picture. Ann continues to have visions and insists that a church is to be built on the site, but she's nothing but a pawn to the people around her, and the story concludes with a morose ending. All in all, a decent effort, but it would be vastly improved by enthusiastic pruning of the Cross story and a seventy percent reduction in the sexual themes, allusions and metaphors. (Reading about a guy eating a hamburger with much chewing and "labial noise" put me off my appetite for several hours; I also prefer books that don't reference the scent of a woman's nethers more times than I can count on one hand.)

Title Forty Seven: Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

2009-07-11T15:47:00.003-04:00

The latest installment in the Thursday Next series is really a gift to fans of the first four books; Fforde did a lovely job of tying up all loose ends in Thursday's story at the end of Something Rotten and could have gone the rest of his career without ever returning to the character, but for the fact that book fans can be just as rabid as any other kind and they wanted some more Thursday (I include myself among this number). First Among Sequels jumps ahead fourteen years from the end of Something Rotten, landing in 2002 and focusing on Thursday and Landen's life post-SpecOps - it's been disbanded - as they raise their family and try to get along with normalcy; Thursday runs a flooring-and-carpet business along with some other ex-SpecOps pals, such as Spike Stoker, Stig the Neanderthal, and Bowden Cable. It's all really a front for the fact that the gang is still involved in their old tricks, something that Thursday hides from Landen and the kids, as well as the fact that she is also still pulling double duty in the BookWorld at Jurisfiction as an agent. Meanwhile, Thurs and Landen are trying to figure out why Friday doesn't show any interest in the ChronoGuard (one of the few remaining SpecOps divisions) even though he's pretty much destined to be its shining star. There are also appearances by past characters like Joffy, Aornis Hades and the Minotaur, along with Thursday's counterparts in the BookWorld, the result of her having books written about her after her previous escapades. Even Goliath comes in again. All in all, it's really just fun for the fans with a chance to return to an old favorite character.

If any of the above made sense to you and maybe caused you to squee a bit, I suggest you pick it up. If you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, move along.

Title Forty Six: The Stand by Stephen King

2009-07-09T19:56:00.002-04:00

I've never read King before; I'm not much for horror, in either books or movies. Basically, I'm kind of a puss. However, I was browsing my sister's bookshelves one night and saw The Stand among the spines (one of her boyfriend's contributions to their little library) and I thought, Hey, why not? I wasn't sure if I would like it, but hot damn did I.

When an accident at a California military base lets loose a bioweapon, one soldier escapes and bolts home to retrieve his wife and child, completely unaware that he's carrying the most contagious and terrifying plague known to man. As the family drives east, they end up crashing into a gas station in Texas, infecting everyone in their path before they drop dead of what becomes known as the "superflu." It spreads across the country like wildfire, wiping out millions in a few short weeks. The victims die grisly deaths as the military attempts to control the situation and fails miserably. A tiny segment of the population, somehow immune, are left behind as the world around them essentially grinds to a halt. There's no electricity; roads are choked with cars filled with bodies rotting in the summer heat; dogs and horses die as well. Civilization as it exists in 1990 disappears as the survivors attempt to figure out what it all means. They become pawns in an epic struggle between good and evil, as they dream about two people: Mother Abigail, an ancient black woman who lives on a farm in Nebraska and becomes the central figure for the good guys, and Randall Flagg, a demon who sets up shop in Las Vegas and creates a community of amoral misfits and those who decide that their chances are better on his side. While Flagg, also called the Dark Man and the Walkin Dude, gets the power back on and starts assembling a collection of worker drones and nuclear weaponry, the motley crew of goodies make their way first to Nebraska to unite under Mother Abigail and then move on to set up the Free Zone in Boulder, Colorado, where God has directed Mother Abigail to take her people to prepare for the final showdown. Eventually, a small group of Free Zoners set out, under Mother Abigail's instructions, for Las Vegas and a confrontation with Flagg.

King uses this massive work to illustrate a grand sociopolitical question: what would it be like if everything just stopped and you were left behind? His characters are amazingly real and nuanced - Frannie Goldsmith, a pregnant college girl from Maine; Larry Underwood, a rock star from New York City who was running from a bad scene in L.A.; Stu Redman, a redneck from the small town in Texas where the original victim died; Nick Andros, a deaf-mute who goes from being a social outcast to a leader. At nearly 1200 pages, it's almost impossible for me to summarize this huge novel, but the narrative is so far-ranging and well-planned that it's almost as impossible to believe that one person could have created it. I never once grew bored, nor did my curiosity wane as I ventured deeper into the story. It's frightening because it could happen, and it made me wonder what kind of person I would be if I survived something so devastating. The good versus evil thing wasn't as important to me, but it provided a decent context and motivation for the plot and actions of the characters. I'm glad I read it. I don't think it's turned me into a King fan, because I'm still afraid of almost everything, but it was worth the while.

Title Forty Five: The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits

2009-06-30T20:23:00.004-04:00

So imagine that I'm browsing in a bookstore, or maybe the book section at Target. I notice you checking out The Uses of Enchantment. I watch for a minute while you read the back, sense your hesitation, and then see you say to yourself, "Eh, seems interesting. I'll take it."

Now you see a slightly manic blonde hauling ass towards you making frantic waving motions. When did they start letting homeless women with well-maintained highlights hang out in Barnes and Noble? you think. At that moment I arrive in front of you, my ponytail slightly disheveled, panting a bit from my trek across the store. (I should really cut down on the cigs.) "Put it back!" I cry. You wonder why I'm so vehement. What could be so wrong with a book whose blurb promises a tale of Mary Veal, who disappeared from her posh New England prep school one day after field hockey practice and reappears a few weeks later with no visible injury or trauma save a case of amnesia. Was it true, or did she fake the whole thing? What repercussions will the event have on Mary's family, therapists, and Mary herself? Why wouldn't you want to check this out?

I'll tell you why. It's a hot fucking mess. Julavits is aiming for literary and instead turns out a disjointed, confusing, and subpar book that tries to blend three different "narratives" - "What Might Have Happened," a convoluted account of Mary's experience with a kidnapper/fellow fugitive/pervy old dude who supposedly suffers from amnesia himself; "Notes" from her first therapist, who goes on to write a book detailing what he considers Mary's entire fabrication and which ends up destroying his career when he's accused of improper patient conduct with Mary by a feminazi colleague; and "West Salem," the events that follow the funeral of Mary's mother fourteen years to the day from Mary's disappearance (Mary's mother, incidentally, refused to see her before she died, and spent most of her life obsessed with an ancestor accused of being a witch). Is that confusing enough you? Congratulations, now you know how I felt when I read the book. Beyond the fact that Julavits has three concepts that never come together, there is no real resolution. You never find out why Mary took off with the guy (if that's what actually happened). You never understand why Mary let the feminazi take over and trash her therapist. You certainly never get any sort of revelations or conclusions from grownup Mary. It's never even made clear who the dude in the car was. It ends abruptly; it doesn't even whimper to an end. The whole thing is like watching a fly buzz between a window and a screen until it drops dead, but somehow less entertaining.

Put the book down. Walk away. I promise not to stalk you through the store.

Backlogged

2009-06-28T22:15:00.002-04:00

I've got about five CB reviews to write, but when I get home from work the last thing I want to do is sit in front of the computer and form coherent sentences. I'll be rectifying that this week. (One of the books I finished last week was The Stand, and man do I have a bit to say about that. My first [and probably only] King book.)

Title Forty Four: Love The One You're With by Emily Giffin

2009-06-14T21:40:00.003-04:00

When it comes to Emily Giffin, I have very definite opinions. I adored Something Borrowed, enjoyed Something Blue, and loathed Baby Proof. My expectations towards Love The One You're With were mediocre, and they were just about met.

Ellen had a great life; she married Andy, the brother of her college roommate/best friend, she started a great photography career in New York, she was welcomed into the wealthy Atlanta family of her husband, and she was happy, happy, happy until the day she saw her ex Leo on a street corner. Instead of ignoring it, or brushing it off casually, she had to make a huge deal about it, sneaking meetings and calls and texts, hiding it from everyone except her older sister Suzanne, who still lived in their hometown of Pittsburgh. Ellen needed *closure* from Leo, the one who broke her heart and got away, the one who knew her inside and out and just ditched her one New Year's Day. Meanwhile, Andy asked Ellen if she would like to move to Atlanta so he could join his father's law firm and be closer to his family, including sister Margot, who is pregnant with her first child. Ellen voiced no doubts and away the two went, with Ellen realizing how stifled she felt in their new mansion, or social circle, or life. I have no sympathy for Ellen; she should have spoken up. Instead she sabotaged her marriage, reignited her relationship with Leo, and burned bridges with her best friend and husband in the process, only to realize that she made a colossal mistake on an ill-fated trip back to New York to work on an assignment with Leo, a writer. Luckily for Ellen, Andy realized how much he loved her, and how stifled she felt, and he took her back, although I frankly don't think she deserved it for being such a selfish cow. Andy wasn't innocent but Ellen, a grown woman, should have tried to deal with the situation constructively. Instead she nearly imploded everything and manages to keep hold in the nick of time. A compromise is reached and everyone gets a happily ever after.

Sweet Christ, what shit. With the exception of Something Borrowed, Giffin has a unique talent for creating completely unlikable characters and constructing situations that are so bland they make plain yogurt look delectable. In my opinion she's a one trick pony and I hope someone stops publishing her dreck.

Title Forty Three: Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes

2009-06-14T21:24:00.003-04:00

Rachel Walsh, the middle sister of the Dublin Walsh clan, is living the glam life in New York City, rooming with her best friend Brigit and enjoying a passionate relationship with the sexy Luke Costello. Sure, she likes to party a little much, but isn't coke the NYC version of coffee? And Valium is no big deal - she just needs it to come down. As for the (high-dose and illegally prescribed) painkillers, well, cramps are the scourge of every woman's life, aren't they? Rachel doesn't get out of hand any more than her friends. When they get on her case, she just thinks they need to loosen up a bit. And if she can't hold onto a job, that's not her fault, because everyone knows bosses are pricks. And maybe she owes her friends a fair bit of money, but we all get in a pinch sometimes.

Until the morning Rachel wakes up in the hospital after the agony of having her stomach pumped. It seems she took a bit too much coke the night before and, desperate to come down and get some sleep so she could go to her shitty job the next day (she has been calling out sick a bit too much lately) she may have overdone it on the Valium. No one will listen when she protests that it wasn't a suicide attempt, and in short order she finds herself packed off to an Irish rehab facility called The Cloisters; Brigit is no longer speaking to her and Luke has ditched her. No matter; loads of celebs have been there and Rachel is almost looking forward to two months' stay in a posh facility, getting massage and seaweed wraps and eating fresh fruit and doing aromatherapy. Until she gets there, that is, and realizes that she's just a step above institutionalized.

What follows is an account, both wrenching and darkly funny, of Rachel's coming to terms with the fact that she is a serious addict. Horrified by the people around her, Rachel steadfastly believes that it's all a mistake, until one day she can't hide from the truth anymore and everything around her crumbles. Your heart breaks for her as she realizes that she's anesthetized herself from life and alienated everyone who ever cared about her, that her self-esteem is shit, and that her life is a wreck. She has to break to get stronger, and Keyes does such a great job with the material that it's poignant and true and slightly horrifying while still maintaining a slightly funny edge.

The ending isn't rosy, but it is quietly satisfying, and Rachel's Holiday is a solid installation in the lives of the Walsh sisters and in Keyes' body of work as a whole.

Title Forty Two: The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

2009-06-08T19:28:00.004-04:00

I'm pretty sure I read this back when it came out and caused a stir, but I wasn't certain (probably not a good sign) so I thought, "Eh, why not?" Wow. Seriously? This book wasn't funny. It was just sad. I only had sympathy for one character, and he got royally screwed in the end.

Nanny is a grad student in child development at NYU who lives in a shoebox apartment and works as a nanny to afford said education and living quarters. She gets picked up in Central Park one day by Mrs. X, who wants her to watch darling Grayer a few days a week. Predictably, it turns into Nanny-as-indentured-servant as Mrs. X flits from salon appointment to charity function and Mr. X fucks a girl from the Chicago office. Nanny falls for Hot Rich Guy Who Goes To Harvard And Lives In The Xes' Building. Grayer, whom Nanny calls Grover, is largely ignored by everyone but her. She is the only shining light in his existence. (Wait, I just heard Handel's Messiah.) Of course, she gets too close to Grayer and Mrs. X fires her while Grayer wails in the background. The end.

It wasn't cute. It was about a bunch of self-centered New York assholes who essentially give birth to expensive accessories, whom they hand off to students and immigrants. Maybe someone should have advised McLaughlin and Kraus to stick with childcare.

Title Forty One: Rag and Bone (A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead) by Peter Manseau

2009-06-08T19:12:00.003-04:00

This looked way more interesting when I picked it up, kids. I mean, I was raised Catholic, so I'm very familiar with the concept of relics (essentially a piece of a holy person, most often a saint; sometimes clothing will work too). I thought it might be cool to read about the experiences of a guy who spent years traveling around the world in search of certain relics - Saint Anthony's tongue; Saint Francis' toe; Jesus' foreskin; Muhammad's whisker; the Buddha's tooth. Manseau does a decent enough job of describing the relics' places in their respective faiths/belief systems, and gives some informative context, such as the juxtaposition of the world's religions in the Middle East and the genocide in Sri Lanka (site of the Temple of the Holy Tooth). The book itself isn't poorly written. It's just that the subject is as dry as the relics themselves, and it's kind of hard to get jazzed up about it. I salute Manseau for his thorough research and interesting travels, but beyond that, I've got nothing.

(The closest I've ever come to a relic was when I visited the Saint Katherine Drexel Shrine here in Bucks County and prayed at the altar where the saint is buried. I might want to see one sometime, though. Seems kind of interesting.)

Side Note

2009-06-02T19:35:00.002-04:00

I'm going to try like hell to make it to 100 books (I've still got months, and summer is the second best season for reading) but I won't be counting any Pajiba reviews towards my total. For some reason, it would almost feel like doing one paper and handing it in for two separate classes. I'm weird like that. Anyway, if you're one of the four people who might read this on a semi-regularish basis and you like what you see, feel free to check out my reviews in the Books section at www.pajiba.com.

Title Forty: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson

2009-06-02T19:11:00.004-04:00

Laurel Hawthorne makes beautiful quilts, but she always puts in hidden pockets and secret compartments where she places something ugly - a bird's skull; a broken tooth. It's her way of acknowledging that everything beautiful has something dark inside, but she won't let it show. Laurel lives her life much the same way, tucking away her sordid family relatives in DeLop, Alabama and the ghost of her pervert uncle Marty, keeping those things separate from the picture-perfect life that she lives with her husband and daughter in a gated community in Victorianna, Florida. Everything is orderly and tidy until the hot summer night that another ghost comes to visit Laurel, the first she's seen in the thirteen years since she moved to Victorianna - her daughter Shelby's best friend Molly, who has drowned in the Hawthornes' pool. In order to find the truth about Molly's death, Laurel has to open the secret compartments and expose the ugliness to the light of day.

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming was surprising; it was far better than I expected and I found myself engrossed in solving the mystery of Molly's death. Laurel brings her sister, Thalia, to Victorianna to help; Thalia is the polar opposite of Laurel, an actress who is married to a gay man, a woman who lives life messily and loudly and brashly. Thalia cannot understand how Laurel can exist in her tidy little world, but Thalia has the courage to root out the truth that Laurel lacks. The novel is peopled with interesting, realistic characters, such as Laurel's husband David, a placid computer programmer who loathes Thalia; simple Bet Clemmens, a teen cousin from DeLop who has come to visit the Hawthornes (Laurel's own little charity project); Stan Webelow, a neighborhood man whom Laurel suspects in Molly's death; and Laurel's parents, especially her mother, who came from the poverty and squalor of DeLop but has managed to insulate herself beneath a veneer of Southern respectability and charm. Jackson also shows the secret side of the upper-middle class suburbs, with its alcoholics, cheats, and liars, contrasting it with the outright crime, drug addiction, illiteracy and hopelessness of DeLop.

Jackson keeps the pace moving as she weaves the threads that Laurel will pick apart as the days following Molly's death pass. She also cleverly uncovers Laurel's past and deftly guides the reader through a sort of journey both forward and back, a plot device that can often feel contrived or heavy-handed when used by other authors but not here. Laurel is the center and she needs to look both behind her and ahead if she is going to find her way out of the pocket within which she has hidden herself. In trying to protect her family, Laurel has frozen them, and Molly's death is the catalyst for Laurel's realization that it's no way to live. She has tried so hard to not be Thalia that she's more a sketch than a painting. There is only one awkward scene, which Jackson resolves nicely enough, even though it was a bit out of place with the rest of the book. All in all, a definite recommendation if you're looking for something with some substance and flair.

Title Thirty Nine: Driving with Dead People by Monica Holloway

2009-05-22T20:07:00.002-04:00

Hey, y'all. Did you miss me? I've been real busy.

Anyway, I need to tell you something. I think I have memoir ennui. I mean, we should have realized that this was going to happen, right? I feed on other people's stories like a leech. Eventually I'd meet one that I'd close and say, "Huh. I should feel more than I do, but I don't."

That book is Driving with Dead People. Please don't misunderstand me; I felt for Monica. She got a raw deal. Her parents were both shitty. Her father splurged his goodwill on being a good guy in public, at his hardware store and Elks barbecues, while he made his kids' lives a living hell, treating them with cruelty and violence and going out of his way to humiliate them. Her mother was a selfish bitch who pretty much abandoned her kids when she figured out she didn't want to play house anymore and decided to go back to school, where she got her own apartment and hooked up with a married guy that she would later take on as a second husband. In the meantime, Monica, her sisters Becky and Jo Ann, and her brother Jamie were kind of left to fend for themselves, and they all turned out about as fucked up as you could imagine they would. Not much is told of Becky's story, and Holloway hints strongly at a sort of estrangement that grew from childhood between the girls, so I got the impression that she's left out mostly because Becky doesn't want to be a part of Monica's life and "lawsuit" can be a sweet word when family is on the outs. (Of course, that's just my take on it. Maybe Monica wanted to give Becky some modicum of privacy.)

Monica does a decent job of essentially raising herself, and forges a strong friendship with Julie Kilner, whose father owns the local funeral home (and by whose family and family business Monica is fascinated; hence the title). The girls create a bond and Monica is amazed by a family where knocking over your glass at the dinner table won't get you knocked off your chair. Monica's father has an obsession with gruesome accidents and death, filming them with the family movie camera, and Monica often wishes she were dead. She's not exactly suicidal; she just sees death as a sort of peaceful place to be, and this feeds her interest in the Kilner mortuary. In their teens, Monica and Julie pick up extra money by fetching bodies from the airport in the hearse, but the book is about so much more than that. It's about how a kid who has the deck stacked against her turns out all right, and how, just when she thinks she's figured out her life - Holloway put herself through college and became an actress, even though she's spent a lot of her time scrabbling from day to day and engaging in disastrous love affairs - one thing comes along and knocks her sideways. You're going to get spoiled, so don't read further if you want to wait and see for yourself.

One Christmas, Jo Ann tells Monica that she's not going home for the annual family celebration. Apparently, now that the kids are all grown up and no longer in need of mothering, Mom likes to pretend happy family at the holidays. Monica stops off to see Jo Ann on her way home, and Jo Ann reveals that she remembers being molested by her father throughout her childhood. It's both shocking and yet not; I had a simultaneous feeling of "Seriously? Something else happened to these kids, on top of the rest?" and "Well, in a family that messed up, I guess it makes sense." The rest of the book deals with Monica trying to come to terms and remember if she, too, was a victim of sexual abuse. Their mother patently refuses to believe that such a thing happened, but Monica recalls her mother's insistence that the girls sleep in nightgowns without underwear to "air themselves out" and slathering their privates with Vaseline at night. Also, all three girls slept in the same room for years, so Monica must have borne witness, mustn't she? Could she really not have known this was going on? Was her mother complicit in the most vile of crimes? Becky refuses to discuss it; Monica and her mother stop speaking; Jamie is too far gone down a road of self-loathing and alcohol abuse to be present; Jo Ann becomes suicidal and is hospitalized. Monica cuts off the oddly congenial relationship she's fostered with her father while trying to figure out her own truth. Then, one day, like an ice pick to the chest, her father inadvertently confesses his guilt: Monica phones him after Jo Ann's suicide attempt and tells him that he must help her support her sister while she recovers, and that Jo Ann left her a suicide note that she has yet to open. Her father tells her not to open it, and when she presses him about it (there is no such note) he screams into the phone, "I never touched that girl!" With that, the entire house of cards falls to the ground. Monica remembers the sensation of orgasm from her childhood, when she would lie still and pretend to sleep while a finger probed her. Her already horrible memories are forever smeared by a layer of filth that can never come clean.

One thing that jarred me, very much, was that in the epilogue Holloway describes a conversation she has years later with Julie Kilner, who still lives in her hometown. Julie recounts that the last time she saw Monica's father and asked about the girls, he responded that as far as he knows, they're not dead yet. For some inexplicable reason, this compels Monica to send her estranged father flowers with a note that says that she misses him every day and loves him. That was my what the fuck moment, when I officially stopped caring about this book. How do you write such an exposing tale of your life and end it by saying that you sent a monster an arrangement from 1-800-Flowers? What does that even mean? How can I be expected to feel anything but ambivalence for a woman who clearly doesn't even know how she feels about the situation?

Maybe I'm being unfair. I don't know. I was just disgusted by that. I respect Holloway for sharing her story with the world, but it left me feeling hollow and vaguely repulsed in its entirety. I need a few rounds of fiction to cleanse my palate.

Title Thirty Eight: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

2009-05-16T21:57:00.003-04:00

If Sarina read this blog, she'd be looking for something handy to chuck at her monitor right now. I don't care. It's well known that Gone with the Wind is one of my favorite books (and films) and reading it makes me happy. There's a reason that it's both a classic and a masterpiece, friends. Whether or not you want to believe it is on you. My faith cannot be shaken.

You probably know the basic story - Scarlett O'Hara, Southern belle, is living an antebellum lifestyle at Tara as the eldest daughter of a Georgian plantation holder when the Civil War (or War Between the States/War of Northern Aggression, whatever) breaks out during the fateful barbecue at Twelve Oaks plantation, where she meets Rhett Butler for the first time. Scarlett wants Ashley Wilkes, but she can't have him, since he's going to marry his cousin Melanie Hamilton. Petty Scarlett decides to marry Melanie's brother Charles for spite, but it kind of backfires when Charles dies of illness in the war's early weeks. War, destruction, starvation and Reconstruction ensue; Scarlett travels from Tara to Atlanta and back, then marries her sister's fiance out from under her when she needs money for taxes to save the family home from falling into the hands of Carpetbaggers. When husband number two, Frank Kennedy, is killed during a Klan raid, Rhett finally swoops in and snatches up Scarlett, telling her that he can't go all his life waiting to catch her between husbands. As Mrs. Rhett Butler, Scarlett finally has enough money to keep her nightmare of being hungry and lost at bay, but there's no happy ending; when Scarlett and Rhett's daughter, Bonny, is killed in a fall from a horse and Melanie Wilkes dies in childbirth, Rhett leaves Scarlett, who has realized too late that all the time she imagined herself in love with Ashley, her heart really belonged to Rhett. Rhett doesn't have enough left in him to care, and utters his famous last words on his way out the door: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Sobbing to herself on the stairs of their Atlanta mansion, Scarlett resolves to go back to Tara, start again, and find a way to get her husband back. Fin.

Look, it's a long book, and the movie cut out about a third of the story, and STILL needed an intermission.

What you might not realize is that GwtW isn't a potboiler or a love letter to slavery. It's a powerful, detailed, and rich portrayal of a time in American history that is often reduced to bare bones and dry facts in high school modules. Mitchell uses authentic dialogue and sweeping narrative to create two tales: the first, of a way of life and a class of people, both of which ended the second the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter. Mitchell does a masterful job of describing the war, martial law, poverty, loss, despair, and the Southerners' efforts to find a place in an alien world where the old rules and laws no longer apply. On another level is Scarlett's story; she never really belonged in the world of gentle, quiet women who oversaw homes and raised children. She is too much like her wild Irish father, too intelligent, too strong, and these traits are what keep her going, working her fingers to the bone in order to thrive while those around her are content to sit around, recounting tales of the old days and Confederate victories while letting life happen to them. Scarlett cannot rely on anyone but herself, and it makes her hard and bitter, but it also makes her real. She's not just a protagonist, but a heroine, clawing, scheming and plotting her way towards a life without fear but not realizing that the fear lives in her, and by the time she does, it's too late. She's too far from where she always intended to be but she recognizes that she just has to go on and find another way. Mitchell knew what she was doing when she created Katie Scarlett O'Hara. You should take some time to meet her.

Title Thirty Seven: Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman

2009-05-04T22:25:00.003-04:00

Emelia falls for her married boss and breaks up his marriage. Next thing she knows, her two-day-old daughter dies of SIDS and she is stuck with an insufferably precocious 5-year-old stepson, William, who insists on puncturing the cocoon of grief she has built around herself. Everything she does makes her feel like a failure - as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a stepmother; she is a failed lawyer and a homewrecker; she cannot breathe. Her husband's ex-wife, a respected and revered obstetrician to the elite of New York City, does everything she can to make Emilia's life a living hell while her husband, Jack, gives off an air of mere tolerance; eventually even his patience breaks and her life lies around in jagged pieces and she has no glue with which to reconstruct it.

I would probably wax rhapsodic about this novel except for one thing: it's really a love letter to Central Park. The book is rife with obscure factoids about the structure and history of the park; Emilia spends all of her time there; her memories center on it; entire chapters revolve around it. I GET IT. New Yorkers love Central Park. It is the greatest park in the history of parks. (At one point Emilia, the first person narrator, even says this in no uncertain terms.) Your life is empty if you don't live near Central Park. You are a philistine if you've never been to Central Park.

The Park is probably much more than just a reference point; I'm sure there's some great metaphor I'm missing, but it's wasted on me because I have a headache from the anvilliciousness of it all.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is a decently crafted book with a thoughtful exploration of the themes of loss, love, grief, and family. Sometimes I wanted to hug Emilia; sometimes I wanted to spank William; sometimes I wanted to shake Jack. Unfortunately, my investment in the characters was sporadic and half-hearted because the cover may as well have had an "I (Heart) NY" logo on the front. I would have been more emotionally involved in the story if it were less about geography. Or maybe I just missed the point entirely.

Title Thirty Six: Ask Again Later by Jill A. Davis

2009-05-04T19:47:00.003-04:00

Boring. Vapid. Shallow. Insipid.

Oh, don't mind me. I'm just coming up with words to describe this transparent stab at chick lit. Who decides to publish this shit? I was intrigued by the idea of a story about a woman who uses her mother's breast cancer diagnosis as an excuse to abandon her career and gentleman friend and essentially hide from her life for a bit. I thought, "There could be something there. A real honest look at what it's like to be an adult but not know how to be a grownup." This is not that book.

Emily's father walked out when she was five. Her mother's a drama queen. Her sister's a socialite. Emily has spent her whole life being defined by her past (a point that she, as the first-person narrator, makes again and again and again until I wanted to throw the book against a wall). She became a lawyer because she didn't know what else to do. She's afraid of commitment. She dates a guy she works with until she quits the job and the relationship. She takes a gig as the receptionist at her father's law firm while she waits out her mother's lumpectomy. She visits her shrink a lot. She pushes back her cuticles. She ponders the fact that she's afraid of living but doesn't do anything about it. It's really this boring. Don't fucking read it.

Title Thirty Five: If I Am Missing Or Dead by Janine Latus

2009-05-04T19:37:00.004-04:00

Look, I'm going to come right out and say it: this book was stupid. I feel very bad for the author and the fact that she suffered from such low self-esteem and that a shitty childhood with her pervy father led her into a marriage with a disgusting, abusive, nasty pig who thinks of nothing but fucking her after she has surgery to make her tits bigger because he wants them to be. It's a vile stream of recollections from someone who unfortunately spent most of her life trying to live up to or hide behind the images of herself that the men in her life have created. I'm sorry that Latus suffered this way for so many years, and only found the guts to claw her way out of the vicious cycle a couple of months before her beloved younger sister, who lived her life in much the same way, was murdered by her boyfriend. I just don't see the point to this book, I really don't. There isn't enough redemption to balance out the filth oozing off the page. I wanted to take a shower with a Brillo pad after I finished it. Again, I'm not mocking the plight of victims of domestic and sexual abuse; I just don't want to read page after page about it without there being something more substantial at the end than "after living with it for years and years and years and knowing something was wrong I finally got out." Latus is a writer for a living; this book should be better. I bought it because I thought it would have more to do with her sister Amy, and it didn't, so maybe that's why I'm so annoyed, but it's just a disappointment.

Title Thirty Four: Trauma by Patrick McGrath

2009-05-01T22:01:00.003-04:00

It figures; I take a short break from memoirs and end up with two back-to-back works of fiction that read like memoirs. Surprisingly, I don't get bored. Maybe that means my expectations are low, but whatever.

Trauma, a dark and densely-written tale of a psychiatrist in New York City in the 1970s, has enough damage in one character to give you vicarious dysfunction. Charlie Weir had the life sucked out of him from an early age, at the mercy of a depressive mother, negligent father, and self-absorbed brother. This, of course, led him into a career in psychiatry, where he subsequently attempts to heal in other people what is irreparably broken in himself, specializing in the victims of trauma, both emotional and physical. At the start of his career, Charlie moderated a support group for Vietnam veterans. The most damaged patient, Danny, had a sister named Agnes who first sought out Charlie in attempts to understand her brother; eventually Charlie and Agnes married and had a daughter, but their life together was shattered on the night that Charlie found Danny dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Unable to deal with his guilt and Agnes' blame, Charlie fled the marriage, convinced that he could only do more harm than good. Several years later, the death of Charlie's mother brings Agnes back into his life and they become fuck buddies, even though Agnes is remarried. Shortly after, Charlie also meets an incredibly broken and unpredictable woman, Nora Chiara. Charlie sees Nora as his chance for redemption, and they begin a relationship where she moves in with him, but the relationship is stunted from the outset by Charlie's clinical detachment and continued trysts with Agnes while Nora's increasingly violent outbursts of temper and nightmares shred the tenuous fabric of their connection further. In the end, Charlie has lost what little happiness he may have felt during those few months and gained only a greater emptiness, yet he resolves to go on with his practice, perhaps never realizing that he will one day simply disappear into the despair that radiates from the people he tries to help.

It's not a light read, but it is a thought-provoking one. It simply may not provoke thoughts that you'd like to think. The author has a deft touch and a keen sense of human frailty and pain, and I'd like to explore some of his other work, but I don't know if this is a novel that I would ever pick up again.

Title Thirty Three: Do Dead People Watch You Shower? by Concetta Bertoldi

2009-04-29T22:31:00.003-04:00

If you see this book, run away. As quickly as possible. Bonus points if you set it on fire before you run. (Kidding.) (Kind of.)

Look, I admit to a certain fascination with ghosties. I love watching "Paranormal State" and have a slight crush on Ryan Buell. Okay, a big crush. I sort of want to have his babies. So I picked up this book hoping to find some interesting anecdotes about the life of a medium and her communications with the Other Side. Instead it was like being trapped at the kitchen table with a loudmouthed North Jersey paisan (I'm an Eyetal; I can say that) who refuses to let you leave until she has told you every detail of her life. "Oooh, look at me, I can see and hear dead people! I bring comfort to grieving family and friends! "They" told me who I was going to marry! I know so much more than you but I can't prove it but dammit you need to believe me because I am an expert!" Shut up and shove a cannoli in your mouth. Your writing is trite, vain, and has the skill level of a dyslexic middle schooler. (This is not a jab at the writer's dyslexia, or anyone else's for that matter; she is simply a poor author, incapable of writing more than one paragraph for many of the "chapters" of the book.)

The only heartwarming segments deal with Bertoldi's experiences with the deaths of her father and brother. They were, and still are, evidently devastating and painful, and if her communications and visits with them have brought her some comfort, then I'm glad that what she calls her "gift" has allowed that. Otherwise, it's a lot of showmanship with little substance. She trumpets her small validations and chalks her failures up to a sort of "Oh, only God is perfect, and I won't be perfect until I am one with Him" mentality. There's a lot of pseudo-New Agey crap sprinkled liberally throughout the book, especially pertaining to her concept that those who go "home" arise to a different plane of consciousness and cease to exist as separate entities, instead becoming a part of God, shedding all earthly constraints. I don't know about you, but when I get to heaven I want to find great sex, exquisite chocolate, flowering gardens and beautiful beaches, along with high-quality scotch flowing like a river and books as far as the eye can see. I want to enjoy my earthly senses to the fullest. In the end I decided that Bertoldi is a hack, which may be unfair, but hell, it's my opinion and my review.

Title Thirty Two: Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

2009-04-26T19:49:00.003-04:00

I don't want to review this book.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad book. It's beautifully written, poignant, thought-provoking, and sensitive. I think it's fantastic and the characters are true and flawed and shining. This might be one of the best books that Picoult has written; I look back at some of her earlier work and this one just shows a level of intensity and maturity that speaks to her talent. I don't want to review it because the ending broke my heart, and I don't want to think about it.

Instead I'll give you a quick recap, and I'll let you decide if you want to read it. Sean and Charlotte O'Keefe have two daughters; Amelia is Charlotte's daughter from a previous relationship and Willow is their miracle baby, who was born with a condition called osteogenesis imperfecta, or OI. Also known as "brittle bone" disease, OI is caused by a spontaneous genetic mutation and its biggest result is the incredible delicacy of the bones; fractures can be caused by a bump into a table, a child hugged too tightly, a stumble over the edge of a rug, or simply a sudden movement. During a family trip to Disney World, Willow slips in an ice cream parlor and falls, fracturing her leg. Charlotte and Sean realize that the doctor's note they carry at all times, detailing Willow's disease, is home in their van in New Hampshire. They are arrested at the hospital on suspicion of child abuse and the girls are taken from them. It lasts only overnight, until Charlotte is able to contact Willow's doctor, but it ignites a fire in her. Upon returning home, Charlotte and Sean visit a lawyer, who tells them that they don't have a case against the police department in Florida but that they do have a case against the obstetrician who may have failed to diagnose Willow's condition early enough in Charlotte's pregnancy for her to terminate - a case called a "wrongful birth" lawsuit. This presents two major problems: one, Charlotte will have to testify that Willow should never have been born; two, the obstetrician in question is Charlotte's best friend, Piper.

What follows is a fracturing of the characters' lives - Charlotte and Sean are literally on opposite sides of the lawsuit, Charlotte and Piper's friendship is irrevocably shattered, Amelia turns inward on herself, and Willow tries to make sense of it all in her six-year-old mind. Picoult shows an amazing depth of understanding as she recounts the story in a way that keeps the reader engaged and shares information about an unknown disease, using it as a metaphor for the larger picture. I usually find subplots slightly tedious, but Picoult picks up pace with Charlotte's lawyer, Marin, who is herself adopted and searching for her birth mother, adding another dimension to the debate over termination in pregnancy.

It's an excellent book, and if you don't mind emotional reads then I certainly would suggest it. I just don't want to think about it anymore myself. Not for a little while, yet.

Title Thirty One: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

2009-04-23T22:42:00.003-04:00

Some books are like old friends. Even though you know them well, return visits are always enjoyable and you remember just why you loved them in the first place. I've read The Lovely Bones several times, but each time I do I drift back into the story of Susie Salmon and the characters are familiar and comforting, even as I experience the sadness and heartache with them over again.

One day, walking home from school, 14-year-old Susie runs into a creepy neighbor who convinces her to investigate a room that he built under the cornfield that is the shortcut between the school and the Salmon home. Susie's natural curiosity is what leads her into the underground space, but once down there she realizes that something is very, very wrong. Harvey refuses to let her leave, then pins her down, rapes her, dismembers her, and erases any evidence of the crime. The only lead that police have is the hat that Susie had on her, made by her mother, until a neighborhood dog turns up with an elbow in his mouth and the Salmon family realizes that Susie is never coming home.

Told from Susie's point of view, looking down on her family from her heaven, the story is one of loss and pain but it's also a tale of how a family tries to move on from a tragedy that creates cracks in the foundation. Susie explores the efforts of her father, mother, sister, and brother as they attempt to navigate a world without her in it. Sebold treats what is a horrific and devastating situation with suprising grace and imagination, and the characters are what make the novel so worthwhile. I came to love the Salmon family, even as they make mistakes and flounder. I watch as her father battles the deaf ears on which fall his conviction that Harvey is the murderer; as her sister Lindsey tries to move beyond being the "dead girl's sister;" as baby brother Buckley attempts to make sense of what it means that Susie is gone; as Mrs. Salmon does the only thing she can to survive by methodically distancing herself from her family; and as Susie's maternal grandmother, Grandma Lynn, becomes the unlikely glue that holds this fractured collection of broken people together.

Sebold takes a tale of horror and turns it into one of redemption, a rare gift indeed, but at the same time she never takes away from the devastation of the emotional chasm that is left by the unnecessary death of a young girl just beginning to discover who she is. The story is real enough to be uncomfortable but at the same time powerfully endearing, and it has kept me coming back again and again, as I suspect it will for years to come.

Title Thirty: Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult

2009-04-22T19:48:00.002-04:00

I'm such a sucker for Jodi Picoult novels. I'm in the middle of reading another one right now. I can't help it; I'm powerless. I know when I pick up one of her books that I'm going to ride an intellectual and emotional rollercoaster that redefines whatever concepts I have about fairness and justice. It's pretty rad.

June Nealon had a good life; she was raising her seven-year-old daughter Elizabeth with her husband Kurt and counting down the final weeks until the birth of her younger daughter Claire when her world was blown apart by the murders of her husband and child, leaving her clinging to Claire, all that she has left. The killer, handyman Shay Bourne, became the first person in over forty years to be sentenced to the death penalty in New Hampshire. Eleven years later, as Shay's time to die approaches, so does Claire's - the girl needs a heart transplant to survive. When Bourne decides that he has to donate his heart to Claire to right some cosmic wrong, it creates an outcry that is dwarfed only by Bourne's sudden transfiguration into a Christ figure; he turns the water in the cell block toilets to wine, brings a dead robin back to life, and cures a fellow inmate of AIDS. Added to the cast of characters are a priest who served on the jury that found Bourne guilty and sentenced him to death, now questioning his own faith in the face of what is happening around Shay, and an agnostic lawyer for the ACLU who takes on Shay Bourne's case and champions his right to die in a manner that will allow for organ donation (hanging, as opposed to lethal injection) while intending to use it as a hammer to shatter the idea of the death penalty.

When you read a Picoult novel, you have to suspend some disbelief. There's always a little mystical/mysterious woo-woo happening; some books, like The Pact and My Sister's Keeper, are much more rooted in fact, while others, like Salem Falls, Mercy, and Keeping Faith ask you to imagine a world where magic and miracles happen. Change of Heart walks a line somewhere between the two camps; on the one hand, really, an uneducated carpenter (anvil!) is suddenly healing the sick and quoting Gnostic gospels? On the other, a sick kid needs a heart and there's enough medical and legal jargon to keep the story grounded in reality for a good part of the novel.

Ultimately, it's a story about people. Picoult is very good at creating complex characters and setting a stage for them to interact. Shay Bourne is going to die at the end; that is never in question. He killed a little girl and her father for reasons that come out later, but he never denies that he murdered them and believes that he needs to die to even the scales, and that saving Claire is his ultimate purpose. As in other books, Picoult uses her people to probe the edges of a thorny issue and gives an ending that is just satisfactory enough, but still leaves some regret. That's the kind of story that I like. I don't need neat corners and tidy bows; I want to think, and this book delivers.

Title Twenty Nine: Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut by Emily White

2009-04-20T19:21:00.002-04:00

I was a women's studies minor in college. I know, right? How much more useless could my university experience be? Major in English lit, minor in gender studies, and find myself several years later suited for not much more than reading, writing book reviews, and loudly proclaiming that if anyone ever marries me, I won't change my last name. Hey, it's a cool last name.

Anyway, that little part of me was attracted to Fast Girls, a decent enough examination of the concept of the slut among teenagers. I admit to feeling somewhat out of my depth, because I went to a private all-girls' high school so I don't think we had a slut. Any girl that was whoring it up certainly wasn't doing it in the hallways, and if someone was doing it on the weekends it obviously didn't make enough of an impression on me that I remember it thirteen years later. White's own memory of her school tramp, a girl they all called "Anna Wanna," inspired her to research the notion of certain girls being singled out and tormented, whether their behavior warranted it or not.

White interviewed dozens of women and incorporated their experiences into what is really a very long senior thesis. The writing isn't particularly great, and the book gets a little tedious and repetitious while depending on references to feminist writings - including those of Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, and Betty Friedan. In trying to find the answer to the question, "Why did that girl get singled out?" White never really came up with a decent answer, and instead just kept telling the same tale of the girl who was known for giving a train job to the lacrosse team or trading oral for cigarettes. The women who she interviewed were more interesting, and ranged from happy and successful in the post-high school world to depressed drug addicts who never really escaped it. White also probed the idea that the slut as outcast is a role found more often in white suburbia than multiracial urban settings, but didn't spend enough time on it to make it worthwhile. In the end it's just acceptance that some girls will always be set apart due to rumor, gossip and innuendo without really offering a way to change it.

Title Twenty Eight: Tribute by Nora Roberts

2009-04-19T20:02:00.002-04:00

We've already established that I like mass market romance novels. Don't look at me like that, you snob.

Cilla McGowan, former child actress, has found her calling in rehabbing and flipping old houses. (This book was obviously written before the market tanked last year.) In her biggest project to date, she's moved to Virginia and plans to restore the Little Farm - not just any house, but the house where her maternal grandmother and film star, Janet Hardy, took her own life in 1974. An air of mystery and sadness surrounds the house, but Cilla is determined to make it shine again. Her neighbor, graphic novelist Ford Sawyer (where do these writers get these names?) would like to make Cilla shine, but that's part and parcel. It's a Nora Roberts book.

When Cilla unearths a box of letters to her grandmother from an unnamed lover, she sets out to discover his identity. Of course, threats and violence ensue as someone tries to scare Cilla into leaving town. Meanwhile, Cilla and Ford are getting cozier and cozier, and he creates a new superheroine based on her. I can't even get a decent guy to ask me out on a date, but whatever.

Ultimately, the bad guy is caught, Ford proposes, Cilla says yes, and everyone lives happily ever after. It's a surprisingly good book if you can look past the formula, with interesting details, likable characters, and sharp-ish dialogue. I'd recommend it for a rainy Sunday or afternoon at the beach.

Shut up. Go read Proust or something.

Title Twenty Seven: Still Alice by Lisa Genova

2009-04-04T14:33:00.003-04:00

My aunt, who passed away a few years ago from cancer, once looked at me during one of her chemo treatments and said, "Alzheimer's is the cruelest disease. There's no way to fight it." I was a little stunned that someone as sick as she was could be thinking of someone else, but that was just her. I should have paid attention at the time.

Alice Howland is a well-respected professor of psychology at Harvard University who begins to notice that she's forgetting things. She chalks this up to her busy schedule as a teacher and world-wide lecturer, the stress of her career and empty-nest syndrome, and what she assumes to be the approach of menopause- she is fifty, after all, and these things happen. Then one day, taking her daily run, she becomes lost a few blocks from home. She knows that the buildings are familiar and that she's supposed to know where she is, but her mind is blank. She is dazed and terrified, and when she comes back to herself a few minutes later, she tries to brush it off but can't.

After a visit to her primary and then another with a neurologist at Mass General, Alice is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. Genova, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard herself, does a masterful job of portraying the devastation, despair, and loss that Alice begins to experience from the moment of diagnosis. While focusing on Alice and charting her steady, heartbreaking decline month by month, Genova also explores how this changes the dynamics of every relationship in Alice's life - with her husband John, a fellow professor; with her three grown children; with her colleagues; most importantly, with herself. Alice knows that there is going to come a time when everything that she has worked and fought toward is going to be washed away, like a sandcastle on a beach, and as a professor who wrote groundbreaking papers and conducted milestone research in the area of psychology and linguistics, the idea of losing the ability to communicate is shattering.

One of the best things about this book is that Genova chose to write it in the third person but it comes across as a first person voice. It's almost an eerie sense of Alice's story, told by Alice as an onlooker. The eloquence of the first half of the novel begins to fade into a more simplistic fashion as the disease marches on. One plot point that jabbed at my heart, again and again, was this: Alice, who has come to rely entirely on her BlackBerry for tying her to who she is, sets an alarm to ask her five questions every day. If the day should come when she cannot answer the questions, she instructs herself to go to her computer and open a certain file and follow the instructions. It just made my heart ache that she knew she was going to reach a certain point and wanted to leave an escape hatch. As the story progressed, and she could answer the questions with less and less certainty, I found myself crying. I tried to tell myself that it was only a story, but by the end I couldn't pretend anymore. It's not just a story. It's the story of every person with this horrible illness and no cure in sight. It's my grandmother's story.

My grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's over ten years ago. Since then, I watched her slip away, bit by bit, until she wasn't my Nanny anymore. Now she lives in a nursing home, and I never go to visit her. I'm a terrible person, and there's most likely a spot reserved for me in hell, but I just can't do it. My Nan was fierce; you didn't cross her and you didn't question her no-nonsense Pennsylvania German ways. She raised eight kids as a working mother, tag-teaming with my grandfather (he was on days while she did nights) and had the unwavering respect and love of her clan. She beat my ass on more than one occasion, and I deserved it. She helped my mother raise me and my sister when my father took off when we were babies, and when she and my grandfather moved to Idaho in the eighties for their health I missed them like crazy; I was thrilled when they moved back in 1996 and we didn't have to wait months between visits anymore. This is the woman who taught me how to scrub a floor on my hands and knees, make a bed (with hospital corners), and cook a roast. Her recipe for hobo bread is legendary. She used to pass steaming baked potatoes out with her bare hands and wash dishes in scalding water without gloves. She called me "Lady Jane" when I was in trouble, and "honey" when I wasn't. We spent a Christmas together in Aruba. She would tell me not to sit on her davenport in my dirty dungarees. She wore starched blouses and slacks in the winter, and pressed t-shirts and khaki shorts in the summer, with her hair always combed, lipstick fresh, and jewelry well-placed. She passed her middle name to me. She's been gone for a long, long time. In her place is a stranger who doesn't know me, or anyone for that matter. She can't speak. She wears a diaper. She's fed by an aide. The staff at the nursing home is wonderful, and they take extremely good care of her, but she's really just an elderly infant in a wheelchair, and I'm a useless excuse for a granddaughter. My Aunt Judy was right; it is the cruelest disease.

Title Twenty Six: Life Class by Pat Barker

2009-04-03T18:47:00.002-04:00

No one does WWI fiction better than Pat Barker. Her Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road) is probably the definitive example of how to create fiction about a war that almost no one ever thinks about. It's true; we remember the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (or War of Northern Aggression, depending on your side of the Mason-Dixon line), WWII, and Vietnam. How often do you think of that little skirmish in the second decade of the twentieth century? America didn't really get involved until the end was near, so it doesn't have the same impact in our history as it does in those of England, Canada, and France, to name a few.

In Life Class, Paul and Elinor meet as art students at the Slade School of Art and have an attraction to one another, but are involved with other people. The first part of the novel is full of blather about art and "the work" and coffee houses and bars and sexual tension, but it's really just filler for the war that is already beginning to cast a shadow on the fringes of student life. As Paul and Elinor turn towards each other, the fighting begins in earnest and Paul, ineligible for service due to problems with his lungs after an illness, volunteers with the Belgian Red Cross. This is where Barker finds her familiar and formidable rhythm, as she describes the conditions of the men, the reports of battle, and the havoc that war wreaks on the mind. Regeneration dealt with the phenomenon of "shell shock" and the beginning stages of its validity as a clinical diagnosis at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland; that novel is based in large part on real events and people (including the famed poet Wilfred Owen, who died only days before the armistice). Although Life Class is completely fictional, there are parts of it that are achingly real and heartwrenching. Barker uses words like the finest strokes of a paintbrush to create the image of a soldier's gangrenous pelvic wound; it's revolting but stunning at the same time. She captures the struggle between the war and home fronts, both turned mad, in Paul and Elinor's letters to each other. Moreover, she uses the concept of art as a medium for what we cannot say to perfection - it's only in Belgium that Paul feels that he can really put himself into his work, although his subject matter is clearly disturbing - it is the only way that Paul can rid himself of the horror of the broken and torn human beings around him. His work, which was never very good at school, is transformed into something more real and honest. It only took the most terrifying circumstances to make it possible.

That said, the story ends rather weakly, with an injured but recovering Paul and a drifting Elinor stumbling towards the end of the love affair that they consummated over a few days while the latter came to visit in the early days of the war. Neither of the main characters could be called likeable, and I didn't really care what happened to them. I think that the real strength of the book rests in the war, but unfortunately the book is meant to encompass more than that and it falls rather flat.

Title Twenty Five: Intern: A Doctor's Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar

2009-03-29T17:12:00.006-04:00

Why do I read so many memoirs? Is it because I'm so bored with my own life? Do I just have a voyeuristic tendency to dig into the lives of others? I don't know, but since I bought another one today, I'm just going to admit my powerlessness over the memoir and give it up to a higher power.

In the case of Intern, Dr. Sandeep Jauhar's account of his internship and residency in a New York hospital, I was drawn because I have a mild obsession with medicine. I was supposed to be a doctor when I grew up. Throughout my entire childhood I was fascinated by the human body and the way it works. Every year, while making my Christmas list from the Sears Wish Book (do y'all remember the Wish Book?) I asked for the anatomical model with the removable organs; I never got it. Maybe I should tell my mother that's the reason I never followed through. The model would have made all the difference! Anyway, when I got to high school and it was time to pick a college and a major, I set my sights on the Physican Assistant program at a local university and applied to a couple of premed programs for backup. I got into the highly competitive PA program (one of only 40 accepted, whoot!) and promptly failed out after one year, not because I wasn't any good at it, but because I was 17 years old and no one in their right minds sends a 17 year old off to live in a dorm and expects her to actually, I don't know, go to class instead of spending her nights doing beer bongs and hanging out with fraternity boys. I spent the next couple of years at community college, acing my way through biology, anatomy and physiology, microbiology and medical terminology courses, but then I got lazy and bored and said, "Fuck it, I want to get an English degree instead." Don't think that I don't kick my own ass for that at least three times a week.

Anyway. Jauhar, the youngest son of Indian immigrants (his family came to the United States when he was a small child) took a circuitous route to medicine - he originally earned his Ph.D. in physics at Berkeley. His older brother Rajiv followed the family dream into a career in cardiology, and after a few years screwing around with quantum dots, whatever they are - physics were not a requirement for my PA program so I took anatomy and physiology in high school instead, and dissected a cat - Jauhar decides that he needs to do something meaningful with his life. A great part of his decision to go to medical school is tinged with jealousy of his brother and the respect and praise that Rajiv receives from their parents, who see Sandeep's little foray into academia as foolish and immature. After fast-tracking through Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, Jauhar packs up and heads out to New York Hospital to begin the three years of boot camp known as medical residency.

Jauhar does a very good job of describing his feelings of inadequacy, fear, and self-doubt as he is plunged into a reality for which no amount of reading and studying can prepare a person. Surrounded by the sick and dying, he sometimes wonders if doctors do more harm than good. He exposes the God complexes of the attendings, the futility of treating patients who seem to fight the men and women charged with treating them at every turn, and the overwhelming exhaustion of trying to be in several places at once without really knowing what he's doing in any of them. It's an interesting take on a place that is a mystery to many; unless either you or a family member has spent any length of time in a hospital (I myself went through it last summer when my grandmother was hospitalized for several weeks following an intracranial hemhorrage, or brain bleed) most of us have vague notions regarding how hospitals and doctors function, based mainly on shows like "ER," "House" or "Grey's Anatomy." Jauhar fleshes out the experience from the other side, showing what it's like to be the person responsible for those bodies in the beds, hooked up to wires and tubes and machines.

At times the narrative is bogged down by too much backstory; my real interest was in the patients and the medicine. In the course of his first year, his internship, Jauhar meets a fellow medical student who would become his wife less than a year later and does a mostly seamless job of integrating that subplot. He also hammers again and again at his sense of inadequacy next to his older brother, a cardiologist in the same hospital, and at times it gets tiring. We get it, your brother is a golden boy and you're in his shadow. He also explores the ethics involved in treatment, and in trying to find the line between helping a patient and causing more damage. It's an important point, but I just don't know if Jauhar has a hard time expressing his feelings on the subject or if, writing this book ten years later, his memories and feelings have blurred and merged in the ensuing decade, because those passages can be somewhat unwieldy and confusing. Granted, that could also be my interpretation of something that is really more of a moral issue and colored by my personal opinions and experiences.

Overall, I found Intern to be an enjoyable and informative read. Most people look at doctors and think, "Well, they must know what they're doing; we let them poke needles in our arms and shine lights in our eyes and stick us in radioactive machines and cut open our chests." The truth is that a white coat doesn't make you God; it just means you have a really good aptitude for memorization. Some doctors take that knowledge and try to do good, while others use it to lord over other people and look for glory. Jauhar does a standout job of giving civilians a peek behind the curtain and showing his readers that there is no great and powerful Oz; it's just a man who knows more than you do about something.

Title Twenty Four: Angels by Marian Keyes

2009-03-28T13:37:00.003-04:00

I've already noted my love for Keyes on this here blog, but somehow I managed to miss Angels, which is strange, because Lord knows I love me some of those crazy Walsh sisters. Angels is Maggie's story, and it takes place after Rachel's Holiday and before Anybody Out There? for those of you playing along at home.

Maggie is married to Garv, her first boyfriend, and they have a pretty decent life - he's an actuary, she works in entertainment law, and they have a house in Dublin. Maggie's the good Walsh girl who's never let her parents down, which makes it quite a shock when her marriage ends and her job is terminated in the span of 24 hours. After fleeing to Casa Walsh and spending several days in its bedlam trying to figure out what to do next, Maggie decides to get on a plane and head to Los Angeles to visit her best friend Emily, who is trying to make it as a screenwriter. Over the course of a month, Maggie is submerged in the sterotypical L.A. culture - everyone drives everywhere, all of the people are beautiful, the drinks are complicated, the waitstaff are out-of-work actors/models/writers, and each day is spent waiting for an agent to call. In the meantime, Maggie tries to be supportive of Emily, who is desperately trying to sell her latest screenplay (if it doesn't happen, she'll have to move back to Dublin in disgrace because her money is gone) and spends her days at the beach and her nights drinking at hotspots, trying to understand how she ended up several time zones away from her old life. There are a couple of romantic interests (male and female - Maggie tries hard to shed her good girl image), funny haircuts, and amusing shopping expeditions as well, but under the surface Keyes does what she does best: she exposes the story, layer by layer, so that the reader figures out how Maggie got to this point at the same time that Maggie does.

It's not fair to give away the answers because it would take away from the reading experience. I will say that Keyes shifts so smoothly from the present-time action of the book and Maggie's flashbacks that it gives the novel a very organic and realistic feel while avoiding being jarring or confusing. The further you read, the more pieces click into place, and that's why I love reading Keyes' books so much, whether they're about the Walsh sisters or not. Her stories are both light and serious, making you think but at the same time keeping a steady flow of action, priceless characters (including, of course, the awe-inspiring Mammy Walsh), and enjoyable dialogue coming. Now if she would just write Helen's story...

Title Twenty Three: The Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

2009-03-28T11:59:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the books of my youth, and I root around in the bookcases for Anne Shirley or Trixie Belden. A week or so back I found myself perusing the shelves, looking for a little comfort read, and my eyes kept going back to my nifty Little House boxed set. I said, "Why not?" and pulled out Little House in the Big Woods, intending to while away a couple of hours with the Ingalls family during their time in a log cabin in Wisconsin. Next thing I knew, I was up to The Long Winter on the prairies of North Dakota, and I just couldn't stop myself. It took me three days to read through the eight book series, which begins with Laura "Half-Pint" Ingalls as a little girl and ends in her fourth year of marriage to Almanzo Wilder.

The Little House books are sweet, quick, and reminiscent of a time and place when church socials, county fairs, and buggy rides were the excitement of the day. Settlers battled the elements, Indians, and the government as they strove to carve out their place in the history of the American Dream. While I was breezing through the series, I thought of my experience with Revolutionary Road a couple of weeks before, and how I proclaimed that the American Dream was a ghost during the 1950s, long since dead of ennui. It was interesting to be reminded that at one point in time that idea of manifest destiny was very much alive and well in our country. I'm not someone who would like to return to that time; I enjoy indoor plumbing and voting rights and my car and supermarkets and the interwebs far too much to want to live on a farm and go to town in a wagon on Sundays while deferring to my husband and keeping an eye out for blizzards, pests, and Indian raiding parties - there is a certain note of racism throughout the books that I didn't recognize as a child, most notably with regards to Ma Ingalls' view that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." However, I've always believed that every little girl should have a set of Ingalls Wilder's books and I treasure the many hours that I spent with them in my younger years.

Say goodnight, not goodbye.

2009-03-26T19:59:00.007-04:00

On a blog about books, I'd like to tell you a story.

Once, there was a fierce warrior queen. She was a slayer of zombies, a mother, a wife, a reader, and a friend. Her wit, humor, strength and courage as she battled cancer with a sword in one hand and a book in the other were not to be underestimated, and her battle was heroic. She laughed in the face of Doom and spit in the eye of Pessimism while balancing her laptop on her knee and turning another page with her finger. She loved her family and supported her friends and made the world a better and smaller place with her fire and words, and she lived, lived, lived.

One day, at long last and yet far, far too soon, the sword grew too heavy and it was time for her to lay it down. She will be remembered in countless hearts and minds for decades to come, and her name is written in the stars. She didn't lose her battle. She won the war.

Godspeed, Alabamapink. Thank you for being my friend.

Still reading, still lazy

2009-03-24T19:46:00.002-04:00

I've got three books to write about but with all of the goings-on in regards to starting a new job, I won't be doing that for a few more days. I haven't bowed out of the challenge; I'm going to surprise you with a quickness. Just you wait.

Title Twenty Two: Promises in Death by J.D. Robb

2009-03-16T02:18:00.004-04:00

For those of you who aren't Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb whores, like me, I'll let you in on a little secret: the authors are one and the same. Roberts began this series about NYPSD supercop Eve Dallas about fifteen years ago, and Promises is #28 in the series, which speaks to both the prolific writing of Roberts (the woman churns out at least two Robb novels, a standalone, and usually a trilogy each year; this isn't counting her contributions to anthologies under both names) and the devotional following that the ID series has attracted and sustained. If you're not a fan and you've never heard of Lieutenant Eve Dallas, Cop Central, an AutoChef, the Urban Wars, a police-issue stunner, or the god of all men (and Dallas' husband) Roarke, I'll try to give you a little background.

The series starts in 2058 with Naked in Death, where Dallas and multibillionaire Roarke meet in her investigation into the death of a young woman from a prominent family; the victim has been murdered with a handgun, something that has been banned for decades. Eve solves the case and gets the guy, although she really doesn't want the latter at first. She's a loner, a product of the foster care system, and the NYPSD's supreme bitch cop (and superstar homicide detective) and Roarke, with his shiny piles of money and ownership of approximately 50-60% of the known universe, is the last things she wants in life. Of course, they fall in love, and over the course of the next couple books, they get married, and become every woman's dream. Throughout the course of the series, Dallas gets a life crowded with friends, more fame and notoriety than she's comfortable with - do NOT call her Mrs. Roarke - and takes out the baddest of the baddies, book by book. If you're rolling your eyes and groaning, that's okay, but the In Deaths are my crack and I'm gonna love 'em until I die. How can I resist an AutoChef, a machine that acts as a sort of insta-cooker and lets your order up whatever you want whenever you want it? In the mood for chicken parm? Press a button and it's yours. You get the idea. There are also pocket 'links in place of cell phones - actually, it looks like Roberts/Robb was ahead of her time because a link really resembles what the iPhone or CrackBerry will be in a few years - cars with vertical lift, off-planet travel to intergalactic resorts like Vegas II, universal healthcare complete with cancer vaccines and organ replacements that put the average lifespan at around 120-150 years, and all kinds of other badass gadgets and gizmos. The latest installment takes place in the spring of 2060, because Dallas has been a busy lady in two years and 28 full books. But enough background, fools.

Promises hits close to home for fans; a fellow cop, Detective Amaryllis Coltraine, has been found murdered in her apartment building by her own weapon. Not only is Coltraine a cop, but she's also the lover of fan favorite Chief Medical Examiner Morris, a cool dead doctor who has become one of Dallas' closest friends. In addition, it looks like the baddie who set the whole thing up is an old enemy of both Dallas and Roarke, currently serving time in a concrete cage off-planet, where the worst of the worst live out their miserable lives, the death penalty having been abolished as well. The overall tone of the novel is one of sadness and grief, because if you've been with these characters as long as I have, you can't help but ache for Morris and his loss, an ache that Dallas feels keenly when faced with something that she can't kick the shit out of. Eventually she solves the puzzle, with the help of her delicious husband, trusty partner Peabody, and the rest of the cast of characters who have wormed their ways into her life and heart, but there isn't really a resolution here because the grief will go on.

Anyway, if this kind of thing isn't your cup of tea or whatever, just skip the review and skip the series. However if you, like me, don't mind a little bit of mind crack and you haven't had the chance to check out Robb's cult-forming series, it might just be worth a shot. And you know you totally want an AutoChef.

Title Twenty One: Band Geek by Dustin Rowles

2009-03-15T14:18:00.003-04:00

Band Geek is actually an unpublished manuscript by my friend Dustin Rowles up there, but after some debate I decided to include it in the Cannonball because I read it, so it counts. Normally, the books I review are published and on shelves at Target and Borders and wherever books are sold, so I consider them open game since any one of the four people who may or may not read this on a random basis can go and pick up the book in question. This is a little different, since DR's memoir is still a work in progress (albeit a very fine work, which in my opinion just needs a little fine tuning in spots) and not available to the general public. At any rate, I checked with the main guy after reading it a few weeks ago, and he gave me the go-ahead to do the review, so here it is. My fervent, sincere hope is that it finds its way onto the shelves of bookstores everywhere at some point in the near future and that you all can enjoy it, because it is brilliant.

One of the things that I loved about this high school coming-of-age tale was not so much how Dustin grew, as a person, throughout the course of it, but that I could follow how, as he got older and more mature, the weight of his life grew with him. That's how life actually happens, though you don't see it at the time. It's easy to look back at tenth grade and think, really, those were my priorities? Belonging to a certain social set and having a boyfriend and wearing the right jeans? Did I really not know that life was so much bigger than that? The truth is, those WERE everyone's priorities then. At thirty I can look back and scoff at my superficiality but at fifteen that was the whole of my life; that was all that there was. I was defined by those things. It's intriguing and true to see the author's perspective open up little by little as he realized that there was more to life than that, the most major decision being the one to get himself the hell out of Benton and DO something. It was kind of like starting at the narrow end of a funnel and moving towards the mouth, with Dustin's worldview gradually widening as the months and years pass.

An integral part of Dustin's story is his father, a single parent working two jobs and trying to raise two boys on his own, just doing the best he can and realizing that it's not always enough. What's gifted about the scenes with his dad is that Dustin doesn't build him up to be more than he was, but doesn't tear him down either. He just shows the man for who he was, and that's a rare talent. Dustin's younger brother, a high school dropout with a drug habit whose life is rapidly going nowhere, plays a smaller but also vital role when it comes to the juxtaposition of the life that Dustin has and the life that he realizes he needs to live. Those of us who know Dustin know that he gets the happy ending, but that's not what the book is about. It's about the survival; it's about waking up every day not knowing if you're going to be ignored by your peers or mocked for your shoes, about wondering if you're going to die a virgin, about trying to imagine something bigger than you and getting a little nauseated because you don't even know who you are yet. The entire thing is laced with a wit and humor that keeps it from being too painful, and I admit to the fact that there were times I was laughing so hard that I had to put my head down to catch my breath. By the same token, there were passages that hit me so profoundly I found myself tearing up. The balance is admirable and strong and honest. It's beautiful, and I loved it, and I'm not just saying that because the author is a pal. I'm saying it because it's so very, very true.

Cheers, DR.

Title Twenty: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

2009-03-07T13:13:00.005-05:00

I haven't seen the film yet, and I wanted to read the book before I did. Call me a snob, but I believe that no movie is ever better than the book (with the notable exception of Atonement), so I wanted to read the novel in order to see what the fuss was about.

It's difficult for me to be unable to pin down whether I like a book or not. Normally, once I turn the last page, I have a very definite opinion. At the end of Revolutionary Road, however, I found myself ambivalent. The only way I can explain that is that, while I think the story was well-told, I absolutely loathed the characters. I've rarely met a more unsympathetic set of protagonists than April and Frank Wheeler. Out of the two, I gave April a bit more of the benefit of the doubt, but Frank Wheeler is a pompous, vain, self-centered ass and if I'd ever found myself with the misfortune of being married to his preening, holier-than-thou self it would be a miracle if I didn't go at him with a frying pan one evening.

The Wheelers live the quintessential 1950s American Dream - they have a charming house in a Connecticut suburb, two children (a boy and a girl, of course), Frank commutes to an office job in Manhattan each day, and they drink their way through everything. Booze is as much a main character as the Wheelers themselves and features more prominently than the children. Of course, the Wheelers hate their boring suburban lifestyle, a point with which I agree. I would rather jam a bamboo skewer into my eye than live in the Wheelers' neighborhood, with its subdivisions and gardens and community theater attempts. I'm not a snob; I just prefer the city and enjoy the fact that I can walk around the corner to get my milk and bread instead of driving ten miles on a highway. If you like the suburbs, or rural areas, rock on. Everyone should do what makes them happy. The Wheelers, however, aren't doing what makes them happy, and so the reader has to suffer through their ennui and complaints, page by page. April and Frank met and married in New York City, but had to move when their family became too large for dingy flats in the city. Frank has put in years in the Sales Promotion department at Knox Business Machines, the very same company that employed his father, because he didn't know what else to do with his life when his wife found herself pregnant not long after their marriage. He languishes in this private hell but at no time does he do anything about it. He prefers to complain and dissemble, while doing essentially nothing at work, and comes home to a wife who is no happier than he is at finding herself locked into suburbia. April alternates between the sterotypical cold shrew and the fawning, doting wife, both of which made me slightly nauseated and contributed to my dislike for the pair. They virtually ignore their children and see fit to associate with only one couple from the neighborhood, whom they deign to be not so far beneath them as other people.

One day April comes up with the idea for the family to move to Europe, where she can support the family as a secretary for one of the American embassies and Frank can take the time to "find himself." They're so above it all that they don't consider the ramifications for their children, their friends, Frank's job, or anything else. The immaturity and selfishness are slightly shocking, and if the author means for the reader to feel sympathy for the Wheelers' plight of having to settle for "ordinary," he went off the rails with this one. Before the grand plan can come to fruition, April falls pregnant once again and the rest of the novel lurches toward a sad ending that gives the situation no real perspective. I can't even call it tragic, because I dislike the Wheelers too much to feel any real upset.

Maybe I'm just tired of this backlash against the nostalgia so long held for the "Greatest Generation." No, things weren't perfect back then. The housewives drank and popped pills and made disgusting Jello molds, and the men wore suits and commuted to stale office jobs in the city and paid more attention to the paper, the ballgame, and their evening cocktails than to their families. The kids rode bikes and had paper routes and played with Barbies and then grew up to burn their bras or die in the jungles of Vietnam. We've known for at least a decade and a half that the "American Dream" was just that; it was a myth, a mirage, an illusion. Maybe Revolutionary Road would have had a fresher feel if I'd read it ten or fifteen years ago, but now it's just a stale retread of books that I've read before. I haven't decided yet whether or not to see the film, but if DiCaprio's Frank is anything like the character in the novel, I'll probably end up turning it off.

(If you still think you might like to give this one a try, I recommend taking a drink every time Frank Wheeler checks out his reflection in a mirror, window, door, or spoon. You'll be hammered halfway through. Drinking games are fun!)

Title Nineteen: Beautiful Boy by David Sheff

2009-02-17T21:49:00.002-05:00

Looking back over this here blog, I see that I've been on a memoir kick, which might help explain why I've not been very interested in reading over the last few weeks. It's not that the books I've read aren't well done; in fact, it's the opposite. Being pulled into something like Manic or Beautiful Boy is wearying because, when done well, a memoir puts you in the place of the author, and you relive all of the pain, sadness, and horror with her or him.

Beautiful Boy is writer David Sheff's account of his son Nic's transformation from a sweet, intelligent and outgoing child into a lying, cheating, stealing meth addict. Sheff starts where a good memoirist should, at the beginning, with Nic's birth. He is detailed and unsparing, telling of the hazy happiness of Nic's early years and then the pain of his divorce from Nic's mother, who moves from San Francisco to Los Angeles, setting Nic up for a custody arrangement that pulls him between the two places on a consistent basis. The story threads its way through Sheff's remarriage and the births of his two younger children, Jasper and Daisy, and weaves in and out of Nic's formative years and his seemingly bright childhood. Nic Sheff was smart, athletic, and creative, and when David discovers marijuana in his preteen son's backpack, he doesn't quite know how to handle it. He's done all of the things the experts tell parents to do, and spoken openly with Nic about his own drug use and the dangers of doing drugs. He takes Nic's word that he only tried it once and didn't like it, and doesn't see that under the surface of this ideal high schooler, with his stellar grades and likeable personality, is a young man experimenting with alcohol and harder drugs, until the day that Nic first disappears and then calls, begging to be picked up in an alley, where he confesses that he's been using meth. David had his own experience with the drug once, in college, and is horrified. He begins a journey to find as much information and help for his son possible while Nic goes down a horrific road of abuse, rehab, and relapse.

Beautiful Boy is different from a lot of drug memoirs in its broad scope. It doesn't only focus on the addict, but also on the friends and family around him, and Sheff also incorporates a lot of the research that he did while trying to help his son and provides an impressive education on treatment options, the pitiful lack of effective substance abuse treatment care available - it seems that rehab is as much of a business as Big Pharma, and just as dependent on return customers - and the physiology of drug abuse, particularly with regards to brain chemistry and meth. According to the many experts that David Sheff consults over the years, meth is the single most dangerous drug available with regards to what it does to the user's brain structure; meth, more than cocaine or heroin or any other street drug, actually destroys the brain tissue and turns it to mush. The damage is usually permanent and makes meth addiction the most lethal substance abuse issue today. What makes this book so gripping is that it's written by a father who doesn't know how to help his son, but can't let go of him either; there are snatches of song lyrics and poems intertwined with vignettes and memories of Nic before the addiction. Nic is such a likeable and engaging person when he isn't on drugs that you can't help but root for him, and it's crushing each time he relapses. The Sheffs, and, by proxy, the readers, walk on eggshells, waiting for the next wave of bad news, wondering where their beautiful boy has gone and if he's ever coming back.

If you have an ounce of empathy, you can't help but ache for this family. They never thought that it would happen to them; Nic was raised with love and good schools and supportive parents and adoring siblings. At times helplessness and despair radiate off the page, and at one point I realized that I was holding my breath as I was reading. It's a good book, but it's draining because Sheff's writing draws you in and invites you to pull up a chair and watch while a family falls apart. In other words, it does its job. The question you have to ask yourself, as a reader, is whether or not you can handle it.

Title Eighteen: He's Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo

2009-02-11T23:39:00.000-05:00

Relax, fools. I didn't pay for this nonsense, nor did I borrow it from a library, friend, or family member. The truth is that my cousin bought it back when it came out when it was all the rage (and she was dating really horrific losers) and somehow managed to sneak it into one of my many bookshelves when she moved in with the guy who is now her husband. Sure, cuz, way to pass off your literary embarrassments on the girl who has so many freaking books she wouldn't notice if a tiny little family took up residence among her collection.

Anyway, when all the hoopla surrounding the movie came out, I thought to myself, "Self, I have seen that book in this house. Why have I seen that book in this house?" When I discovered the answer (see above paragraph), I climbed back into my mind and said, "You know what would be funny? If you actually read this turd. You need a good laugh."

Let me just say, wow. Women bought this? And formed groups around it? And made it their Bible - kind of the New Testament to The Rules' Old Testament? Look, it's pretty basic. If the dude: is married; doesn't return phone calls; disappears into thin air; only calls you when drunk; won't introduce you to his friends; only calls you for sex; or wants to be your boyfriend but won't have sex with you, you don't need a book by a douchenozzle to tell you that. You just need either common sense or a really honest friend and a bottle of wine.

I would recommend this book for a laugh, but it's not even worth that. Just do a Mad Libs or something. It would be time much better spent.

Side note: At the end there is a "glossary" that is supposed to help you figure out what a word is supposed to mean and what it really does mean; for example, "I'm not ready" should mean "I can't find my pants," but instead means "I'm just not that into you." I had to laugh at the entry that went like this: "Call me." "Should mean: I just dropped my cell phone in the ocean and lost your number." "Does mean: I'm just not that into you." The reason I thought it was funny is because my ex-boyfriend actually did drop his phone into the bay while fishing a couple of summers ago and I thought he would have a stroke, but since we were together at the time, and had been for years, I didn't have to worry that he had lost my number because it was in his head. Besides, we lived together, so there really wasn't any excuse not to call. (The point is that I'm trying to pad this damn review because it sucks.)

Title Seventeen: Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell

2009-02-04T09:37:00.000-05:00

You know what? This book was a piece of horse shite. It doesn't even deserve a review but some innocent trees died just so that it could be printed, and then I wasted valuable moments of my life reading it when I could have been doing something else, like scrubbing my toilet or pondering Barack Obama's economic stimulus package or wondering why I can't rock short hair like Jayne and Rachel Maddow or re-watching the heartbreaking conclusion to the second series of Doctor Who and crying my eyes out over Rose standing on the beach with mascara running down her cheeks while she chokes out "I...I love you" and the Doctor looks back at her with all this longing in his holographic eyes and manages a "Quite right, too" and SWEET CRACKER SANDWICH THIS BOOK WAS HORRIFIC.

Kay Scarpetta was the best forensic medical examiner in the history of the world but now she's not but they don't say why, and her weird niece Lucy is some law enforcement genius who left the government and runs a private firm and kills bad guys and flies a helicopter, and some fat detective named Marino loves Scarpetta but he's fat and alcoholic and has a peptic ulcer, I think, and Scarpetta never thought of him that way anyway so he just keeps eating and drinking and being gross. Kay's ex-lover Benton is dead BUT HE REALLY ISN'T he's just undercover and she doesn't know it and this crazy werewolf man (yes, seriously, they call him Loup Garoux because he has hair all over his body and is a deformed freak with pointy baby teeth and no peen) is on death row in Texas because he tried to kill Scarpetta many books ago, and she gets all wrapped up in his case again for reasons that are never made clear. Meanwhile, Wolfman Freakypants has a really good-looking twin brother who is also a murderer and kills women in Louisiana and feeds them to alligators with the help of his twisted fuck of a fatass lover Bev. They live in a bayou shack. Scarpetta gets tied into all of this because she gives a seminar at the beginning of the book and one of the students is from the area where WolfyFace's brother is hacking the wimmens and that student gives her a blow fly in a jar. (SERIOUSLY.) The only other time that blow flies come up is when Lucy stages a suicide and tries to use the buggers (see what I did there?) to throw off time of death, but it ultimately doesn't work and no one mentions blow flies again for the rest of this pointless tripe. At the end the Wolfman escapes from Death Row and is in the wind, his brother and brother's ladyfriend get shot by Lucy, and Scarpetta meets up with Benton and realizes he's not dead, and sits down on some stairs to try to take it in. The end.

Really. It ends right there. No postscript, nothing. Just, "Hey, you're dead." "No, I'm not. I had to fake my death to keep you safe." "You're a bastard." Sits down. Blank pages follow. I have questions, dammit! Where's NoPeenWolf? Where did the rest of your crew go? Why do people keep buying Cornwell's books? Why is Cornwell even allowed to write books? Is this the worst book I've ever read? When will the stimulus package pass, and what will be included? Do I have enough toilet bowl cleaner? Why do I still cry at an episode of a cheesy sci-fi show that I have seen over a dozen times? Am I really still wasting time on this review? Not anymore, I'm not.

Title Sixteen: The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks

2009-02-02T03:05:00.000-05:00

For Civil War buffs like me, Robert Hicks has created a well-told tale of the Battle of Franklin. In November 1864, the Union and Confederate forces met on the outskirts of this nondescript Tennessee town and clashed in a bloody battle that left 9,200 men dead and had far-reaching ramifications for not only the town's residents but the soldiers on both sides. Carrie McGavock, a grieving mother of three whose husband and two surviving children mean little to her as she inhabits a ghost world where her dead children still live, laugh, and play, finds her home, Carnton, rudely turned into a field hospital for the Confederate wounded. This snaps Carrie back to a reality she never wanted to see again and transforms her from a shadow woman into an efficient nurse, house mistress, and sparks a love between this refined gentlewoman and a crude Cracker soldier named Zachariah Cashwell, with whom Carrie spends hours, not caring what anyone may think - not her husband, John, her slave, Mariah, nor Mariah's son Theopolis. Carrie tends to the dead and dying, writing to their families and hoping against hope that Zachariah will not be taken from her too, but it is not meant to be when he is pronounced fit enough to be carried off by the Union army to a prison camp and Mariah once again loses a piece of herself. However, this time she is stronger and begins to fight for what she believes in, refusing to accept that the dead men buried in her fields can be forgotten.

Other characters weave in and out of the narrative, which takes the form of journal entries or perspectives from Union soldiers and Cashwell himself, as well as third-person accounts of John McGavock and Mariah's forays into the ravaged town of Franklin. Franklin itself becomes a symbol of the defeated South itself, from burned buildings and destroyed roads to the homes and shops of free issue slaves. Cashwell escapes his prison and goes to work for a time on the railroads, but something pulls him inexorably back towards Franklin, Carnton, and Carrie. The Widow of the South is a love story in a similar vein as Gone with the Wind, but the two could not be more different. The two novels share only the descriptions of the hardship of the "War Between the States," the loss of so many brave men who died for nothing, the poverty and hunger of the aftermath, and the jarring difference between life before and after the war. Carrie and Zachariah's love is not epic or sweeping, like that of Scarlett and Rhett; it is more basic, more earthy, and more real.*

Towards the end of the novel, the McGavocks realize that a wealthy neighbor who owns most of their land (John having sold it off, piece by piece over the years to finance, at first, his family's lifestyle and later, his incessant drinking, the only activity which gives him solace) has decided to dig up the graves of the boys who died on the McGavock property - on the carpets, the floors, the porch, in the yard, and whose amputated limbs were dumped like so much chattel out of the kitchen windows and doors during cruel field operations. This neighbor hates the Confederacy because his only son left to fight for the Cause and was killed instantly on the Franklin battlefield. Carrie musters every ounce of rage, horror, and deviousness in her heart and mind and blackmails old Mr. Baylor into leaving the ground undisturbed. It is then that Carrie McGavock undertakes the greatest project of her life: turning those fields into one of the largest, if not the largest, Confederate cemetery in existence, erecting a marker at each grave and keeping a detailed log of each soldier in a book that never leaves her side as she makes her daily rounds, dressed in old, neatly-mended black, accompanied by the faithful (and psychically gifted) Mariah. Carrie continues these rounds into her old, widowed age, and the novel is nicely bookended by scenes of her, going about her caretaker's business, in 1894, when a mysterious man returns to Carnton. If you've read this far, you already know that Zachariah Cashwell, suffering from consumption, has come back to his home - which is both Carrie and Carnton - to die.

What struck me most, besides the honesty and keen attention to detail of Hicks' novel, was the fact that Carrie McGavock was a real person and Hicks leaves no stone unturned in his research. It's a beautiful, haunting, and excellently-written book that I strongly recommend to anyone with a love of history, Americana, true patriotism, human compassion, and the strength of the human spirit.

*GwtW remains my favorite novel to this day.