Bragan Reads Everything Else in 2016

Hello again, Club Read! I wish you all a very happy New Year, and may you all have lots of truly excellent reading in 2016.

It may be a little while before I finish my first book of the year, but I wanted to pop in and set up my new thread in advance of that. My thread title last year was "Bragan reads everything in 2015." For some unfathomable reason, I didn't quite manage that, but, undaunted, I shall continue my quest to read everything else in 2016. I am expecting it to be yet another year of eclectic reading, full of everything from fluffy brain candy to Meaningful Works of Literature, with non-fiction on a zillion random topics thrown in, because that is how I roll.

I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes, and to hearing all about everyone else's reading adventures in the new year.

Ooh.... I get a front row seat! ;)
Looking forward to your eclectic reads.

>2 avidmom: Enjoy the view!

I'm looking forward to my eclectic reads, too. :)

I'm starting off the year with nothing very close to being finished either. I am always impatient to get that first book logged!

I'll be here to follow along with your reading.

As someone else who is attempting to read all of the books, I also found that there are still a few still to be read. Looking forward to following your reading for another year.

>4 ursula: I know! Why did I choose a 600+-page novel to start the year out with? Oh, well. At least it's proving to be a good one.

>5 RidgewayGirl: I have, at current count, 886 books on the TBR shelves. Reading everything might, I fear, be a little ambitious. But, still, you have to try!

I very much liked your comment on . . yeesh, Alison's thread, I think, about reading for 'all the reasons' - responding to her review.

Was reading short books to make my 2015 goal, but now I'm back to the big ones . . . Don't dare count the books on my shelves, but I imagine it's similar.

Looking forward to following you another year, Betty. I fully expect everything. You do have an extra day this year after all. 886 books in 366 days is ~2.4 books a day :)

>7 sibylline: Thank you. I think that really is very much the only way to describe my own reading. Hence the eclectic mishmash of books.

I've got some very long and some very short books I've been eyeing for 2016. I have the feeling they'll probably cancel out, and I'll end up with about the same reading total I've had for the last couple of years. (My 2014 and 2015 totals were within one book of each other.)

>8 dchaikin: Sure, I can do that! Maybe I'll take the Leap Day off and sit home and read. Come to think of it, the day before that is my Thingaversary. Maybe I should make it a two-day book-reading anniversary extravaganza!

Good to see you back again! It seems the main reading job at the minute is keeping up with threads.

>10 VivienneR: Haha! The threads are dazzling me a little. Keeping up with them takes a lot of time! Is this the way it's going to be all year? It frightens me a little :-)

It calms down soon. It's like your local YMCA - the workout rooms are packed at the start of the year, but as people get busy...

Yes, I've been completely failing at keeping up with anything! Between this and the ROOT group, I can't even keep my unread posts down to one page. And that's with skimming rapidly over a lot of things...

But, yes, it should settle down soon. The beginning of the year is always like this, as everybody sets up new threads and jumps into a new year of reading.

>13 bragan: Know the feeling! I'm stalling my own thread startup partly for that reason. Also, I need to "settle down" myself and get with the program!

>1 bragan: Happy New Year! Looking forward to your thread.

Happy New Year! I'll be lurking around happily following your thread.

A big hello and thank you, once again, to everyone who's stopped by the thread, and here's wishing you all a happy new year full of excellent books.

Now, let's get this reading party started! This one may have taken longer to finish that I was hoping it would, but it was very much worth it.

1. Skippy Dies by Paul Murray



In the opening scene of this novel, Irish boarding school student Daniel "Skippy" Juster dies on the floor of a doughnut shop. Only after that do we actually get to know Skippy, and all the people around him, as we're shown the months leading up to his death and what happens afterward. It's a complex, slightly strange book. The choice to extract the death scene and show it to us first is oddly unsettling, and shapes the reading experience in some interesting ways. The novel deals with so many subjects that are dark, depressing, or tawdry, that at some points it almost seems a little bit much, and it captures the obnoxiousness of 14-year-old boys with a faithfulness that can be downright painful. It jumps around from viewpoint to viewpoint, often slightly changing styles as it does so, and it weaves a wonderfully complicated and effective web of themes. It's pervaded by a subtle sense of humor, even though there's very little in it that you could easily point to as funny. Also, there are lectures on string theory.

And yet, in the end it comes together in a way that's poignant and satisfying, despite -- or, really, because of -- its deliberate messiness. And hoo, boy, can Murray write. There are so many passages in here that brought me up short, thinking, That's it. That's exactly what life is like.

Rating: 4.5/5

Wow. All of that and a lecture on string theory? It sounds terrific. I remember when it was on the Booker shortlist. Now I know why.

>18 theaelizabet: That probably doesn't even scratch the surface, really!

Great review of Skippy Dies, Betty. I've been meaning to get to this for a couple of years, and hopefully I can do so in 2016.

>20 kidzdoc: I do recommend it! If you do get to it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

it captures the obnoxiousness of 14-year-old boys with a faithfulness that can be downright painful.

It really does! Skippy Dies is a brilliant book and I'm eager to read his new one.

>22 RidgewayGirl: Is that The Mark and the Void? I went and added that one to my wishlist about halfway through Skippy.

Just catching up - looking forward to your year's reading!

Great review, Betty! I agree with you on Murray's writing--excellent.

Betty? can you explain string theory (just joking)

Enjoyed your excellent review of Skippy dies

Thanks, guys!

>26 baswood: Probably not, but I can lend you my copy of String Theory for Dummies. :)

2. Elfego Baca in Life and Legend by Larry D. Ball



Elfego Baca is something of a legendary figure here in my little corner of New Mexico. He was a gunfighter, a lawman, a private detective, and a politician, although he's best remembered for an incident in which he spent several days holed up in a friend's house under siege by a gang of violent Texan cowboys

This examination of Baca's life seems to be well-researched, and is admirably careful about attempting to separate fact from myth. Which seems like no easy feat, as apparently Baca himself was given to embellishing his exploits in later years. It's pretty dry, though, and not very engagingly written -- to the extent that I sometimes had trouble following or concentrating on it. Which is pretty typical for this kind of local history book, I suppose. Also, it turns out that the famous shootout with the Texans seems a lot less exciting when you carefully consider all the messy realities and the conflicting accounts, but, of course, that's hardly the author's fault.

Still. Baca really did have an interesting life, and that comes through. And there's something fascinating about reading a bit of local history like this, in that weird shock of almost-recognition you feel suddenly encountering people with names you know only from street signs. It's also particularly interesting for me to walk through the streets of sleepy little New Mexican towns like the one I live in and try to wrap my head around the fact that, a hundred plus years ago, there really were people running around shooting up these streets in the wildest tradition of the Wild West.

Rating: 3/5, although half a star's worth of that is probably just for the local interest.

>28 bragan: Those darn Texans...

I really should read Skippy Dies. Encouraging review.

>29 dchaikin: Those Texans caused a lot of trouble!

>23 bragan: Yes. I'll probably get to it this year. The premise is interesting.

3. The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett



Terry Pratchett's final Discworld novel, and his last novel, ever.

The Shepherd's Crown opens with a death, and the early chapters deal with a number of things that the author himself surely must have had on his mind in his last years: acceptance of the inevitable and the making of dignified preparations for the end, the memories and legacy one leaves behind, the practicalities that those who remain have to deal with afterward. It all choked me up more than a little, I must admit.

The story that unfolds from there is... Well, it's all right. It is very good to see these familiar characters one more time -- including Tiffany Aching, who was a late addition to the Discworld mythology, but whom I've always very much liked -- and to get to say a proper goodbye to some of them. The story features some of Pratchett's usual appealing and good-hearted themes, and there are some amusing moments (including some horribly groan-worthy puns). But the plot is rather thin, some scenes are summarized where they'd have been better fully described, a few jokes are repeated perhaps once too often, and there's a new character introduced who never really came alive for me quite the way he should. Probably all of that is understandable, when you factor in not only the author's illness, but the fact that, according to the afterword, he died before he'd quite gotten the manuscript into the final shape he would have liked.

Still. I am glad to have payed this one final visit to the Disc, and to have walked the Chalk alongside Tiffany Aching one last time. And perhaps, sometime soon, when I'm feeling a little less sad, it will be time to go back and re-read all his greatest works again, because, of course, they will always be there, no matter what.

Rating: How can I even rate this one objectively? Call it 3.5/5 for the story, maybe, but there's no putting a number of what it did to my emotions.

Heyyy, I thought of you recently as I was reading a sci-fi book about radio astronomy and a programme like SETI --any chance you've read/heard of it, The Listeners by James Gunn?

It's from 1972 (serialised from 1968), so rather old-fashioned in some ways (ahem, women--operating coffee machines rather than telescopes), but I thought there probably aren't too many serious sf books about radio astronomy so maybe you'd get a kick out of it anyway.

The setting is the observatory in Arecibo.

>33 LolaWalser: Y'know, that sounds awfully familiar. I don't have a copy of it, but I think I must have read it from the library back in high school sometime.

I, of course, operate both coffee machines and radio telescopes, which is as it should be. :)

>32 bragan: The final three Tiffany Aching books are the only Discworld books I haven't read yet, though I own them all. I'm putting my rereading of the whole series on hold for a while while I go through the five of her books. I'm sort of dreading getting to The Shepherd's Crown though. I'm glad that it sounds like it's at least a better send off for the series than Raising Steam, but it's going to be tough reading it knowing it's the last ever.

>35 valkyrdeath: I really had to steel myself to read it. I just did not want to get to it, knowing it was the end, but it kept sitting there on my shelf staring at me forlornly until I gave in

Although it's not what it perhaps could have been, and I would have preferred it if it felt less, well, slight, I did like it better than Raising Steam, which was very meh for me. And it does feel like it went out on an appropriate note.

You are reminding me that I want to try Pratchett. Looking back at previous years' CR wish lists, several of his titles have been recommended to me. Maybe after I finish with Hornblower!

>37 Poquette: I most definitely recommend Pratchett. Some of his books are better than others, but overall, they're great.

>37 Poquette:

Oh, I've only read three, but may I recommend Small gods? If any one Pratchett is likely to amuse you, Suzanne, I'd bet on that one.

>34 bragan:

It has some symbolic dot diagrams of messages if that helps ring a bell... I was just thinking, the only other sf book dealing with the subject I know of is Contact. Sagan, btw, is mentioned over and over.

>39 LolaWalser: Good to see you, Lola! Thanks for the recommendation. I will add it to my list.

>32 bragan: I actually dread this one somewhat when I eventually get to it.

>41 stretch: Believe me, I felt much the same way.

4. The Art of Mad Max: Fury Road by Abbie Bernstein



Like a lot of people, I was astonished by just how much I loved Mad Max: Fury Road. There are many reasons for that, but undoubtedly one of them is how visually amazing the movie looked. Which made this book difficult to resist. It's got lots and lots of pictures, including some early concept art, snippets of storyboards, some behind-the-scenes photos, and plenty of stills featuring close looks at the movie's vehicles, costumes, and settings. The text consists of quotes from multiple people who worked on the film, talking about the process of making it and the thought processes that went into various aspects of the design. These seem to have been put together from many different interviews, and sometimes feel a little disjointed, but they're very interesting. Clearly a lot of thought was put into this fictional world and why things in it look the way they do, even when that look is frankly insane. It's genuinely impressive.

I wouldn't necessarily call this an absolute must-have for Fury Road fans, but it is a nice supplement. And it's really got me wanting to watch the movie again. I wonder if I can justify buying in on Blu-ray?

Rating: 4/5

>17 bragan: This is such a nice review, and I've added Skippy Dies to my TBR.
>32 bragan: As a devoted Discworld fan, I can't decide if I should read this book or not. I have this silly notion that if I don't read it, the series isn't really over...

>44 reva8: I hope you enjoy Skippy Dies as much as I did!

I have this silly notion that if I don't read it, the series isn't really over...

I think I tried and failed to convince myself of that. Alas. But it is definitely time for a Discworld re-read for me. I've been talking to a friend who's just started reading the series for the first time, and finding that my memories of most of the books have faded immensely. Maybe it'd be a little bit like encountering it for the first time again, and it would feel like it wasn't over at all. (Of course, finding time to do that when I've got a gillion books still waiting for me to read them for the first time is another matter.)

>45 bragan: I don't re-read books too often, but I love rereading the Discworld series. There's so many references in them that I almost always spot something I've never noticed before. And if it's been a long time since I've read them and forgotten some of the main details too, then that's a bonus. My latest read through them is going very slowly though as I fit it around the too-many-other-books that I have.

>32 bragan: I haven't read a discworld book in ages, but this got me all sad anyway. Nice commentary. I miss knowing he was still cooking something up.

>46 valkyrdeath: They do seem as if they should be very re-read-able.

>47 dchaikin: It's terribly sad when someone who creates works you love suddenly isn't there to create them any more. (Not that I've been thinking about that entirely to much lately...)

5. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins



Rachel takes the train into London every morning, and when her train pauses, as it regularly does, behind a row of houses, she likes to gaze out at the occupants of one particular house if they happen to be in their back yard and daydream about the perfect life they have together, so very different from her own. Then one day she sees something in that yard that shatters the illusion. And soon after, something terrible happens, something that Rachel herself might know something about, if only she weren't completely blackout drunk at the time.

I wasn't sure about this book at first. The premise seemed intriguing, and I liked the structure, which features multiple POVs and a certain amount of unreliable narration. But twenty or thirty pages in, I found myself thinking that it might have been a mistake to pick it up. The writing wasn't wowing me, and all of the characters seemed thoroughly unpleasant. And not unpleasant in an interesting, compelling way, either. Just a dull, banal kind of unpleasant.

But as I kept going the main character, at least, got more tolerable, and the plot shaped up to be reasonably interesting. It was never the compulsively page-turning read I'd hoped it would be when I first opened the cover, and I didn't find any of the plot twists hugely surprising. But it was decent, and kept my attention. And having all those thoroughly unlikable characters did mean that, for much of the book, just about anybody could have plausibly turned out to be the bad guy.

On the scale of vaguely similar-feeling books, I'd rate this one far ahead of Before I Go to Sleep, but far behind Gone Girl. Although, if we're making that comparison, I do have to give it points for being far more realistic about the workings of human memory than Before I Go to Sleep was.

I do have to wonder, though... What is it with this current trend of books with "girl" in the title? Do we have Stieg Larsson to blame for that? At least his character was young enough that it'd maybe be understandable to refer to her as a "girl." But the woman in this one is in her thirties, for crying out loud! I mean, honestly.

Rating: 3.5/5

Don't forget The Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999).   ;-)

>50 Poquette: Maybe that one was ahead of its time. :)

There will be hundreds of books published in the next few years with "girl" in the title. Publishers love to chase a winner.

>5 RidgewayGirl:

Because of these trends I've been avoiding every book that goes along the lines of "The ***'s Daughter".

>53 lilisin: Yes! And the covers that show a woman looking away so that her face isn't visible.

>52 RidgewayGirl: And I am already tired of it. Which is too bad, as apparently I still have no fewer than nine books on the TBR shelves with "girl" or "girls" in the title. (Well, OK, probably I shouldn't count Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. So, eight books.)

>53 lilisin: And I've got four books on the TBR shelves called "The X's Daughter" or "Daughter of X."

>54 RidgewayGirl: Wow, if you avoid those, is there even anything left these days to read? Oh, wait, of course, there's still all those books with the top of the woman's head chopped off. Sigh.

And I'm laughing to myself because today I took Alexander McCall's Smith The Woman Who Walked In Sunshine to read if I had a minute. No girls here.... Oh, wait, there's The Forever Girl

*sigh*
Nevermind .....

>6 bragan: McCall Smith's Morality for Beautiful Girls is also one of the ones on my TBR shelves. Although I might be more forgiving of that one.

I must have some girls somewhere.

>58 baswood: *snort* :)

Irwin Shaw "Girls in their Summer Dresses". That title has stuck in my mind for decades, why I could not say.

Hmm. I got curious and checked, and apparently there are also 7 books in my TBR that have "boy" or "boys" in the title. That's a closer result to the "girl" books than I expected. As far as I call tell, though, with the exception of Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird, in which, as I understand it, "Boy" is actually a woman's name, all of them refer to people who are actually under 18. Which is definitely not the case with the girls.

I have ten books with "girl" or "girls" in the title. Brown Girl Dreaming is about the author's childhood and How to Build a Girl begins when the protagonist is fifteen, but yeah. There are four with "boy" or "boys" in the title and three refer to actual children, with The Burgess Boys being the exception.

The only "girl" in my catalog is Y: The Last Man, Vol. 6: Girl on Girl. And "boy" there are Bonyo Bonyo: The True Story of a Brave Boy from Kenya and The Boy Who Played With Dark Matter, both of which are relating to children (the former is even a children's book).

>49 bragan:
I don't think you can fairly blame the late Mr Larsson - in Swedish the three titles are all "The A who B", but only one of the A's (the middle book) is "girl". His English-language publishers must have been the ones who decided that the "The girl who..." thing would sell better.

Contrary to what I would have expected, I've only got slightly more titles with "boy" (20) than with "girl" (16) in my library (two appear in both lists).
Many of the girls are from the 20s and 30s and were grown-up women even then (The girl on the boat, A girl like I, etc.). And of course there's The Danish girl, about someone who had technically never actually been a girl...
Apart from a couple of children's books ("The boy's book of ..."), the boys are all from my stash of 70s and 80s gay novels, so they are also all grown up by the time the stories get interesting...

>62 RidgewayGirl: Interestingly, searching my entire library instead of just the To Read collection turns up 17 girls and 18 boys. I may have to rethink this...

>63 .Monkey.: The Boy Who Played With Dark Matter is a great title.

>64 thorold: Aha! Sorry, Mr. Larsson! I will blame the publisher, instead. If I get to blame anybody.

6. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi



Paul Kalanithi was in his thirties and just at the start of what was promising to be a successful and fulfilling career as a neurosurgeon when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Suddenly, he found himself living a life whose future was very, very different from the one he'd worked and planned for.

In this memoir, he shares his thoughts about life, death, and suffering, both from a doctor's and a patient's perspective, and searches for meaning in his work, in literature, and in human relationships. It's deeply thoughtful, beautifully written, and poignant without ever being despairing. Looking mortality in the face is hard, but we all have to do it sometime, and I find I am rather grateful to Dr. Kalanithi for holding my hand for a moment and helping me take a good, long stare at it.

Rating: 4.5/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

>ooh - great review, but not sure if I could read this. Perhaps too real for my liking.

>67 AlisonY: It was difficult, but not as much so as I was expecting, actually.

But I think now I've had about as much contemplation of the reality of death as I can handle for the moment.

7. Nimona by Noelle Stevenson



This graphic novel is set in a fantasy world with a medieval look, but modern (or even slightly futuristic) levels of technology. It features Lord Ballister Blackheart, mad scientist supervillian; his archnemesis Ambrosius Goldenloin; and his brand new sidekick, Nimona. Nimona is young, spunky, enthusiastic, possessed of some useful and interesting powers... and considerably more cheerfully bloodthirsty than Blackheart is at all comfortable with.

This is actually the second time I've read this story, as it was originally published as a webcomic and I first encountered it online. But I think I enjoyed it even more the second time. And I enjoyed it a lot. The setting may be a bit silly, but the characters of Nimona and Blackheart are great, and instantly believable. The story is pretty great, too. It's full of laugh-out-loud humor and lots of fun, but also has some genuinely touching moments, and it gets nail-bitingly exciting by the end. I also enjoy the way it plays around with and subverts a lot of the usual hero and villain tropes, plus I'm a total sucker for the "adversaries who once used to be close" dynamic, which is executed rather nicely here. My only complaint is that the ending leaves me longing for a sequel.

Rating: 4.5/5

>69 bragan: I keep seeing this book all over the place. After your review and the fact that I've loved Stevenson's Lumberjanes comics, I'm not sure how much longer I can resist. It sounds a lot of fun.

>70 valkyrdeath: I've heard great things about Lumberjanes. I'm going to have to check it out sometime. I definitely recommend this one, in any case.

>69 bragan: I had a look at the web comic, it looks interesting! Thank you for the review. I might look for it at my local library, or maybe on Comixology.

>72 FlorenceArt: I think the book is the same as the webcomic, only with a short extra epilogue.

ETA: Although I see they only have the first three chapters online now, anyway. Fair enough.

I've only recently tried the graphic novel format and was quite impressed by it. Now I'm on the lookout for new books to try and it sounds as though this might be a good one to look at (>70 valkyrdeath: >71 bragan: Lumberjanes, too!), even though I don't read that much fantasy. The form kind of invites experimentation, doesn't it?

>74 theaelizabet: It does, indeed, invite experimentation! Especially as graphic novels, in general, tend to be pretty fast reads, so it doesn't cost to much of your time to give one a try and see if you like it. And while I'm not sure I'd recommend Nimona to someone who actively dislikes fantasy, I don't think you need to be a hardcore fan of the genre to enjoy it.

Nice review of When Breath Becomes Air, Betty. There was an enticing review of it last week in the NYT, which I posted on my Facebook thread. I'll definitely buy and read it this year.

ETA: I noticed that it was published earlier this week, so I just used my 20% off coupon from Barnes & Noble to purchase a copy of it.

>76 kidzdoc: Excellent! It is very much worth reading.

8. Dryland by Sara Jaffe



Julie is a high school sophomore in the early 90s in Portland, OR. She hangs around with her best friend, Erika. She joins the swim team. She worries about her older brother, a former Olympic hopeful, who isn't really in touch with his family these days. She tries not to think too much about her own sexuality, but ends up exploring it some, anyway. She thinks a lot of things she doesn't say, because she doesn't want people to think she's weird. She listens to a lot of R.E.M. She eats a lot of chicken.

All of which sounds pretty dull, or at least like the kind of teenagery stuff that's really only interesting when you're still a teenager. But I was really surprised by how much I liked this book. It's so well-written, in an elegantly pared-down kind of way, that it just carries you effortlessly along. I'm particularly impressed by Jaffe's ability to describe music in words, in a way that captures it perfectly. There's some kind of weird magic in that. But the effective, quiet subtlety with which she handles the drama of being a teenager is darned impressive too.

Rating: 4/5

>78 bragan: any nostalgia?

I love how you had us all searching for "girl" and "boy" on our libraries. I have a lot of both, but then there are a lot of children's books there, including quite a few from American Girl.

Great conversation about "girl" and "boy". You had me check my library too. In books I've read, I had 8 "girl" and 4 "boy". Also 3 "man/men", 8 "women", 4 "lady", 3 "daughter" and one each for bride and wife.

In my TBR, it was 11 "girl," and 7 "boy." Also, 2 "men", and 1 each for "son" and "bastard." And 4 "women", 3 "lady", 2 each for "daughter", "wife" and "mistress," and 1 each for "mother" and "bride."

We all sort of scorn this title convention, but I noted that it is used by Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates and many other notable authors. But then there's The Other Boleyn Girl too, so a little of both I guess.

>79 dchaikin: Not so much. Maybe for the music, a bit, but I certainly don't miss high school. Although I was actually in college during the early 90s. Which is maybe why they're kind of a blur.

>80 Nickelini: Yeah, the more I'm thinking about this "girl"/"boy" thing, the less certain I am about making any pronouncements about it. I suppose the problem isn't really with "girl" itself (although I still look askance when it's used for grown women without good reason), but the fact that it's shown up on the bestseller lists so often lately makes it look like the current trendy bandwagon thing, and trendy bandwagons are always annoying. You can't help wonder, with recently published books, if the author (or maybe the publisher) chose that title because they see it as some sort of magic formula for success, and that can leave a bad taste in the reader's mouth.

Fun game! My girls tend to be kickass and/or queer, it seems...

Chelsea girls, Girls and boys, The roaring girl and other city comedies, Lives of Girls and Women, The piggle : an account of the psychoanalytic treatment of a little girl, The girl with the golden eyes, Little wars : a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books, with an appendix on Kriegspiel, The adventures of the black girl in her search for God, Foxfire : confessions of a girl gang, Rip-off Red, girl detective and the burning bombing of America : the destruction of the U.S., An armful of warm girl : a novel, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, The Captivity of the Oatman Girls Among the Apache and Mohave Indians, Girls, Visions and Everything: A Novel, Sex and the Single Girl, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Adventures of a Lesbian College School Girl, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, The Girls Next Door, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, Odd Girl Out

Only 18 titles with "boy(s)", including the two appearing above.

My girls tend to be kickass and/or queer, it seems...

Those seem like pretty good girls to have on your shelves. :)

>83 bragan:

You wouldn't believe the parties! :)

9. How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever by Jack Horner and James Gorman



In a sense, the dinosaurs never actually died out. Their direct descendants are still all around us today, in the form of birds. In fact, scientifically, birds are dinosaurs, even if, externally at least, they don't look much like the images of dinosaurs most of us hold in our minds. Well, not yet, anyway. But paleontologist Jack Horner has a plan to make that happen. He figures that it should be possible to alter the embryonic development of a bird -- specifically, a chicken -- in such a way as to recreate the development of its dinosaur ancestors, giving it teeth, a long tail, and clawed forelimbs instead of wings. He believes that the process of figuring out how to do this would teach us a lot about dinosaur and bird evolution, provide a useful educational experience for the public, and perhaps yield new medical insights that could be used to prevent birth defects in humans.

This book is about that freaky, fascinating idea of his and how it might be achieved... supposedly. I mean, that's what the title implies it's about, and what the dust jacket says it's about. In reality, he mentions the chickenosaurus in the introduction, and then basically doesn't talk about it again for the next two-thirds of the book, only really going into it at all in the last two chapters. Of the rest of the book, some of it provides some moderately useful scientific background on embryonic development and evolution, and some of it is interesting even if it's not entirely relevant, but a lot of it feels like digression and padding. And not even particularly well-written digression and padding. Ultimately, it seems to me like the subject matter here would have been better served by a long magazine article or two than a book, even a fairly short one like this. And the book would have been better served by being clear about what it wants to give its readers. Because promising that you're going to tell us about turning a chicken into a dinosaur and then instead launching into fifty pages on the history of Montana is about the worst bait and switch ever.

Rating: 3/5

>9 bragan: Sounds like they fell in love with a title.

>86 cabegley: That may well be. I mean, it is a pretty great title. Or maybe some savvy marketing person at the publisher correctly realized that a book that sounds like it's entirely about dinosaur chickens would catch readers' interest more easily. Or maybe Horner just couldn't quite manage to write to his supposed topic. One of those, probably.

10. Doctor Who: Tales of Trenzalore by Justin Richards, George Mann, Paul Finch and Mark Morris



If you're a Doctor Who fan, then you probably know that in the 2013 Christmas special, "The Time of the Doctor," the Doctor spent a long, long time on the planet Trenzalore. We only saw a tiny bit of his time there during the episode, which means that there's a lot of scope for filling in the blanks. This book provides four short stories, set at different points during the Doctor's extended stay, which attempt to do some of that. And... Well, to be honest, I wonder why they bothered.

OK, I did rather like the final story, Mark Morris's "The Dreaming," which at least featured an unusual choice of villain and some wonderfully Doctorish dialog. But even that felt underdeveloped, and the other stories were even slighter and less memorable. They're not bad, really. But they do seem kind of pointless. None of them does anything particularly new or interesting with its familiar bad guys -- indeed, the one with the Autons doesn't really do anything with them at all -- and while the characterization of the Doctor is mostly decent and fits well enough with what we saw on screen, there's absolutely nothing added to it, either. Which just seems like such a lost opportunity, as there is so much room for some insightful character exploration in this setup.

Rating: 2.5/5. I considered bumping it up a half star just for "The Dreaming," but, honestly, even that story doesn't make this collection anything but skippable.

11. The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss



This is a short side-story set in the universe of Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles, and, as the author himself points out in the foreword, it probably won't make a lot of sense if you haven't read the main books in that series. Actually, it may be debatable how much sense it makes even if you have read those.

It focuses on Auri, a minor character from the series, and that immediately struck me as not necessarily a workable idea. Auri, I thought, might very well be one of those characters who is better in small doses, and better left mysterious. Looking at things from her POV -- her weird, weird POV -- might, I thought, be impossible to do in any remotely convincing or relatable way. But I was curious to see what Rothfuss might do with it and whether he could pull it off. Having finished the book now, I'm still not entirely sure. At first I felt kind of interested by Auri's perceptions of the world. Then I felt oddly charmed by them. Then I got kind of tired of them, then a little sad, then tired of them again, then intrigued, and then the story was over. That's a lot of reactions to go through over the course of 150 pages (including illustrations). It's hard to know quite what they add up to, but it was, at least, an interesting read.

The book also includes an extended note from the author at the end in which he talks about the writing and publication of the story. (Amusingly, he assumed it was probably going to be unpublishable, but everybody he showed it to kept saying, "Well, other people probably won't like it, but I do.")

Rating: It's hard to know how to rate this. But I'm going to give it a 3.5/5. Although I'm tempted to add another half star just for the sheer audacity of the thing.

How to build a Dinosaur - As rare as Hen's teeth

>90 baswood: Which are apparently less rare now! As scientists have induced birds to grow teeth.

12. The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap by Wendy Welch



A memoir about the experiences of the author and her husband opening and running a used bookstore in a small town in the Appalachians. She talks about pretty much everything you can imagine a small-town bookstore owner might have to talk about: the struggles it took to get the business off the ground, the headaches of small-town politics and the warmth of small-town community, the day-to-day details of a bookseller's life, thoughts on books and bookselling and the role of used books and print books in today's world, personal anecdotes and stories (some amusing, some heart-warming, some sad) about customers who come to the shop to buy and trade or just to talk. And probably a lot more stuff that I'm forgetting, too.

Through it all, Welch comes across as both warm-hearted and level-headed (even if she cheerfully admits that jumping headfirst into this particular business venture was both crazy and naive), and she clearly loves the life she's living and the people she's living it with.

I'm really, really easy for books about bookstores, so I may be biased, but I enjoyed it a lot. Like many (possibly most?) bibliophiles, I've entertained the occasional idle daydream about running a bookstore. Unlike Welch and her husband, I have far too much common sense (and am aware that I have far too little business sense) to ever for a minute consider actually doing it. But living that dream vicariously for a little while through these fine folks -- while they, of course, do all the real-world work! -- was a pleasant experience, and one that's left me smiling.

Rating: 4.5/5 (I initially rated it 4/5, figuring that giving it anything higher than that really would be showing my bias, and would probably be a bit more than it properly deserves. Then I thought, screw it. If I can't be biased in my own book ratings, where can I?)

That sounds like a good one! On the list ....

>92 bragan: I definitely recommend it if, like me, you're the sort of person who enjoys books with books in them.

13. The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex



Eleven-year-old Gratuity "Tip" Tucci's mother is abducted by aliens, who then conquer the Earth and decide to relocate the population of the United States to a human reservation in Florida. Gratuity elects to drive rather than be transported, takes her cat, picks up an alien in need of a ride, has all kinds of trials, tribulations and adventures, and ultimately plays an instrumental role in liberating the world.

It's a wonderfully fun combination of hilarious wacky comedy, science fiction, road trip story, and satire on colonialism in one of those rare volumes that seems likely to work so well for both adults and kids that I'm honestly not sure which audience the author had in mind while he was writing. I enjoyed it immensely.

Although I am tempted to take back half a star for the way that the characters keep leaving their cat in the car for hours on end. In hot climates. In the summer. With no apparent bad consequences. Come on, Mr. Rex, that's just irresponsible! (I am, however, fine with the eleven-year-old driving a car by tying cans of corn to her feet so she can reach the pedals.)

Rating: 4.5/5, if I ignore the car-and-cat thing.

I've wl'd the bookstore book.

For reasons I can't understand I've avoided the Rothfuss novella (or whatever it is) - but I am intrigued that it is about Auri, who certainly is an interesting, albeit very much a side character.

How bizarre that the Dinosaur book goes off an a paean to Montana!

Love the review of Smekday and agree heartily about irresponsibility vis a vis cat!

Now I have to go off and see what books of mine have girl and boy in the title.

>82 LolaWalser: How did you get the titles to list thusly?

I came up with 22 girl titles and 12 boy and 1 with both.

>96 sibylline: The Montana thing didn't come completely out of the blue, because he was talking about a very important dig site for dinosaur bones in Montana. But I did not need to know that much about it! Or about the town nearby, or most of the rest of what he spent those 50 pages going on about.

I think The Slow Regard of Silent Things is, in fact, a novella, which means that if you're not sure about it, it at least doesn't take much time to read.

(>97 sibylline:

I searched for "girl" in my catalogue, did a title-only display, then chose printer view. Copy/paste, then added touchstone brackets individually.)

>88 bragan:

Meant to ask you, have you been watching the show? I preferred the last season overall but "Heaven Sent" blew me away.

>99 LolaWalser: I have, indeed! There are some things in the most recent season I have some mixed feelings about (plus I hated that one episode everybody else also seems to have hated), but overall I've been extremely impressed by it. And "Heaven Sent" was amazing. Just an absolute triumph of writing, acting, and directing that left me picking my jaw up off the floor by the end. If it doesn't win a boatload of awards, there is no justice in the world.

Hmm, since I stopped visiting the fan forum I got out of the loop of "what's hot or not"--which one was the hated story? And yes, "Heaven Sent" struck me as the best teevee I ever saw, contemporary at least. I love Capaldi. Just love him.

I'm geeking out over this thread. Capaldi is an awesome Doctor.

I'm home sick with the flu (despite getting the flu shot) and don't feel much like reading so have instead been catching up with the Doctor. I'm in the middle of season 6. So glad to hear good things about Capaldi and that much good is yet to come!

>101 LolaWalser: "Sleep No More," the "found footage" episode. Which isn't a concept I mind, and I thought the episode had some potentially interesting ideas/world-building details in it, but, man, did I find the story an annoying combination of nonsensical and dull. Oh, well. I guess they can't all be great all the time.

And Capaldi is just such a fine actor. The show is so lucky to have him. He's one of those actors who can do that amazing thing of conveying so much with just the tiniest change of expression. And when "Heaven Sent" relied on him to keep the audience engaged in what was basically him talking to himself for an hour, he pulled it off brilliantly.

>102 fuzzy_patters: I am always, always happy to geek out about Doctor Who!

>103 theaelizabet: Sorry to hear you have the flu, but I suppose if you have to be sick, it's good to have some Who to keep you company through it. You have, in my opinion, some truly marvelous stuff ahead of you.

I hope that you feel better soon, Thea.

14. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky



A man, living in depressing poverty in a city full of small, horrible tragedies, commits a terrible crime for reasons that seem simple but probably aren't, then spends a long time in a complicated internal conflict between worrying that he'll be caught and wanting to confess.

It became clear to me pretty quickly just why this is considered such a classic. Dostoevsky writes with an incredibly subtle, nuanced, and realistic view of human psychology, complete with an understanding of all the ways in which people lie to themselves, justify their own actions, and fail to entirely understand their own motivations. That's pretty impressive stuff, and by a hundred pages or so in, I was enjoying this book much more than I expected to -- if "enjoying" is quite the right word for a novel so full of awful stuff -- and even finding a sort of bleak humor in just how utterly incompetent the protagonist seemed to be at both criminality and penitence. There's also some wonderfully vivid characters. I think Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin is perhaps my new favorite most hate-able character in all of literature.

It did begin to drag for me somewhere in the middle, though. I know it's silly to wish for this kind of novel to be a little bit shorter and pithier, but I found myself kind of wishing it, anyway. And I wasn't entirely satisfied with the note it ends on, but I think that's because Dostoevsky and I have different religious views, not because it isn't well-written.

Still, I do now understand just why this Dostoevsky fellow is still considered so much worth reading. And maybe one of these days I will finally get around to The Brothers Karamazov.

Rating: 4/5

I loved Crime and punishment and really want to reread it one of these days. I "read" The Brothers Karazamov but had a really tough time with it. I need to try again sometime.

>107 japaul22: I doubt I'll ever re-read it, myself, but I can see how it could very well reward a second look.

I've had The Brothers Karamazov on my To-Read shelves for years, and every year I think, "maybe this will be the year I finally read that," but I keep being a little too intimidated by it. Crime and Punishment, at least, was much shorter, and so easier to motivate myself to read.

That's a great review, bragan. It makes old Dostoevsky seem almost possible (for me).

>109 ChocolateMuse: It was very much not a quick, easy, simple book, but certainly not an impossible one.

>14 Poquette: Great review. One of those "I should probably read this" but ... I am encouraged now.

Great review. I keep teetering around wanting to read it but finding reasons to go past it. Not sure it's a book for the bus commute!

>106 bragan: I think I probably read Crime and Punishment a long time ago, but as always I don't remember anything about it, and anyway I would certainly have a completely different outlook 25 or 30 years later. You make me want to try it. Some day...

I read Crime and Punishment as a teenager and loved it, but when I read it again in my 40s I didn't like it much, but I don't remember why.

Thanks for the nice comments on the review, all! I'll be amused if I end up being the cause of a spate of reading (or re-reading) Crime and Punishment.

>112 AlisonY: Depends on how much time and ability to concentrate you have on your bus commute, I would think. :)

>106 bragan:

Yess! *ten thumbs up from a Dostoevsky fan*

>107 japaul22: I made it through The Brothers Karamazov as well. I know one book shouldn't put you off an author, but I'm reluctant to put myself through that experience again in a hurry. Then again, I read that C&P is an easier read, easier to follow. So maybe... but not quite yet.

>116 LolaWalser: I don't know that I'd call myself a "fan" at this point, but I do see why he has them, at least. :)

>117 Helenliz: It wasn't too difficult of a read, really. Some really long blocks of dialog, and a few places where I found it a little hard to follow who was speaking. And all the long Russian names and their variants were sometimes a little hard to keep track of, since I'm not very familiar with them. Plus, like I said, it did drag a lot in the middle for me. But overall it wasn't much more difficult, than, say, Dickens.

I've picked up Crime and Punishment several times and never actually cracked it. Maybe it's time to change that. I have the same cover too!

>117 Helenliz: C&P is much, much more readable than The Brothers Karazamov!! It's worth trying.

Fun review of C&P. I found C&P to have a lot of narrative drive. I was always so concerned about where the guy was going. So it went by pretty fast. The Brothers Karamazov was work for me, in comparison. It's a much deeper book, one written with censors looking over D's shoulder forcing him to make it even more complex...and it's very rewarding, but it lacks the same degree suspense. (It helped that the Tomcat was around when I read TBK.)

>119 janemarieprice: Kind of an old edition, then, if it's the same one as mine. I picked it up in paperback at a library sale, and by the time I was done reading it, the poor thing was starting to fall apart.

>121 dchaikin: I think maybe part of the reason C&P dragged a bit for me in the middle is because it turns to showcasing other characters and thus gets a little sidetracked from that sense of suspense. But it is at least always there in the background.

The Brothers Karamazov is still intimidating me, but perhaps a little less so now.

15. The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean



The Disappearing Spoon is a lively, anecdote-filled stroll through the periodic table of the elements. To some extent it's about chemistry and nuclear physics and the history of how scientists have figured out the principles of those sciences, come up with the periodic table as a way to organize the elements, and discovered new elements to fill in the spaces on it. But, as the subtitle might suggest, it's not just all about the science. There's a lot of human interest here, including stories about the personal lives and rivalries of scientists, as well as discussions about various elements' role in such fields as warfare, history, biology, and art.

It's all very readable and often quite entertaining, and is very much aimed at the scientific layman (although I imagine that having taken a high school chemistry course -- even a dimly remembered one -- is likely to be of some help). Most of the science, and many of the stories about scientists, were things I already knew, but despite that I still found it enjoyable and interesting, and those who are less familiar with the subject matter are bound to learn some fascinating new things.

Oh, and in case you're wondering about the title, it refers to a practical joke popular among chemists: You make a spoon out of gallium and give it to a friend to stir their tea with. Gallium looks just like aluminum, but it melts at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, so that when they put the spoon into the hot tea, it melts and disappears. See? Chemistry is fun!

Rating: 4/5

>123 bragan: Sounds interesting!

>123 bragan: I do recommend it if the subject matter sounds interesting.

>123 bragan: This has been sitting on my TBR for too long. Thanks for the nudge with your enticing review!

>122 bragan: Yeah mine was from a used bookstore and looks like if you dogear the pages they'll break off. I kinda like books like that even though they aren't really the best for reading.

>123 bragan: I keep looking at this book in the shops and have been for a long time but for some reason I've never actually gone ahead and read it. Sounds like it will be a good read though. I need to get back to reading science books.

>126 cabegley: It had been on my own TBR since 2010. And it really shouldn't have taken me this long around to it, either.

>127 janemarieprice: I have something of a fondness for the well-used, well-loved books, myself.

>128 valkyrdeath: Science books are good for the brain! :)

>123 bragan: I attempted to listen to this on audio a few years back. I may have to give it another try. I recall getting bogged down in it pretty quickly.

>130 brodiew2: I'm trying to decide if there's something about it that might work less well in audio than in print... Well, not having the periodic table in the back to flip to when needed would be a disadvantage, at least.

16. 21st Century Dead: A Zombie Anthology edited by Christopher Golden



This is a follow-up of sorts to Golden's earlier zombie anthology, The New Dead. I liked that one a lot, so I went into this one with fairly high expectations, but, unfortunately, it didn't do nearly as much for me.

There are maybe a handful of stories here I would describe as good, with the rest ranging from okay all the way down to annoying. Which maybe isn't actually all that bad a hit rate for an anthology; it's rare for every story to be a winner, or for all of them to match any given reader's tastes. Still, the previous volume was so good that it's hard not to feel disappointed. Especially as what impressed me so much about that one is how fresh and clever its authors' various takes on the zombie concept felt. Too many of the stories in this one feel as if they're trying -- maybe a little too hard -- to be fresh and clever, but falling down in the execution. There are too many chunks of exposition explaining how this or that version of the zombie scenario happened, with variations in detail and setting making them slightly different from other versions I'd seen, but usually not quite different enough to be interesting. And, you know, the first time a living, breathing human is referred to as being "the walking dead" in a zombie story because they're in a hopeless situation or something, it might seem meaningful, but after encountering it for the third time in the course of one anthology, it starts to feel like yet another cliche.

I wouldn't say this is bad, and the best stories in it are probably worth reading. But if you're looking for thought-provoking, well-written zombie-themed stories, I recommend The New Dead instead, then John Joseph Adams' excellent The Living Dead and The Living Dead 2, and then, if you still haven't had your flesh-eating fill, I'd say go ahead and check this out.

Rating: 3.5/5

Super review of Crime and Punishment!

>133 sibylline: Thanks!

17. Hard Eight by Janet Evanovich



Book eight in Janet Evanovich's series about Stephanie Plum, bumbling bounty hunter. This time out, Stephanie searches for a woman and her daughter who have disappeared in an apparent case of parental kidnapping, and is terrorized by a guy in a rabbit suit.

The writing in this series, which I do think was steadily improving for a while, seems to have plateaued a few books back, and if anything, I think Stephanie is getting even worse at her job, an incompetence that is perhaps beginning to stretch disbelief a bit. And I'm still not thrilled with this as another installment in the ongoing story of Stephanie's sexual tension with two hot guys. It's not nearly as annoyingly written as some of these love triangle plots tend to be, but it does still make me want to roll my eyes a bit. If you ask me, what she really needs to do is forget both guys and buy a vibrator.

But Stephanie's wacky antics are still amusing, and this was yet another breezy and entertaining (albeit violent) read. So far, at least, this series remains just about ideal for when you're stressed or busy and need something fun, quick, and distracting.

Rating: 3.5/5

>114 rebeccanyc: I read Crime and Punishment as a teenager and loved it, but when I read it again in my 40s I didn't like it much, but I don't remember why. - that's really interesting. Could it be that it's a book for the young, like Herman Hesse or Milan Kundera? Maybe it makes sense after all to have it as an English text for Year 12 students? (haven't read it yet myself)

>135 bragan: Funny review :)

>136 ChocolateMuse: I can't speak for anyone else, but if someone had made me read Crime and Punishment in the 12th grade, I'm pretty sure I would have failed to appreciate it at all and gotten very little out of it. But then, I always reacted badly to being made to read things instead of discovering them for myself in my own time, so I may not be the best person to judge by.

Me too, oh yes, me too! In fact it wasn't until 8th grade I realised the texts we were reading had been written as ordinary novels, and not specifically for study. Didn't make it much easier to read them though.

>136 ChocolateMuse: I read it on my own as a teenager, in the summer. And Herman Hesse dates from that era too! I wouldn't even attempt to read him now.

18. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates



Being, as I am, the whitebread product of a whitebread upbringing, I am by no means qualified to comment on the experience of being black in America. I'm not entirely sure I'm even qualified to comment on a commentary on being black in America. But what I can absolutely say is that the perspective of those who are so qualified is one the rest of us really need to hear. And that Ta-Nehisi Coates writes from that perspective with a powerful combination of raw emotional honesty and careful, perceptive thought, in a way that sometimes approaches a sort of poetry. I can say that there were moments when I found myself thinking, simply and wholeheartedly, Yes, as Coates seemed to put his finger on something profound and important and express it in just the right way, and other times when I thought, instead, Ouch, as it felt like he'd just given me a well-deserved slap across the brain with an unpleasant truth.

So, basically, yes, all those reviews saying that this is an "important" work and that everybody in America should read it are probably right.

Rating: 5/5. I hesitated over that a little. This book has gotten so much praise, and I give the 5/5 rating so seldom, that it almost feels like bandwagonning. But what the hell. If this book doesn't deserve it, I'm not sure what does.

>140 bragan: that sounds like an amazing book. One a future read, definitely.

>140 bragan: I've been hearing about this book for a while, but your review pushed it to the wishlist.

I do recommend it. It's gotten a lot of hype, but in this case it's probably deserved.

I'm reading Between the World and Me now and it's slow going - I keep having to stop and think about what he's saying.

Yep, it's one for the ages. I wouldn't worry about being "qualified to comment", I think anyone living in a multiracial society has a duty to comment.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes from that perspective with a powerful combination of raw emotional honesty and careful, perceptive thought, in a way that sometimes approaches a sort of poetry.

Beautifully noted.

>144 RidgewayGirl: Yes, for such a slim book, it took me a while to read it, in part for just that reason.

>145 LolaWalser: Well, you know, I know far too many people who are entirely too ready to speak for everybody else's experience when they don't have a clue what they're actually talking about. And I don't want to be one of those people. So I suppose what I mean by that is, it's not really my place to sit here and pass judgment on Coates' perceptions and experiences, to say he's right, he's wrong, he should feel this or shouldn't say that, or whatever. It would be entirely too presumptuous, and not based on any real knowledge of where he's coming from. In this case, I think the appropriate response is to listen to and think about what he's saying, and try to understand it on its own terms. (Which, I must admit, didn't stop me from passing judgment here and there, because nothing can entirely stop any of us from doing that. But, in any case, those judgments were largely positive, including personal approval of his perspective on religion, and an agreement that his views have changed in the right ways since his youth.)

19. Carry On by Rainbow Rowell



This book has an odd history. It starts with Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, whose main character is obsessed with a Harry Potter-esque series of kids' books, featuring the young magical Chosen One Simon Snow, his friends, and his vampire roommate, Baz. I loved Fangirl a lot, and came away from it feeling genuinely disappointed that the Simon Snow books weren't a real thing I could actually read, beyond the little snippets and glimpses of it we got in that novel.

Well, it turns out the author felt pretty much the same way. In her afterword, she says that she was able to let the main characters of Fangirl go when she was done with them, but kept finding herself thinking about Simon and Baz, and how she would write them for real. So she did. And then I got to read it! Sometimes our literary wishes do come true.

It was definitely a weird reading experience at first, though. I kept getting distracted wondering exactly how I should relate this book to Fangirl, whether I should think of it as being the fanfiction story that the main character of that book was writing, or just its own separate thing, inspired by the earlier book. And it felt a little too close to Harry Potter for a while, without quite feeling like it was doing that in order to make some kind of interesting comment on it. Plus, it basically drops you in at what would be the end of the Simon Snow series, with multiple previous adventures alluded to, but unseen. It all worked together to keep me feeling a little off-balance for the first, oh, 150 pages or so.

But I enjoyed it. And the more I kept reading, the more I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the story, which did eventually become very much its own thing and not at all a Harry Potter clone. I enjoyed the world, which had a few fun details that I think I liked better than Rowling's. And I enjoyed the romance, which, OK, was very fanficcy, but what the heck, my inner fangirl (which honestly isn't all that inner) likes being indulged once in a while, and this story did it well. Basically, I enjoyed it all. I enjoyed it all a lot. So much, in fact, that I blew off whatever it was I'd been intending to do today and just spent all day reading it and not stopping until I was finished. I'm feeling pretty good about that as a life choice right now.

Rating: 4.5/5

Seems like a pretty good life choice to me.

There is nothing better than canceling all plans and ignoring all obligations in order to spend the day with a good book. And Rowell's books are exactly the right kind of book to do that with.

And I was thinking along the same lines as your comments in >146 bragan: -- that were I to read a hundred accounts of what it was like to grow up as an African American boy, I'd still have just a tiny proportion of the knowledge of someone who actually did. And no right to speak for them at all. An obligation, certainly, to support and defend their words when appropriate, but not to speak for someone else. Basically, I think I have a lot to learn and so need to listen.

>148 FlorenceArt: I'm still feeling pretty good about it!

>149 RidgewayGirl: I can't even remember when the last time I did that so thoroughly was, but I'm thinking I should really do it more often. Mind you, it probably helped that I didn't actually have anything too important or time-sensitive to get done yesterday. It wasn't much of a problem to put off the housework until I was done reading.

And, yeah, while it doesn't mean that you have to accept everything that someone with different experiences than you says absolutely uncritically, I do think this country might be a lot better off if we were to just shut up and listen to each other a little bit more.

>146 bragan:, >149 RidgewayGirl:

I don't know whether these posts are aimed at anything I said (I hope not) but if it's considered necessary to spell out something I'd think was obvious, like that no white person can know what a black person's experience is like, then perhaps it is necessary that it should also be pointed out that "to comment" does NOT mean "to judge" or "to speak for".

"To comment" presupposes one's engagement--reading the book, or as you say, "listening".

But--and I'm making here a general point, not addressing anyone in particular, least of all you two--once we agree that it is important first of all to listen (which is already more than many white people seem willing to do), I think we should also recognise that merely listening isn't enough, nor is merely listening what Coates wants from his white audience. All too often we end with pious liberal banalities (isn't it awful and horrible but I can never know, I can never imagine, it's so remote from my experience) that do nothing to change status quo--reading and listening as mere penance.

What's needed--and what I think Coates would like to see, if I understood him--is an active recognition of the role of whites in perpetuating racism. Sure we can't know what it is like to exist in a black body in a racist society. But we ought to know our end of the equation, how we contribute to racism and how we profit from it. And in order to do that we must first admit that we exist in that racist equation.

This absence of whites in their own minds from racism is one of the first and most bewildering impressions American society makes on a foreigner. It's as if some inexplicable, extraplanetary calamity has struck black Americans specifically--but it's nothing to do with anyone else! Something happened "in history", perhaps done by some other whites (also nothing do with us) and somehow the consequences radiate down to our days--but it's all nothing to do with us, or any "well-intentioned" white person etc.

Sorry to be a soapbox bore again--but the discussions in recent years, some kind of change in the air ushered in the wake of terrible news of police brutality and discrimination, South Carolina's flag etc. along with the interest in Coates' book and similar, seem to me to point to a REAL change in how white people TOO (because black people have always known this) understand racism--not some select minority, but, for the first time, something that can be called "the public".

>151 LolaWalser: Oh, well, I was just trying to explain what I meant when I said "comment," which I admit I was using in a rather vague way, and certainly wasn't meant to indicate that racism in itself isn't a topic I should actually think or talk about, just that his personal experiences and opinions aren't something I want to or should, well, leap into and make all about my personal experiences and opinions and my projection of those onto others. Because I think that white people's tendency to do that rather than trying to actually listen and understand where others are coming from is, in fact, a part of the problem. (And the fact that I've seen that happen entirely too often sadly does make it entirely necessary to spell that out, I think.)

I do very, very much agree with your general point. It seems to me that one of the reasons why racism remains so much of a problem in this country lies in how easy it is for white people to stick our heads in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist, or that if it does, it has, as you say, nothing to do with us. Or is even the fault of black people, rather than of whites, on the principle that if they'd only behave better, they'd be treated better. That is certainly how I was raised, and looking back on those attitudes I grew up with, I find myself horrified by the level of ignorance, self-centeredness, and denial they embodied. And still do, in the people who still hold them.

(I recently had a confrontation with a relative who expressed the opinion that black people should stop complaining because they don't have it bad, and never had it any worse than anybody else, because even slavery wasn't all that big a deal, as lots of slaves were treated well and thought of as part of the family and had easy enough jobs. And... I mean, what do you even do with that? Where do you even begin? I'm afraid all I managed to do was to yell, "Are you fucking kidding me?" a lot, which I doubt helped very much. But if that's where you're starting from, surely the absolute first thing you need to do is to learn to have some empathy and some willingness to understand what others' experiences are actually like, in the present and in the history that got us here. You can't get anywhere at all, I don't think, if you don't take that step first. I hate that that's a step I have to actively remind myself to take, but, having grown up with people piling sand on top of my head, I obviously do.)

>151 LolaWalser: Yes, and especially ...This absence of whites in their own minds from racism....

I'm certain we're in agreement on this issue. The conversation on racism has gone public and it's making a lot of people very uncomfortable - Beyonce's performance at the Super Bowl has some people outraged, and I think it's because things can't be unseen, so now something that could be avoided is no longer avoidable, for all the shouting about how all lives matter. So one thing we can do is to keep the conversation going, to not let it be comfortably set aside. Still thinking this through.

>153 RidgewayGirl: Yes I think we're all entirely in agreement. I think my entire also-soapboxy post above was just me trying to be clear that my "I'm not qualified to comment" was not, in fact, me disagreeing with any of that. :)

20. Morality for Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith



This third book in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series finds Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only female private investigator, with a lot on her plate, including a change in business arrangements, an unwell fiancé, a possible poisoning, and the discovery of a feral child in the bush.

Despite all of that, as in the first two books, the actual plot in this one is low-key almost to the point of being incidental, while the real focus is on the characters and their gentle ruminations on life, love, tradition, and morality in modern Botswana. I have ten more books in this series still sitting unread on my shelves, and I can imagine getting tired of this before I reach the end of them. But I haven't yet, and I still found this one charming and, in the end, satisfying. And I am delighted by the development that Mma Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe's secretary/assistant gets in this one. She's shaping up to be just as formidable a character as her employer, and I hope to see lots more of her in future volumes.

Rating: Still going to call this a 4/5.

I've enjoyed all of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, but I found out that I had to leave time between them.

>156 NanaCC: I was just saying exactly that to the person who gave me most of the series: that I was pretty sure if I read them too close together, I'd get tired of them much more quickly, so I was making a point of spacing them out. (Although, really, I do that with lot of series, anyway.)

Very interesting discussion about Between the World and Me. I've definitely got this one on my radar.

>147 bragan: Hmm. Sounds like my kind of thing. Do you think you could start with this one or would you suggest starting with Fangirl?

>158 janemarieprice: You should be able to read Carry On without reading Fangirl without any problem at all, although I imagine it's going to be a very different experience than if you've read Fangirl first.

Coming late to this and agreeing with >158 janemarieprice: about the interesting discussion.

>160 rebeccanyc: I'm glad it seemed interesting. I never know when I'm going on too much, personally. :)

21. Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word by Matthew Batles



This... is not a history of the written word. It's a set of miscellaneous musings on writing and on scattered moments in the history of writing, more poetic than informative and more dreamily philosophical than coherent or substantial. Which, I have to say, is really not my kind of thing. There were moments, especially early on, when one of the author's sentences would strike me as prettily insightful, and times, mostly in later chapters, when I did learn something interesting about the history of printing that I didn't know. But despite that, I mostly found it kind of frustrating, overall, and ended up more or less forcing myself to finish it.

Rating: I'm calling this 2.5/5, but it's one of those books that's really hard to rate, because I am sure there are readers out there for whom this book will be perfect. It's just that I'm decidedly not one of them.

And, speaking of words...

22. British English A to Zed: A Definitive Guide to the Queen's English by Norman W. Schur



I bought this book figuring I'd maybe browse through it a bit and then sit it on the reference shelf, but Anglophile and lover of language that I am, once I started flipping through it I found it interesting enough that I ended up keeping it out on my kitchen counter and reading it through a page or two at a time over the course of several months.

It is, as the title suggests, a dictionary of British English for Americans. And it really was interesting to peruse, partly because now I am finally able to remember whether a Brit means 6:30 or 7:30 when they say "half seven", partly because it was fun and interesting to boggle at some of the differences that made me wonder how on earth we ever manage to communicate with each other at all, partly because it's written with fun little touches of humor, and partly because I found it bemusing to note how many expressions that I find perfectly familiar and natural are flagged here as specifically British, and how many of the American translations weren't familiar and natural-feeling to me. Which is no doubt a testament to how varied America dialects are, and to how much American and British dialects have influenced each other.

Anyway, it seems likely to be very useful for the American reader encountering unfamiliar or confusing British terms. Probably a bit less so for American writers looking to write dialog for British characters effectively, as simply reading the entries surely won't always give you a good idea about who is likely to use the expressions in what contexts (although the author does often include some notes on that sort of thing). There are also appendices at the back covering topics including specialized vocabulary (like cricket terms or parts of a car), weights and measures, weird place name pronunciations, and some general systematic differences between American and British English. All of which made my head spin, skimming through it, but which could be very useful when it's needed, as a lot of it seems like might be hard to figure out how to search for on the internet.

Rating: 4/5

>163 bragan: I had to ask someone just the other day what she meant by "half eleven!" (And I've since forgotten...) And we had a conversation about what she would call American-style biscuits, which she wasn't sure of because she's never had one.

>163 bragan: I love books like that too, although because I grew up in Canada, I use some of those Britishisms too without knowing they're British.

>164 ursula: Scones?

>165 Nickelini: It always seems to me that there is an English bilingualism in Canada: English spoken by the English vs that spoken by the Americans, and somehow through context Canadians are able to make the correct interpretation in most circumstances.

>163 bragan: Sounds like a fun book. I grew up with the "half eleven", so no problems there.
Travelling in Scotland once with a Canadian person, we were stopped by a police officer who enquired of the driver "Is this your motor". After working through the accent, the driver immediately thought he was being accused of stealing the actual engine. My sister and I interpreted (and tried not to laugh), so that we were able to calm him down and get the situation straightened out with no untoward consequences.

I wouldn't use scone for (American) biscuit though. To me they are quite different and the actual products are used in different circumstances.

>163 bragan: This sounds interesting. I have two Brits in my office and it would be fun to throw them some English English.

>165 Nickelini:, >166 SassyLassy: That was the difficulty. She assumed they were similar in consistency to scones (true), but she couldn't get around the idea of having them as accompaniment to a meal. There's no equivalent for that.

>166 SassyLassy: Indeed! I was in my late 20s when I realized that the words that I had the most problems spelling were those that are different in US and UK English. We in Canada, of course, use a combination. Colour, honour, not color honor . . . but organize, not organise.

>165 Nickelini: I really was surprised by how many "Britishisms" in the book didn't strike me as specifically British at all. In part, that's probably because I read so many books and watch so much British TV, and they've just become familiar to me.

>166 SassyLassy: LOL! at the "motor" story. Yes, such things can cause great misunderstandings. (Although that can happen with different dialects even within a single country, too. I will never forget the ridiculous "Who's on First?"-style routine I once found myself going through thanks to New Mexicans' habit of referring to any soft drink as a "coke," back when I hadn't lived here quite long enough to get used to it.)

American biscuits and scones are definitely in the same family of bready products, but I don't think they're quite comparable, either. I think scones are generally denser, for one thing.

>168 ursula: Yes, I remember seeing a Brit having much the same reaction once. I had the impression, in her case, that even though she theoretically knew better, she couldn't help thinking of them as being at least something like a British biscuit/American cookie. (Although the book made me realize that even "a British biscuit is an American cookie" is apparently not quite right, because it can also be a cracker? So confusing!)

>169 Nickelini: I have a book about world English -- I'm pretty sure it's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language -- that includes a picture of a Canadian business with a sign that says "Tire Centre" and the note that Canada is the only place in the world you'd find that particular combination of spellings.

>170 bragan: a Canadian business with a sign that says "Tire Centre" and the note that Canada is the only place in the world you'd find that particular combination of spellings.

That's funny. And I had to stop and think, how else could you possibly spell that?

Tire Centre - an injunction to French-Canadians to shoot straight?

>170 bragan: In 8th grade, I spent three weeks in England on a mini foreign exchange, staying with a British family. There were many planned cultural excursions, but we did spend a few days following our host student for a day of British school. As a shy 14-year old, it was bad enough when a good looking British boy leaned over to whisper to me in class. It was mortifying that he was asking me for a rubber. (British for eraser, American for condom).

>173 ELiz_M: That's not the first story I've heard about embarrassment caused by the varying transatlantic definitions of "rubber," but it may be the cutest one. :)

The response to that English book is very funny.

I am utterly amazed that half past an hour is not a phrase known outside of the UK. Blimey - who knows how many Americans and beyond I've confused when they've asked me the time. But now that I think about it, I've never heard anyone in a US sitcom or film say half past.

I believe 'fortnight' is not widely known outside the UK either?

Now this language confusion works both ways. Pants - need I say anymore? And 'I like your suspenders' takes a conversation a whole different direction in the UK versus in the States.

My ultimate hate is the word 'fanny' - up there with my most hated words of all time. I believe this means your bum in America. For us Brits it is, as my mother would politely say, one's 'front bottom'. It would never be mentioned in polite conversation, therefore I have to squirm when I hear the like of Pink singing lyrics about 'fanny snatching'.

>175 AlisonY: "Half past seven," I get. Just "half seven" is confusing.

And now I remember why - in Belgium, "half seven" was 6:30.

Ah - OK. So is it half way towards the hour or past the hour - I get it now.

>175 AlisonY: Yep, an American would say "seven thirty" but understand "half past seven" perfectly well, even if they would be less likely to phrase it that way. Even "half past" would work just fine, if the hour were understood. But "half seven"... I'm not sure it ever even occurred to me that that was simply a shortening of "half past seven." My brain kept trying to interpret it as some kind of weird metaphor for being halfway to seven from six, or something.

"Fortnight" is a word that I understand perfectly well, but would be unlikely to use in any kind of everyday context. There probably are a lot of Americans who know what it means, and plenty who don't.

"Pants" certainly has the possibility for lots of hilarious confusion.

And "fanny" is kind of a funny one. Because, yes, here in the US, it means your backside, and not only that, it's a super-mild, cutesy word for it, the kind one might use while joking around with children. "Bugger," although not that widely used here, is maybe in a similar position. My mother used to use it in phrases like, "You little... bugger!" when she was trying to not actually swear at us. I think she would have been deeply surprised to realize that it's refers to a certain kind of sex act, and is still very much associated with that in the UK.

On the other hand, when UK smokers talk about lighting up a fag, it is utterly, utterly impossible for people from the US not to cringe. So. Much. :)

I've been interested in Between the World and Me and enjoyed your review and the conversation. Enjoying all the conversations, in fact, on all the topics.

OK, my world just crumbled. Do you mean that half seven means 7:30, not 6:30? Wow. I suppose my confusion must come from German, which is the foreign language I learned first. I'm pretty sure in German Halb 7 means 6:30. Or does it? Now I'm thoroughly confused.

>179 detailmuse: Thank you! I am happy to provide a home for enjoyable conversations here on LT. :)

>180 FlorenceArt: Well, I am at least glad I'm not the only one who has been ridiculously confused by this. I swear, for ages I thought my inability to make heads or tails of that expression meant I was just dumb. Although I don't have the excuse of knowing German or any other languages where it might work differently.

>173 ELiz_M: My father had a client from Sweden visiting him, and when we were all at dinner, he mentioned that before going home, he wanted to by some "rubbers that smell." When everyone looked shocked, he hastily added, "for the kids!"

>175 AlisonY: And my father was on the other side of it when he was in Australia, and waiting to see another client. He'd been chatting up the busy assistant, and said admiringly, "Boy, you really shake your fanny for your boss." He meant it as a compliment, that she was a hard worker. She was shocked and mortified.

>175 AlisonY: So what are "suspenders" if they're not something used to hold up your pants? I may need to google that one.

>163 bragan: Adding that book to my wishlist. Sounds like so much fun :)

>182 cabegley: I laughed out loud at both of those stories.

>183 Narilka: "Suspenders" are garters in the UK, where your trousers (not pants) are held up with "braces."

>180 FlorenceArt: No, you're right. It's that way in German and Dutch, which is where my confusion came from.

>180 FlorenceArt: I found that confusing when I first moved to Germany and meant there were a few situations when people showed up an hour before I thought they were going to. And so halb sieben is 6:30 in Germany and half seven is 7:30 in England.

23. The Awakening by Kate Chopin



A short 1899 novel (or maybe it's technically a novella?) about a married woman who finds herself falling for another man and reaching longingly for freedom, self-actualization, and passion outside her duties as a wife and mother.

The dissatisfied housewife is practically a cliche now, but at the time, apparently, this novel caused a huge outcry and scandal. And given the things that society wanted to believe about women and motherhood and marriage at the time -- not all of which we've let go of today, now that I think about it -- I can see why. Because it feels so... true. There's no overwrought melodrama here, just the inner experiences of a woman who wants something more and different from the life she has, a life that she fell into almost by default, because it's what was expected of her. And those inner experiences are insightfully observed, well-conveyed, and utterly truthful.

Rating: 4.5/5

>163 bragan: looks fun, and I like the confusion that's reigned since. The UK and the US: two countries divided by a common language.
I spent a year of my degree in texas (yup, that's not a heavy accent at all). After the first few times the exclamation "Gee, don't you speak English funny" ceased to be in the least bit amusing.

>187 bragan: I was stunned when I read internet comments after I finished The Awakening about 5 years ago written by people who seem to have the same views of women as when the book was written over 100 years ago.

>189 Nickelini: Yeah, I looked at a few of the reviews on LT, and, boy, do some of those people appear to have missed the point. Urgh.

Nice little review of The Awakening. Knowing the difference between 6.30 and 7.30 is crucial especially as it could be an invite for dinner. Now if everybody used the 24 hour clock then...........

>191 baswood: A 24 hour clock still might not do the trick, if people are confusing each other by saying, "Dinner's at half nineteen!" :)

24. Images of America: Socorro by Baldwin G. Burr



A collection of old photographs of the small New Mexico town where I live, and its surrounding areas, some dating back as far as the 1880s. The accompanying text is nothing particularly special, and I think I was hoping for a higher number of photos of the town proper, but it was still an interesting little volume to look through. I was surprised by how many of the locations in the pictures were still instantly recognizable. Also, I now know which street they used to hang people on, which is kind of creepy.

Apparently the publisher has thousands of books in this series, featuring places all over America, so if you're in the US and this sort of thing sounds interesting to you, you can google "Images of America" and see if they have one for your home town.

Rating: 3.5/5

>187 bragan: I've come across mentions of The Awakening before, but yours is the first review that makes me actually want to read it.

>194 FlorenceArt: It's one of those books that I finally decided I had to read precisely because I kept seeing mentions of it everywhere, more and more often.

>193 bragan: the publisher has thousands of books in this series
I have a couple of these for towns I've lived in and think the publisher does a nice historical service. Our house is almost 100 years old and I've been wondering about its WWI-era history but hadn't thought to look at this little book. So thanks!

>196 detailmuse: I agree, I think it's wonderful that these exist, especially for small towns whose history isn't really going to be told anywhere else.

Let us know if you find out anything interesting about your house!

>188 Helenliz: I just read Lady Bird and Lyndon. Apparently a lot of it was transcribed from her tapes with great difficulty due to her accent. It was then read by her social secretary for possible errors. Imagine that good lady's confusion on reading someone described as looking like a "bowl of jelly". Apparently Mrs Johnson was complimenting her by saying she looked like a "Botticelli".

As an addition to the English language confusion, it is surprising to be told "I'll knock you up at half seven" Really?

>198 SassyLassy: Ha! Mind you, that sort of transcription problem doesn't just happen between different dialects. I've seen some hilarious examples that came from people trying to transcribe technical language they didn't understand, too. Like the time an astronomer was talking about data from the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite,and the transcriber, having clearly never heard of this device, apparently figured the data must have come from Japan, and wrote "Kobe."

OK, I admit, now that I look at it, that's way less funny than the Botticelli thing. :)

And the British use of "knock you up" will never not be funny to me.

>191 baswood: Invitations are a minefield. Even if you resolve the linguistic confusion about what time is meant, there's still the cultural problem of working out how the time stated relates to the time your host actually wants you to be there. If a German invites you for 7.30 then the soup will probably be getting cold already by 7.31, but if they're Spanish and you arrive at the time it says on the card you may find yourself helping your hostess with her zip. And if you're living in another country which is neither yours nor theirs, it's anybody's guess whether they have used their own national conventions or those of the host country in setting the time.

I was once invited to a Ghanaian party in Holland, with explicit instructions to be there on time so as not to miss the big entrance of the guests of honour: needless to say I followed the instructions to the letter, and arrived to find the place still locked up. The important dignitaries from Africa didn't arrive until about seven hours later...

>200 thorold: A minefield, indeed. I have enough trouble figuring out when the heck I'm actually supposed to arrive in my own country.

>200 thorold: In Germany, guests arrive precisely ten minutes after the time stated in the invitation, except for business events, when they arrive exactly at the time stated.

25. A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin



This is the novel the recent movie Mr. Holmes was based on. I haven't seen that yet; I wanted to catch it while it was in theaters, but for one reason and another I never got to it. So, while I'm waiting to watch it on DVD, I figured I'd read the book.

It centers on an extremely elderly Sherlock Holmes, whose once-unparalleled mind now suffers from lapses of focus and memory. He makes a visit to post-WWII Japan, becomes a sort of paternal or mentor figure to a young boy with a talent for beekeeping, and relates the story of a case he investigated decades earlier, but none of it is really about any sort of plot. Instead it's about the character, and about themes of memory, loss, and the irrational mysteries of human life.

And I am so very torn about it. Because all of that sounds good, and it is good, really. The basic concept is a powerful one, Holmes and his cognitive issues are handled sensitively and well, the themes are rich, and there are some genuinely poignant moments. And yet, I can't help the feeling that I expected it to do more for me, somehow, to make me feel more. Instead, it's a mostly well-crafted thing that I appreciated intellectually, but that never quite engaged me the way I wanted it to. I find I keep thinking about this sketch Mitchell and Webb did about an elderly Holmes suffering from dementia. That thing existed solely as the punchline to a running joke about comedy shows dropping the jokes and getting all serious and emotional at the end, and yet, embarrassing as it is to admit, it made me want to cry. I think I wanted this to make me want to cry. And it never quite did.

Nevertheless, I do still very much want to see the movie. I'm very curious to see what Ian McKellan will make of it. Who knows, maybe he'll make me want to cry.

Rating: Oh this is impossible. Fine. I'm going to call it an unfair, utterly nonobjective 3.5/4, and now I'm going to go away feeling guilty for not rating it higher.

>203 bragan: I listened to this book quite a few years ago. In fact, I think it was when it first came out. I had similar feelings about it, and also gave it 3.5 stars. I watched the movie recently on DVD, and thought it was well done. It is not an action movie by any stretch of the imagination, but very slow and visually lovely. I do like the cast. My 15 year old granddaughter watched it with me. She had asked for the DVD for Christmas, probably because of Ian McKellan, but liked the movie enough that she wanted to watch it again with me.

>204 NanaCC: "Ian McKellan as an elderly Sherlock Holmes" was and is enough to make me want to see the movie, to the extent that pretty much anything else about it is nearly irrelevant. (Well, everything except the fact that I live in the middle of nowhere, an hour from the nearest movie theater, anyway.) You surely cannot get better casting than that.

Great reading and reviewing going on here! Especially Between the World and Me.

My spousal unit had us tie the knot at "half after four" because he just likes the way that sounds.

It is a bit scary that The Awakening is still so "relevant."

In Italy, times are flexible. Increasingly so the farther south you go.

>49 bragan: hmmm is NPR reading your thread? -- The 'Girl' In The Title: More Than A Marketing Trend

>206 sibylline: Thanks! And "half after four" might be a good compromise.

>207 ursula: I remember reading a book once by an Italian talking about his experiences living in the US. As I recall, he marveled considerably at our commitment to punctuality. It's definitely something that varies a lot from culture to culture.

>208 detailmuse: Well, I could hardly have been the only person to notice this trend! But I feel weirdly vindicated to hear that the "girl" thing actually is something publishers are deliberately encouraging. The interview snippets about women and suspense are interesting, too, so thanks for the link.

>203 bragan: I haven't read the book yet, and I'm not sure if I should. But I thought the film was excellent and Ian McKellan's performance was perfect.

Also, I've just watched that Mitchell and Webb sketch. I'd somehow never seen it before, and now think I maybe haven't seen the final series after all. That was a really surprisingly effective sketch and certainly not what I was expecting at the end.

>210 valkyrdeath: Having such conflicted feelings as I do about the book, I'm not sure whether to recommend it or not. It's hard to know if other people will have the same responses I do to it. But I'm glad to hear at least one positive vote for the movie. Not that I'm surprised. Honestly, I think Ian McKellan could make a dramatic reading of his shopping list worth watching.

Mitchell & Webb are fantastic, and I'm still kind of amazed they did that, and took it so effectively from mildly (if slightly uncomfortably) funny to genuinely heartbreaking.

Invites to dinner in the Gers (France)
All the locals speak of the Gers quarter and so you must always arrive a quarter of an hour after the stated time (assuming you have understood that time)

The most difficult thing to cope with however is when someone is very late - say an hour or two, because no drinks or nibbles are served until everyone has arrived.

>212 baswood: Wow. Given how chronically late some people I know are, I probably would have starved to death by now if I had to wait for them before I could eat.

Finally catching up here but really enjoying the discussion. I feel that I would be completely out of my depth with British English. As it is I've had several kind friends have to clue me in to regionalisms in my speech that I thought were totally normal American phrasings.

I can't imagine living anywhere where everyone is on time all the time. Louisiana I'd say people are either early or late - all very casual. NYC people are late 75% of the time and blame it on public transit which is extremely reliable.

I read The Awakening a few years back and was surprised by how much I liked it. It's one of those that's always been on the 'must read this VERY IMPORTANT and will make you a better person' list which sort of puts me off. But yes, I wish I could say that it was archaic content.

>212 baswood:, >213 bragan: cross-posted with these, but Barry that tradition is alive and well in south Louisiana. I will not start my food unless everyone else has been served and am still convinced to this day that my mother would be able to sense if I did and call me to scold.

>214 janemarieprice: I was a little surprised by how much I liked The Awakening, too, as I wouldn't have thought it was entirely my sort of story.

<208 We are in front of trends here, I think. ; )

Thanks for sharing that article.

26. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths



When a computer alphabetize a list of words, or fits a curve to a series of data points, or decides what it should keep handy in parts of its memory it can access quickly, what exactly is it doing? Well, it's using an algorithm, some set of instructions that give it the rules for how it should proceed in tackling the problem before it. Of course, for any given problem some algorithms may be more efficient or give better results than others, and a lot of computer science and a fair amount of mathematics is dedicated to finding the best algorithms for the problems we want solved. And those rules are often ones we humans can use, too, whether we're deciding which tasks to tackle first in order to miss the fewest deadlines, or re-organizing our closets, or deciding when to stop driving around looking for a better parking space.

And that's what this book is about: algorithms of the kind computers use, and their applications in the real world. Which, I admit, sounds dull. I suppose to most people, it may be dull. But, giant nerd that I am, I found it fascinating. Intellectually exciting, even. How amazing is it that a very small change in the requirements of a problem can alter the task of finding the best solution from a simple to an impossible one... or that, by going back to the simpler version of the problem and working from there, you can often come very, very close to that best solution, anyway? This book is full of things like that that made me go wow, from the notion that introducing randomness into calculations about non-random things can actually give better results, to guidelines on how to make the best possible guesses based on completely insufficient data, to the welcome confirmation that I'm already intuitively using the optimal methods for alphabetizing my bookshelves.

It's all wonderfully well-written, too: beautifully comprehensible and full of excellent examples. There's also, for my mind, exactly the right amount of math, as the authors talk us through careful mathematical thinking without ever getting bogged down in equations. Or computer code, for that matter. It's all just nice, clear, readable English.

Am I going to go out now and apply the algorithms discussed here towards improving my own life? Well... maybe. Did I come away from it feeling like I understand the world better? I think so. Did I come away feeling I understand more about the tools we have for understanding the world? Absolutely. I also may have come away regretting more than ever that I didn't major in computer science, because it really did just light up all kinds of nerdy areas in my brain.

Rating: 4.5/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

>218 bragan: I like the sound of that. I love computer programming and often wish I'd studied it beyond the first year of university. This is going to have to go on the wishlist.

>219 valkyrdeath: I was on my high school's computer programming team, and actually had some real talent at it, I think. Which I was eventually forced to admit I didn't have in physics, which is what I insisted on studying instead. I sort of hate the thought that maybe my mother was right when she urged me towards computer science instead! Ah, well. It's nice, at least, to have a book like this to show me some of what I missed.

>220 bragan: I was good at it too, but in my case I went on to pursue maths instead, which I do like but wasn't anywhere near as good at. Probably a mistake.

>220 bragan:, >221 valkyrdeath:

Put me down as another person who chose the wrong science. Was better at math-based chemistry/physics and ended up choosing organic chemistry. Big regret.

>222 lilisin: If only we could all have do-overs...

Is someone handing out do-overs? Where's the line?

>224 Nickelini: If I find out where it starts, I'll let you know, and you can get in line behind me.

I'll stay right here, thank you. I'm sure that there's an equal chance of me messing up all over again.

>226 RidgewayGirl: There is that to consider.

Oh...

Hi Betty. I was some 100 posts behind and missed a whole world of interesting conversations here. I'm a bit lacking of anything to add to what's already here. So, just saying hi. Great reading, reviewing and conversations.

>226 RidgewayGirl: well, true that. But I would have tried harder to avoid the oil industry in a rerun. And I like to think I would have read more as a kid. Anyway I should have.

>228 dchaikin: Hi! :)

Also, I read a ridiculous amount as a kid, and I do recommend it as a good way to spend a childhood.

27. Railsea by China Miéville



Railsea is set in a world -- I want to say "a post-apocalyptic world," but maybe that's not quite right. Maybe it's just a very old world in which a lot of stuff has happened. Anyway, it's set in a world where the oceans are railroads. Literally. Instead of water, there are miles and miles of train tracks, splitting and joining and looping in on themselves everywhere. And people take to these rails, among other things, to hunt giant moles. Whale-sized giant moles.

Basically, it's a sea story, but with trains. Which is a ridiculous, insane idea and should not work, but Miéville is an absolute master of taking surreal ideas like this and shaping them, somehow, into detailed, real-feeling worlds, and this one is no exception. The bizarre, fascinating setting isn't the only selling point here, either. The plot is full of exciting, suspenseful adventure. The narration has a clever, self-aware quality to it that could, in lesser hands, have seemed painfully arch, but instead works beautifully. Also, it riffs on Moby-Dick in some thoughtful, playful ways that I found utterly delightful (although, lest you get the wrong idea, the novel is by no means a Melville pastiche). Miéville slyly sneaks in a few other entertaining literary references, too, from the obvious to the obscure. And the ending... the ending was nothing I expected at all.

I've enjoyed all the Miéville novels that I've read (which includes the Bas-Lag trilogy, The City & the City, and Kraken), but I think this one may be my new favorite. What a ride!

Rating: 4.5/5

(I have, by the way, noticed that I've been giving out a lot more of these 4.5 ratings than I usually do. Maybe it's a sign that I'm becoming more easily pleased, but it seems to me that this is shaping up, so far, to be an extraordinarily good year of reading. Here's hoping it continues!)

>230 bragan: a world where the oceans are railroads - architect's mind blown. I need to think about this some more. And maybe read the book. But this thought will be brewing for a while.

>231 janemarieprice: It is weird and wonderful!

>27 bragan: I enjoyed your review of Railsea. I have never been intrigued enough to dive into a Mieville, but this concept sounds uniquely interesting. I look forward to checking it out.

>233 brodiew2: I like Mieville a lot, and I think I'd call this a decent place to start with his stuff. It's a little less dense and a little more adventure-plotty than much of it, and is generally just a really fun sort of weird.

>230 bragan: Sounds like great fun!

good to see that Miéville continues to delight with Railsea

>236 baswood: Now I just need to get to Three Moments of an Explosion soon, and not let it sit around on the TBR shelves for years like that one did.

28. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison



The contents of this book are remarkably difficult to describe. Well, all right, no, it's easy enough to describe: it's a series of personal essays all of which, in some manner, deal with the subjects of human suffering and human empathy. But I'm not sure saying that gives you a good idea of what to expect at all. Partly that's because the specifics of the subject matter are so varied. The author talks about her personal experiences, including having an abortion and being punched in the nose during a mugging. She tours places dense with misery and observes not just her surroundings, but her own reactions. She describes a job she had pretending to be a patient for doctors in training and rating them, in part, on how much empathy they displayed, and then talks about attending a conference for people who are certain they are suffering from a disease doctors don't believe actually exists. And so on.

Some of these essays struck me as better than others, but at they're best they're amazing: lyrically written and insightful in a way that sometimes made me want to gasp. And if sometimes it borders on the self-indulgent, well, that in itself just provides more to talk about, as Jamison thoughtfully considers what it means for her to write about her own pain or her perceptions of others' pain, and widens that self-reflection out to consider complex questions about not just empathy, but about what we mean when we accuse someone of wallowing in their own pain and in what contexts we make those kinds of judgments. And for all that she talks about herself a lot, there seems to me to be a laudable kind of humility in her willingness to constantly re-examine and question her own feelings and her own responses. The result isn't always easy to read, but I found it very much worth it.

Rating: 4.5/5

Interesting review on a subject formerly known as navel gazing perhaps. It seems as though the personal experiences described translated into issues that would ring true to many others.

>239 baswood: It's the productive kind of navel-gazing, I guess, the kind that does reach beyond the person doing the gazing to connect with others.

>238 bragan: Sounds like a book right up my navel-gazing alley. LOL. Onto the wishlist it goes...

Productive navel gazing, hmmm.

>241 avidmom: I hope you like it as much as I did! It does seem like the sort of thing that's probably not for everybody, but I was surprised by just how effective and thought-provoking it was for me.

29. Visions of Sugar Plums by Janet Evanovich



A short holiday-themed interlude in Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, written between books eight and nine. (You can tell it's not a regular part of the series because there's no number in the title.) The story involves a mysterious, hot guy with supernatural abilities who magically appears in Stephanie's living room, having been sent -- somehow, by someone -- to help her as she attempts to apprehend an elderly toymaker named -- wait for it! -- Sandy Claws.

OK, I'm aware this must seem like a very unseasonable thing to read in March. But this is when I happened to reach the point in the series where it's set. And I thought that might actually work in its favor. I mean, I honestly much prefer Christmas music if I encounter it (usually via iPod's random shuffle feature) in July than in late December, by which point I've been inundated with Christmassy stuff for so long I've gotten sick of it. I'm not sure that works nearly as well with books, though, because I was a bit humbuggy about this one.

The thing is, while I like fantasy novels just fine, supernatural elements suddenly, randomly popping up after eight volumes set firmly in mundane reality annoys me immensely. Since this is presented as being outside the main run of the series, that might not have been quite as much of a problem if I could have just regarded this as -- to use a nerdy buzzword -- non-canonical, a Christmas fantasy brought about by over-indulgence in eggnog, perhaps. But it features a significant development that seems like it's going to have to carry through to later books in the series, so I couldn't even do that. And it's not like the fantasy part of the story was even good. It was underdeveloped and gratuitous, and silly in entirely different ways than this series is supposed to be silly.

It wasn't all bad, though. There are some great scenes with Stephanie's family, who are in fine, hilarious, even-crazier-than-usual form. I'm mildly tempted to knock my rating up another half a star just for those, but... Meh.

Rating: 2.5/5

>Railsea just clanged onto the WL.

>245 sibylline: All aboard! :)

30. On Beauty by Zadie Smith



The self-absorbed middle-aged white male academic who spends his time cheating on his wife and gazing into his navel is possibly the single oldest, most widespread, most tedious subject in literary fiction. But Zadie Smith does something really interesting with it: she puts that guy at the center of her novel, but then, instead of following him into his self-absorption, she opens up the world around him to us, showing us perspectives you don't usually get in that sort of story. We see what life looks like from many other points of view, including those of his down-to-earth black wife, Kiki, and their mixed-race children, each of whom is struggling to define their identity in their own very different ways. And Smith tackles a dizzying array of themes, from race relations to post-modernism to free speech, some of them directly, some subtly.

Her characters are great, too. (I have a particular fondness for Kiki.) Admittedly, some of them are better-developed than others... All of them feel real, but we spend more time getting to know and understand some of them, and it's often not the ones I expected the novel to focus on. It had something of a tendency to jump around from person to person, sidelining situations I expected to be more important only to develop others tangential to them, in ways that sometimes left me feeling a little-off balance, but ultimately I think it all worked surpriaingly well.

Rating: 4/5

31. Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876-1939 by William J. Fanning, Jr.



Apparently people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a little bit obsessed with the idea of death rays. And so is William J. Fanning, Jr. , because this is an obsessively compiled work. ("Death rays," I should note, is used in a very broad sense here to describe pretty much anything that can reach through the air to cause damage, including not just beams of light or other radiation, but also arcs of electricity, and even sound waves. And the purported effects range from shutting off an automobile engine, to remotely detonating stores of gunpowder, to vaporizing cities.)

The book consists of two parts. The first looks at newspaper stories and other "factual" accounts talking about inventors who'd purported to invent death rays (including serious scientists, cranks, and hoaxers), rumors about governments supposed to have them under development, and speculations about what such an invention would mean for the future of war. The second part deals with death rays in fiction and popular culture, including books, movies, radio, and other media. Interestingly enough, this includes not just what we would now think of as science fiction, but also lots of detective stories and thrillers that treated death rays as if they were a familiar technology, or one that was inevitably going to be reality soon.

Turns out, this is one of those books that takes a subject I think sounds really interesting and ends up telling me way, way more than I actually wanted to know about it. If you have a scholarly interest in the subject of death rays -- and apparently there's at least one person who does, so I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be two -- it'll probably be a really useful resource. It may also be exactly the book you want if you're an SF writer looking to pen an alternate history novel about a more mad science-y version of WWI and want some real history to ground it in. But for me as a casual reader, the seemingly endless, slightly dry catalog of every mention of death rays in that time period ever did get to be a little much.

And, aside from a few more detailed stories about individual inventors and hoaxers, it mostly really was just a catalog. There's not really much analysis about what it all means, for instance, although it is very easy to draw some interesting comparisons between what people thought death rays would do to war, and what atomic weapons did or didn't do to war later on. There's also not any attempt to explain the real or supposed science behind any of it. There are a few short quotes about how various death rays were supposed to work, ranging from plausible (if impractical) to utterly meaningless, but Fanning never spells out which is which. Well, no doubt science is not the guy's area of expertise, but it might have been nice to get some input from a physicist.

Rating: I, as a moderately interested general reader, am giving it 3/5, but if you have some actual use for a meticulously compiled collection of mentions of death rays between 1876 and 1939, it's going to be a lot more worthwhile for you than that.

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

Two great reviews! - for very different reasons. Thanks for the review of On Beauty which might just be the spur I need to finally pick it off my shelf - so far it's felt like a bit of a duty read but now I feel like I might actually enjoy it.

And your death ray review made me yelp with laughter!

Thanks! And I really hope you like On Beauty as much as I did if you get to it. It's garnered a lot of mixed reviews, which I find interesting, but it definitely worked for me.

>248 bragan: A very interesting review. Thank you!

You are possibly the only person that I know who would voluntarily request a book called Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876-1939. I like that about you.

>251 OscarWilde87: Thanks!

>252 RidgewayGirl: I have to be honest, I kind of like that about me, too. :)

>252 RidgewayGirl: Haha. So true!!! :)

>247 bragan: I liked White Teeth when I read it last year and have been considering whether to try something else by Zadie Smith. Sounds like it might be worth giving this one a go.

>248 bragan: That's actually exactly the sort of thing I get drawn to, and I did come across the book somewhere not long ago and had noted it, so I'm glad to know in advance that it ends up as basically just a list. I think I'll give it a miss.

>252 RidgewayGirl: I had a unformed thought bubbling through my head while reading this review giggling, and this was it, so thank you!

>254 avidmom: Well, death rays are interesting! How can you not want to read a book about death rays? :)

>255 valkyrdeath: White Teeth is also on my TBR Pile. I'm definitely looking forward to it now.

And the death rays book is a good list, it should be noted. A very complete list, and one that tells you all about what the contents of all those newspaper articles and pulp figures stories were. Still, yeah, basically a list, when you get right down to it, and that does start to get old after a while, for me.

>256 janemarieprice: Glad to have amused so many people. :)

>252 RidgewayGirl:, >256 janemarieprice:, me too!

I think I will pass on the Death Rays.

32. The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente



This is book number three in Catherynne M. Valente's "The Girl Who..." series, a series ostensibly aimed at kids but also appealing and satisfying for adults who remember what it was like to be kids, and to love fairy stories and get lost in the worlds they offer.

As the title might indicate, this one's a bit of a departure. The previous volume ended on quite a cliffhanger for our usual hero, September, and this one leaves her there for a good long while, although she does put in an appearance at the end. Instead, the story focuses on a different character: a troll named Hawthorn who is swapped as a changeling for a boy named Thomas and grows up in the human world, always feeling different but never quite knowing why or how. Which is a slightly disconcerting change of focus, maybe, but once you accept that, the story is as smart and as charming as the previous volumes. (Well, maybe not the first one. I think that one's still my favorite, although perhaps only because it surprised me so much.)

Rating: 4/5

Catching up with your posts Betty. Fun stuff. Funny how we associate you with an intelligent book on death rays in media.

My jottings as I read through:

>238 bragan: Míeville on Melville. Guess he couldn't help himself.

>247 bragan: very nice on Zadie Smith. You reminded me of what I liked about On Beauty.

>261 dchaikin: Well, I suppose there are worse (or at least much less entertaining) things to be associated with!

And thanks!

Huh. Touchstones don't seem to be working properly on this one. Weird. Wonder if there's a problem with them at the moment, or if it's just this book.

Well, anyway:

33. Running with Rhinos: Stories from a Radical Conservationist by Ed Warner



Ed Warner is geologist who made his fortune in the oil industry and now spends time working for wildlife conservation in Africa. (He is aware that this particular combination of life paths tends to raise a few eyebrows, but does not believe the two things are actually contradictory.)

In this book, he talks about his various trips to Zimbabwe and Namibia to work on projects aimed at protecting wild rhinos. He's got some interesting stories about working with the animals in the field, and includes some good descriptions of the places he's visited, which he presents with a real enthusiasm for the wildlife and the knowledgeable eye of a geologist.

But... Well, you can tell the guy's not a professional writer. He seems like someone who'd it'd be interesting to shoot the breeze with around a dinner table, especially if you happen to know any of the people he's talking about, but that doesn't necessarily translate into writing a book. So significant portions of this feel rather too much like rambling, disjointed anecdotes, some of which basically boil down to "Let me tell you about this funny thing my buddy said!" and were probably a lot more funny if you were there. (Also, I would probably not take any medical advice from this guy. Just sayin'.)

Rating: 3/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

34. Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam



This is a novel about a family of Bangladeshi immigrants living in New York. (In Brooklyn, of course. Somehow, it's always Brooklyn.) There's Anwar, an amiable pothead who has seen some shit and kept some secrets; his somewhat less amiable wife, Hashi; their rebellious teenage daughter, Charu; and the college-age Ella, a niece they adopted when her parents were killed in a war, who is now struggling to define her own sexual identity. The first half of the book follows them for one summer in New York, and the second half features a trip to Bangladesh to visit relatives none of them have seen in many years.

It took me a little while to warm to the writing here. Well, mostly the dialog: it's an odd combination of earthy casualness and long, fancy speeches that feel more than a little unrealistic even after factoring in the knowledge that most of the characters are coming from a somewhat different cultural and linguistic background than I am. But mostly I was able to roll with it, since the characters seemed well-drawn and interesting, regardless. And while the story itself felt a little unfocused at times, if only just in that way that character-based literary novels often are, it came together in the end in a way that satisfied me well enough. And learning a little about the history of Bangladesh -- a subject about which I confess I knew essentially nothing -- was interesting, too.

Rating: Although I went back and forth on this one a little while I was reading it, in the end I think I feel happy calling it a 4/5.

35. Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe



Randall Munroe (best known for the brilliant webcomic xkcd) sets out to explain lots of complicated things using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language and some awesome line drawings. They're genuinely complicated things, too, from the periodic table of the elements, to what's inside your laptop computer or under your car's hood, to how a nuclear power plant works. Needless to say, the explanations are simple and kind of limited, but a lot less so than you'd think. You won't learn any of the technical names for things, but you may, in fact, learn a lot of other stuff. And the simplified language is bizarrely appealing. A lot of the names and descriptions he comes up with are clever, charming, and funny. (And he doesn't let being limited to a thousand word vocabulary keep him from making some good jokes, either.) More than that, I found it got me to actually stop and think about the things being described and their functions much more than just giving them their proper names would have. It made for a really fun, interesting change of perspective.

Rating: 4.5/5. (Which might be half a star high, maybe, but I love Munroe's stuff way too much to be entirely objective about it.)

Happy Easter, Betty!

>226 RidgewayGirl: LOL! Happy Easter to you, too!

>266 RidgewayGirl: I've actually seen that expression on my kids faces. :)

>266 RidgewayGirl: : )

Betty - Enjoyed your latest reviews. Still not sure whether I would enjoy Thing Explainer.

>265 bragan: Sounds interesting. Nice review.

>269 dchaikin: Thanks! I can't imagine not enjoying Thing Explainer, but I suppose that might say as much about me as about the book. :)

>270 brodiew2: Thank you, too!

>265 bragan: it got me to actually stop and think about the things being described and their functions much more than just giving them their proper names would have
This sounds good. I have it and have gotten leery that it'll be annoying so this is a good re-frame.

(oops, edited to correct reference post #)

>272 detailmuse: It does sound like the sort of gimmick that could get annoying easily, I suppose, but it really doesn't. Certainly didn't for me, anyway.

36. Beautiful Chaos by Gary Russell



This is a Doctor Who novel featuring the Tenth Doctor and Donna. Which automatically means I have complicated mixed feelings about it, since on the one hand, Donna was possibly one of my favorite characters in the history of the show, and, on the other, the way she was written out was so unforgivably awful on every level that it's hard not to get upset and angry about it all over again every time I think about her. Sigh.

But that's the fault of an entirely different Russell. So, evaluating this book just on its own merits... Well, the plot isn't anything special, being mostly an uninspired collection of over-familiar tropes from the show, although it does have a surprisingly emotionally affecting moment towards the end, and the main villain gets a few fun lines. And I do like Gary Russell's careful attempt to give real lives and personalities to all of the bit-player characters who get taken over or killed by the alien menace. Sometimes attempts to do that come across as manipulative or contrived, but he makes it feel like a genuine attempt not to lose sight of anyone's humanity.

The writing is readable, but not exactly of high literary quality or anything, which is probably mostly what you expect from a TV tie-in novel. And the astronomy that features in the plot is pretty terrible, although maybe that's mostly what you expect from Doctor Who. And in fairness to the author, he probably never anticipated that his inaccurate depiction of a radio telescope control room would be read by someone sitting in an actual radio telescope control room. So I'll try not to hold it against him too much, even if I did spend entirely too much of the novel wanting to scream things like, "One antenna DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN ARRAY!!" at him.

The book's main strength, really, is in its depiction of Donna and her family. Donna is her lovably strident self, her granddad is as irresistibly sweet as always, and I could hear their voices clearly in my head throughout. I also like the fact that, although Gary Russell captures Donna's mother's sour attitude perfectly, he also goes to some length to try to make her feel a little more complex and a little more sympathetic than the show itself ever did.

Rating: 3/5

37. The Rights of the Reader by Daniel Pennac



Why do little kids who love storytime with all their hearts grow up to be older kids who think reading is boring? And how can children be encouraged to love books and engage with them, rather than regarding them as a tedious schoolroom chore?

These sound like heavy subjects, but Daniel Pennac writes about them with delightful charm, humor and passion. I will admit, in many ways I find the experiences he's talking about a little hard to relate to personally, and not just because Pennac is French and has different cultural touchstones than I do. I'm not a parent, myself, and to say that I was not a reluctant reader as a child would be to go so far beyond the realm of understatement that we might actually need a new word for it. But I do remember, all too well, the experience of having all the joy and meaning sucked out of reading by having a book foisted on me in the classroom complete with quizzes to prove I read the thing and papers in which I was expected to parrot back some lifeless received wisdom about what it meant. And based on those experiences, I think he's dead-on in his prescription for rectifying that: let kids experience books as stories, rather than as work, first and foremost, and the kind of engagement that leads to them actually being able to understand and discuss and get something out of literature will be much more likely to follow.

Rating: 4/5

he probably never anticipated that his inaccurate depiction of a radio telescope control room would be read by someone sitting in an actual radio telescope control room.

The Marshall McLuhan Effect! :)

And in fairness to the author, he probably never anticipated that his inaccurate depiction of a radio telescope control room would be read by someone sitting in an actual radio telescope control room. So I'll try not to hold it against him too much, even if I did spend entirely too much of the novel wanting to scream things like, "One antenna DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN ARRAY!!" at him.

I had to laugh at that. >:-) The reader's experience most certainly has an impact on the way the book is interpreted. I'll almost certainly never read a Doctor Who novel (far too tied up with memories of hiding behind a cushion), but I'm quite happy to read about you reading them.

>276 LolaWalser: Am I Marshall McLuhan in this scenario? That is awesome. :)

>277 Helenliz: I am always glad to entertain with my second-hand Whovian reading!

And it is, of course, a truism that whatever narrow, obscure thing you happen to be an expert in, you will find yourself wincing whenever that thing is portrayed in books and movies, and, conversely, whatever thing you're not an expert in but think you can get away with writing or making movies about, someone is going to roll their eyes at how wrong you got it.

>278 bragan: Even if the author carefully markets the book at people who think Jodrell Bank is a financial institution, there are bound to be well-meaning busybodies who go around saying "You must read this, it's all about radio-astronomers". Or who decide that it would make a perfect Christmas present. Murphy will get you every time.

>279 thorold: I don't think that's actually happened to me, as such, but I do get a lot of well-meaning friends enthusiastically sending me science articles about really basic stuff I already knew, because "It's about space!" And then I read it and go, yep, that was an article about space, all right. :)

>275 bragan: After reading your comments about that book, I realize now that from first to sixth grade the teacher always read a book to us .... our job was to remain quiet and listen. And, as far as I can remember, we always were and there was no quiz at the end of the book .... or anything. I don't remember "required" reading of a specific book till 8th grade (The Lord of the Flies, I hated it).

>281 avidmom: That is precisely Pennac's recommendation for how to get kids to actually absorb and care about a book: read aloud to them. I remember with some fondness my third grade teacher reading us lots of E. B. White, but she's the only one who ever did, at least once we were out of kindergarten. Otherwise, I think it was mostly short stories with reading comprehension tests afterward in elementary school, and then the dreaded required books starting in a big way in 8th grade.

I didn't read Lord of the Flies until a few years ago. I found it interesting, despite having a lot of issues with it, but I can so easily imagine how much I would have loathed it if made to read it in school at that age.

>281 avidmom:, 282 I read Lord of the Flies in grade 10 in the late 70s and rather liked it. Although I was an avid reader, I rarely finished a school assigned book (in my memory, The Old Man and the Sea was over 1,000 pages. Note: it's about 120p). But I actually finished Lord of the Flies, so that says a lot. A few years ago I talked to a friend who taught grade 10 English, and she said she had done Lord of the Flies for years, but she was finding that the female section of her classes were completely resistant to it. When I went to university in my 40s, I studied the Lord of the Flies and I was surprised at how well I remembered it (since my husband will tell you that I don't remember anything at all). So there you go.

>283 Nickelini: There are always, somehow, a few books one ends up liking despite, rather than because, of having been taught them in class. I can't imagine Lord of the Flies would have been that one for me, though. (My own list includes Huckleberry Finn, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Hamlet... All of which I then went on to re-read as an adult to remove the classroom taint from them.)

>284 bragan: Yeah, school can definitely ruin a book. For my own daughters, who are both strong readers, it was killed by how long they took to go over a short book. They were told not to read ahead, but when you're reading a 150 page novel, it can be hard not to. And to stretch that out over two months is torture. I'm also surprised at how many books they covered that I did myself back in the late 70s. Change it up a bit, I think.

I did Hamlet at uni in my 40s and loved it. I wouldn't have had the patience in high school.

I did Hamlet, aged 15. I hated just about everything thing we read for English between 14 & 16, and I put that down the the teacher. She managed to make everything just so duuullllllll. I quite enjoyed English until then. Didn't put me off reading, but I've never read Shakespeare (or indeed, any play) since (quite happy to watch them) and it did take me over 25 years to read Hardy again.

There's something most dispiriting about the dissect this paragraph in massive detail. And I find it hard to work out what benefit is supposed to derive from trying to discuss emotions that, aged 14-16, you're in no way mature enough to have experienced or to even comprehend.

>285 Nickelini: At least my teachers did one thing right: I don't believe I was ever told not to read ahead. We were always given the book and told to finish it by a certain date, and only then would we start discussing it. I cannot imagine trying to slow down my reading of a single book to stretch over two months. It sounds like agony.

>286 Helenliz: Hamlet was like a breath of fresh air for me, after being taught Romeo and Juliet indifferently and King Lear incredibly badly nearly put me off Shakespeare for life. I think it helped that the ending reminded me of a TV show I was into at the time... I was ripe for enjoying bodies-on-the-floor tragedy, apparently. :)

Reading a book at the right time in your life can be so important to what it does or doesn't do for you... There are so many excellent books that are probably just not right for most teenagers, but when you force them on the kids at the wrong time, they're likely not to realize that and to come away with the feeling that the book is just worthless.

I asked one of the high school seniors I work with how he liked The Lord of the Flies and he said he loved it. And I was completely stunned that somebody not only liked that book but enthusiastically liked that book! It's then when it dawned on me, maybe 8th grade was not the right time for that particular book....

(And it was required reading for my geography class of all things, WT????)

>288 avidmom: Geography class? Did your teacher think it was a serious study of an island?

It's all I can figure.... Nothing else makes sense.