announcement

Good English is on Vox now! Vox is pretty and shiny, you'll dig it:

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In addition to reviews and book goal stuffs, I'm doing mini movie reviews and occasionally posting songs and videos and schtuff.

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thirty-two/seventy-five through thirty-five/seventy-five

I'm doing it again, yes. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I'll forget what I read if I keep waiting until I have time to fully describe each book. Boo, I suck.

32. Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand
interesting tidbits about goddess worship, good story with great characters. I want to read the UK version, which has a bunch of stuff that was edited out of the US version (probly to make it a faster read). (****)

33. The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
meh. okay story, but I couldn't really get into any of the characters, and the plot just kind of floundered near the end. it could have been so much HOTTER hehe. (**.5)

34. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
MUCH better than The Mermaid Chair. basically, this little girl runs off and tries to find out who her mom was. I loved all of the characters and the story itself was told very well. (****)

35. Come to Me: Stories by Amy Bloom
Amy Bloom writes so well that it's almost disgusting. while I didn't enjoy this collection as much as I enjoyed A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Come to Me was good in its own quiet way. the stories examine love and family -- the different definitions for each and the way they come together. (****)

fourteen/seventy-five through thirty-one/seventy-five

I'm cheating a little because otherwise I'll never catch up . . . briefest reviews ever, with stars for rating purposes (on a one-to-five scale).

14. Astonishing X-Men: Gifted by Joss Whedon
good and catchy! I definitely want to read the rest. (****)

15. Magical Witch Girl Bunny by Elizabeth Watasin (interview with Watasin here)
hard to follow sometimes, but cute. definitely a fluffy read. (***)

16. Close Range by Annie Proulx
definitely gives you a feel for Wyoming. (****)

17. Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner
chick lit, but WELL-WRITTEN chick lit. (*****)

18. To Have and to Hold by Jane Green (BARF)
cemented my loathing for Green. (*)

19. Love and Country by Christina Adam
okay, but Adam is WAY too fond of wordy flourish-filled metaphors. (***)

20. Passage by Connie Willis
one of those reads that takes a little while to catch on, but sticks with you forever. (*****)

21. As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
hot but brutal. (****)

22. The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery
so delicate and pretty, even though it's a little dated. (****)

23. Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure by Sarah Macdonald
started out annoying, with Macdonald whining a lot and seeming xenophobic, but ended up in a better place. (***)

24. The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq by John Crawford
gritty, truthful, sad. (****)

25. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
very nice YA alternate-reality read with likeable characters. (****)

26. The Three Incestuous Sisters by Audrey Niffenegger -- 9/3/06
pretty novel told in pictures (what a depressing story, though). (****)

27. Sunday Money: Speed! Lust! Madness! Death! a Hot Lap Around America with NASCAR by Jeff MacGregor -- 9/9/06
fun, and even more fun when you read it right before attending a race. (*****)

28. Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder -- 9/16/06 (good review)
great little fantasy read. (*****)

29. The Mercy of Thin Air by Ronlyn Domingue (sniffle) -- 9/24/06
sad and beautiful. (*****)

30. Not a Girl Detective by Susan Kandel -- 9/28/06
mediocre, which was disappointing considering Kandel's credentials. (***)

31. House Magic: The Good Witch's Guide to Bringing Grace to Your Space by Ariana -- 10/1/06
cute read, very open to interpretation. (****)

thirteen/seventy-five

After the poetry, I tried a little bit of another genre I've been neglecting, graphic novels. Marvel 1602, by the fab Neil Gaiman, was my first stop. Marvel superheroes + the seventeenth century = awesomeness. Very good, so good I'm looking at the sequel, even though Gaiman didn't write that one.

twelve/seventy-five

It has been forever since I finished a book of poetry. I love Adrienne Rich's voice and the words she chooses. I'm no good at poetry crit, so this will have to do: I enjoyed Dark Fields of the Republic, although it was a little difficult at times, and I'm keeping an eye out for more of Rich's work.

eleven/seventy-five

If you're looking for a good gothic YA novel, Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty is definitely it. Melodramatic, historical fiction with supernatural goodies mixed in. The sequel is out and I'm having to force myself to wait for the paperback.

ten/seventy-five

March won a Pulitzer Prize. Somehow. Geraldine Brooks's novel is well-paced, interesting, and pretty well-written, but I wouldn't say it was Pulitzer material. It was okay, not great.

It's a novel about the March pater's adventures during the War, and it gets the feeling of that time across well. It was kind of disorienting to think about his foibles, though, after all the adoration of him in Little Women.

Not a favorite but not a waste of time.

nine/seventy-five

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

Info about Frieda Hughes.
Her sometimes awkward poem re: the public's fascination with Plath:

Readers
by Frieda Hughes

Wanting to breathe life into their own dead babies
They took her dreams, collected words from one
Who did their suffering for them.

They fingered through her mental underwear
With every piece she wrote. Wanting her naked.
Wanting to know what made her.

Then tried to feather up the bird again.

The vulture with its bloody head
Inside its own belly,
Sucking up its own juice,

Working out its own shape,
Its own reason,
Its own death.

While their mothers lay in quiet graves
Squared out by those green cut pebbles
And flowers in a jam jar, they dug mine up.

Right down to the shells I scattered on her coffin.

They turned her over like meat on coals
To find the secrets of her withered thighs
And shrunken breasts.

They scooped out her eyes to see how she saw,
And bit away her tongue in tiny mouthfuls
To speak with her voice.

But each one tasted separate flesh,
Ate a different organ,
Touched other skin.

Insisted on being the one
Who knew best,
Who had the right recipe.

When she came out of the oven
They had gutted, peeled
And garnished her.

They called her theirs.
All this time I had thought
She belonged to me most.

published November 8th 1997 in The Guardian

And more Frieda.

eight/seventy-five

The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett.

seven/seventy-five

Close Range by Annie Proulx.

Proulx's reaction to Brokeback Mountain's Best Picture loss:

For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.

six/seventy-five

The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory.

five/seventy-five

Sunshine by Robin McKinley.

four/seventy-five

Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner.

three/seventy-five

Sometime I need a little gentle prodding, a reminder that "classic" does not equal "boring."

Bram Stoker's Dracula has been sitting on my TBR shelf since last Hallowe'en. For all my love of vampire lore and my desire to bone up on the classics, I couldn't find the time to concentrate on it until last month.

I expected it to be dry and boring, but at least it would give me the vampire basics, right?

Damn, it was good. I honestly hadn't thought that Dracula would be scary, but I was creeped out several times while reading it in the wee hours of the morning. The way the story is told through correspondence and various characters' diary entries is very effective, and the plot moves along quickly enough that even the slow parts aren't boring.

Of course, the "women are such fragile flowers, weak of mind, body, and will, needing protection and to be brought to redemption through the acts of men" thing scraped my nerves a little bit. (Okay, a lot.) But I chalked it up to the gender roles of that era, breathed into a paper bag for a while, and tried to ignore it, although it got especially difficult when Mina was presented as almost a saint because she had a "man's mind" along with a woman's caring, delicate, etc. soul.

Aside from that, hehe, I thoroughly enjoyed the story. It's sweeping and melodramatic and gory and full of lovely creepy imagery, and it's a rollicking good time. A few spots are slow, but it doesn't stay slow for long enough to matter. The ending seemed a little abrupt, though.

By the way, the introduction by Leonard Wolf is definitely worth reading. Aside from letting the reader know how Dracula came to be, it also offers up a huge list of classic vampire stories and puts them in context.

two/seventy-five

Once upon a time I read The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank, and I thought, "Meh." I liked it, but it did not blow my mind or change my world. As time passed, I forgot what I actually thought about it and instead, after reading several reviews that classified it as standard chick-lit, decided that's what it had been and forgot about it.

I decided to give Bank's second novel, The Wonder Spot, a go, mostly because I could get it for free in one of the book club sign-up things. Also, I like the title. I read it warily, afraid that it would end up being chick-lit at the end, with a wedding or a baby or a weight loss that would reaffirm the protagonist's place in the world and wrap everything up in a bow, and that I would despise myself for wasting my time with it.

Instead, I found myself liking the book quite a bit. Bank writes from a place she knows, and the conversations flow believably and Sophie, the main character, is definitely not a one-dimensional cut-out. There really isn't a particular plot; the novel is mostly the story of Sophie's life. Huge chunks of years are skipped, but Bank doesn't think the reader is stupid -- she gives enough clues that you can figure out what happened in the time you missed, but doesn't feel it's necessary to spell it out. Sophie is likeable and relatable and by the end, you feel like you've just read a long letter from a friend.

I'm going to have to dig out Girls' Guide and see what I think about it now.

query

A Million Little Pieces -- fact or faux?

Ah, The Smoking Gun . . . I always forget how much I love their bulldoggedness until a really juicy story like this comes along. I still have to finish the article, but the first page has been very interesting.

one/seventy-five

Well, if we ignore the pesky fact that this isn't technically the first book I read this year, I can say that the new year started off right. I love Ann Patchett's writing. She always chooses the perfect word, the perfect phrase, the twist in the storyline that's exactly right.

The Magician's Assistant starts off with a death, that of a magician named Parsifal, and follows his assistant, Sabine, as she struggles to make sense of it all. It's full of dream sequences and flashbacks and it's a little hard to get into all the dreaminess at first, but when you do, it all clicks together and the book seems almost . . . magical. It's like fantasy, but not. It's beautiful.

I read some reviews on Amazon that reflected disappointment in the story's outcome, but I think it was just right for the story. Everything doesn't have to be tied into a perfectly clean bow at the end of a book for it to be good. I enjoyed the potential, the way it was left open, the way almost anything could happen.

Yeah, it's safe to say I recommend this one.

new year, new goal

My reading goal for this year is seventy-five books. I'd like to throw a little poetry into the mix, maybe devour a couple of plays. It seems ambitious, but I think I can do it.

And on we go . . .

poor neglected book blog

Here's a link to help you feel a little more loved: here's a guy checking out the covers of some of the books that show up in the most current NY Times Book Review. I'm a whore for good cover design, and I love to shred bad cover design, so I think it's a pretty fun little blog. Nothing too in-depth, but a good way to waste a few minutes and get some design nerd laughs.

fifty-two/fifty-two

Cheating just a smidge, because I finished this one on January 1. But really, it was so depressing that I'd like to leave it in 2005.

I've read Anne Tyler before: Back When We Were Grownups. I liked it, but wasn't blown away by it. It annoyed me a little -- I think I found Tyler's dialogue irritating, but I can't remember for sure, I just remember a vague sense of annoyance.

Anyway, The Amateur Marriage tells the story of a boy and girl who fall in love, get married, and have a few kids. That's it. It covers the WHOLE thing, sixty years in their lives. And the first half of the book was good. I especially enjoyed the setting; Tyler is a good writer, I'm not denying that, and she made me feel what is was like to be caught up in the fever of the war. But after all the cute meetings and outside descriptions of the couple, she starts telling everything from their perspective, and man, two more unlikeable people you'll have a hard time meeting.

Almost everyone in the book is unlikeable, and not one of them is interesting enough to make up for it. Add to that one of the most depressing stories I've read in a while, and I just . . . bleh. I didn't like it, is what I'm saying.

Tyler is a spot-on writer as far as letting you understand characters' motivations, and setting the mood of the story, but this one just ended up being too gray for me.

fifty-one/fifty-two

Assassination Vacation is the third book by Sarah Vowell that I've read, even though it's the first one of hers that I heard of. I was waiting patiently for it to come out in paperback. I love the covers on her books, they rock, to put it simply.

I've gotten used to Vowell's sarcastic writing style now, and I've grown fond of it. Vowell has a sort of fascination with assassinations, and knows all sorts of quirky facts (as well as normal date-and-place facts) about our presidents. This book focuses mostly on McKinley and Lincoln's assassinations, but it's really all over the place. It's scattered in a fun way. Vowell travels on a sort of "best of" assassination tour, dragging friends and family along with her from time to time, and the whole thing seems like a good time, even given the subject matter.