seventeen/fifty-two

I am running out of things to say about books. Wow, that's bad. I just was not built for book reviews, and I think these have gotten longer than I meant them to when I started to do little reviewlets.

Okay. Book the seventeenth. Good Grief by Lolly Winston.

Sophie's husband, Ethan, died of cancer. (Hodgkin's, another fun disease to add to my List for Hypochondriacs.) She is struggling through depression and through all the other things losing the person you were closest to in all the world will do to you.

I expected it to be hideously chicklit-y, but it was actually really good. A keeper. Funny and sad and filled with characters I could actually sympathize with and like.

sixteen/fifty-two

Oh, man. I feel bad about this one, because I've read Zoe Trope's LiveJournal every now and then, and she seems like a pretty cool person.

So I read Please Don't Kill the Freshman. It's all angsty and full of veiled meanings and deep imagery and I liked it for the first 50 pages or so. But then I should have taken a break.

It's the story of Zoe's (it's a pseudonym, in case you didn't know) freshman and sophomore years in high school. She has tons of male friends, mostly gay, she falls in love with a girl who decides to be a boi, she deals with the perils of publishing after her chapbook (also named PDKTF) is successful.

The problem I had with it was getting bored with the prose. If I had taken it section by section, broken it up into four days' worth of reading instead of one, it would have been okay, I think. But I read it too fast, and it lost its charm. For me, personally, anyway -- I know there are people who would devour this in one sitting and want more more more.

I would have loved this book when I was seventeen.

fifteen/fifty-two

Ach, I've been putting off reviewing #15 and #16.

The first one, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, was good, actually. The only thing that bothered me was the way he used the word "rape" in describing . . . uh, stealing food or something, I don't remember exactly what it was. Sorry. I read it about a week ago. Obviously it bothered me enough that the irritation stuck with me, though. I had no problem with his constant swearing throughout the book, it seemed real to me and not just thrown in there.

As for the book's purpose, it's about how Bourdain fell in love with food, started working with it, screwed his life up with drugs, got it back together, and became a pretty damn good chef. Interesting.

I'd been wanting to read this one for about a year now; I don't know if it was worth all that yearning, but it was good for what it was.

tic tic tic

I keep forgetting to mention this: one of the things I noticed about The Virgin's Lover that really annoyed me was the repeated use of certain adverbs. Mostly having to do with speaking. It would be okay if it was throughout the book, probly not even noticeable, but these were, like, within a page of each other.

I noticed it once at the beginning, although I can't remember what the particular adverb was; but I do know that it was Amy and Robert Dudley. Then it was obvious again about two-thirds of the way through the book, when one of the characters' wife says something "shrewdly," then on the next page, that character also says something "shrewdly."

Know what I mean? I thought it was odd that nobody had caught that in the editing stage. Maybe it's only annoying to me, maybe I'm just too persnickety.

fourteen/fifty-two

I kind of liked Haven Kimmel's Something Rising (Light and Swift) and I kind of didn't. I liked the story, for the most part -- Cassie is a pool player (a really good one), and this is her coming-of-age story.

Honestly, half of the characters seemed like assholes to me. There were large chunks of the book where it seemed like Kimmel was being obscure and dense just to make her writing seem more artsy, although I'm sure that's just my own perception of it. I mean, I get that Belle and Laura (Cassie's sister and mom, respectively) are on a different plane and their brains work strangely, and I could get where their "unique" perspectives were coming from most of the time, but sometimes it felt like a bunch of words were thrown together prettily and chewily regardless of their sense-making. Aside from that, I enjoyed Kimmel's writing.

I appreciated that Cassie's coming-of-age tale was not focused on finding a man; I'm always wary of female coa stories because the boyfriend hunt usually plays a fairly major role, and it gets old after a while.

It was good enough to talk me into trying another of Kimmel's books, just to give her a fair shake, but by the end of this one I was only reading out of a feeling of duty.

thirteen/fifty-two

Now, when I said I was "enjoying" A Million Little Pieces, I didn't mean that in a frolicky springtime day way. James Frey's story of recovery (from addiction to all sorts of nasty stuff) is very, very hard to read at times. He is quite blunt about all the gross stuff that happens when you abuse your body as much as he did. Also, his writing style (as I mentioned below) is difficult to get into at first. It seemed pretentious and overly precious and annoying for the first few chapters, and it distracted me from the story (perhaps a good thing?) for a while. It starts to become kind of rhythmic after a while, though, and I think it works well with the story. (I've read somewhere [it's mentioned in the linked article above, too] that he wanted the writing to draw readers in, to help them feel what it's like to be addicted themselves, and I think it accomplishes that.)

I won't get into the whole AA good/bad debate, because I have no deep knowledge of it myself.

All in all, a good book, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's "the War and Peace of addiction," as Pat Conroy's back cover blurb claims, but it was good. Didn't glorify addiction, didn't mince words. Also, the design of the copy I have (softcover) is very nice.

a warning

I'm in the middle of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. Have you read it yet? If you have, you probably know where I'm going here.

EVERY SINGLE TIME I've tried to write something today, I've written it, looked at it, and realized I've written it like I'm trying to be James Frey. Then I've rewritten it, because I'm not up in here writing about being an addict. (I just had to delete the capital "A" from "Addict" -- see what I mean?)

If you haven't read the book, here's a parody of Frey's writing style in AMLP.

(For the record, I'm enjoying the book a lot more than I thought I would.)

(link via TrudyJ on Chicklit's forums)

twelve/fifty-two

When Did You Stop Loving Me by Veronica Chambers, and no, I didn't leave off the question mark.

Okay, that thing that sticks with me the most about this book is the design. It's beautiful. The story's narrator, Angela, is the daughter of a magician, and every chapter begins with a few words tumbling out of a top hat. The paragraph breaks are card suits -- hearts, spades, clubs, diamonds. It could be considered cheese-licious, I guess, but I love it. Even the typeface is pretty.

The story: Angela's mom leaves Angela (age 11) and her magician dad, and they learn to cope. That's basically it. It's a good, quick read, and it doesn't feel like you wasted your time after you're done. I especially enjoyed all the popcult references (and there are many).

There's an in-depth bookreporter.com review here, if you want more details.

eleven/fifty-two

Sometimes I worry that I'm reading too much, that there's a set amount of words you can read in your lifetime, and I'm burning too fast, burning through the pages, and I'm almost done, and I need to slow down.

But then I remember that I'm a overanxious freak, and I get on with my life.

Seriously, it's been a few years since I've read this much, and I'm enjoying it enormously. The latest victim of my voracious reading habit was Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty, the story of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, a poet (and author of Autobiography of a Face) who survived cancer as a child, which left her with a disfigured jaw. She and Ann sort of became friends in college, and this book covers everything from there until Lucy's death in 2003. It's a sad read for the most part, and there's one paragraph near the end where I sat there, read it again, and said, "Well, that's it then, that's how it's going to end, and there's no way anyone could stop it." and it was crushing but real. Real life is a bitch sometimes.

I say it's a sad read for the most part, but that may be a bit too sweeping. It's also very sweet and touching and all that stuff, it's just that when it's real life, and you know that the ending is sad, everything becomes tinted a little bit gray. But Patchett writes well, and it wasn't a mind-crushingly depressing read, please don't get that idea. A lot of it was funny, and I like that Patchett wasn't afraid to tell the truth of Lucy (or of herself, for that matter), all the bad parts along with the good parts.

p.s. Here's an article that Patchett wrote that's basically a condensed version of Truth & Beauty, if you're interested. I think I'm falling a little bit in love with Patchett's writing, it's so beautiful and perfect and everything's in just the right place.

(link via cheesedip.com)

ten/fifty-two

I first got into historical fiction back toward the end of middle school, with Ann Rinaldi's books, which would commonly take a significant historic event and look at it through the eyes of a teenage girl from that time. They were addictive. I still have one of them: A Break with Charity, I believe.

Philippa Gregory's books, I think, are my grown-up Ann Rinaldi novels. They are enjoyable to read, easy to get into, interesting and based in fact enough that they don't feel like total fluff, and as a bonus, they make me want to learn more about the history they cover.

The Virgin's Lover, which I just finished, is Gregory's latest contribution to the genre. It follows her other novels: The Other Boleyn Girl was basically about Anne Boleyn and King Henry VIII's affair, The Queen's Fool about Queen Mary's rise and fall, and The Virgin's Lover about Queen Elizabeth's reign and affair with Robert Dudley (who was also a key player in The Queen's Fool).

Dudley's wife, Amy, was also a major character in this novel, and while she was painted as kind of an insane shrew in The Queen's Fool, in The Virgin's Lover, Gregory paints her as a most sympathetic betrayed woman. That was the only issue I had with the novel, although I'm sure there's a lot of playing fast and loose with facts going on in there. I don't know enough of the history to know for sure yet, and I don't mind that, because Gregory's novels always lead me to read more factual accounts. That, for me personally, is the mark of good historical fiction.

I'm tempted to read Gregory's Wideacre trilogy, but I'm not sure if it's worth it. I'll have to look into that. In the meantime, I'm looking for good books about Mary's and/or Elizabeth's England.

nine/fifty-two

Instead of watching the State of the Union address and clawing at the screen like an angry badger, I read a book Wednesday night. It was a small one, a thin little memoir. Exactly what I needed to take my mind off of all the badger-making stuff.

Ambulance Girl by Jane Stern has a blurb on the front cover that says, "How I Saved Myself by Becoming an EMT" and that pretty much covers it all. I had heard Stern's name mentioned in passing before -- in connection to different kinds of food writing, especially offbeat food writing -- but had never read any of her work. I really enjoyed this book; in it, Stern shares how she conquered her depression and anxiety by becoming an EMT in her small town's volunteer service. It was good, well written and funny and Stern isn't afraid to make fun of herself or let herself look a little bad.

And hey, it's supposedly being made into a Lifetime movie starring Kathy Bates, so how bad can it be? I think Kathy Bates is an excellent choice, actually. And even if it ends up being bad, you know, there's nothing quite as good as a disastrously bad Lifetime movie.

eight/fifty-two

Numero ocho: Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell's A Dark-Adapted Eye.

As far as mysteries go, this was pretty tame. It won an Edgar award in 1986, which I didn't know until I read a review after reading the book. (I'm glad I read the review afterward, because the cover on the book they chose to show kind of gives away one of the main plot points.)

Vine's novel is pretty mannered and the sentence structure can make it a little hard to get into (it's set in England in 1940) unless you're used to that sort of writing. The story itself was pretty good; it's mainly about two sisters, one of whom is hanged, and the reason for that is slowly revealed as you go further into the novel. I liked The Brimstone Wedding better, but this one was okay.

because I forget like a mofo

I just want to post these here because I ALWAYS forget links.

Literary Vamp.

lex's LJ.

One of these days I will get a links thingie worked out. Probly the same day I do a flat-out site redesign, ha.