Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

★ ★ ★ ★ I read this whole book in a single day. It was an easy read, but good.  Audrey Niffenegger is also the author of The Time Traveler's Wife, which I've also read. I enjoyed this book a lot more although there are clearly some themes that the two books have in common. The theme of individuals traveling and communicating in ways that aren't typically possible is at the forefront, as well as some rather twisted personal relationships. I was incredibly uncomfortable about the romantic relationship in The Time Traveler's Wife, which, although made to seem beautiful, was in actuality somewhat disturbing. He knew her as both an adult and as a child, which is, at the least strange, and at the most somewhat perverse. In Her Fearful Symmetry, there are ghosts, two sets of twins, and some very strange familial/sexual relationships. The tone of the book is sufficiently dark that you can anticipate the plot twists with relative ease, I thought. Basically, if there is a...

★ ★ ★ I wanted to like this book more than I did, but I felt like there was too much going on for me to become involved in any one character. The book is the story of a family holding onto the past and trying to make sense of what's happening to them and to their nation. With so many characters who all have a different response to what's happening, it's somewhat confusing as to what viewpoint we're supposed to identify with.  There are also a lot of themes at play here - racism, colonialism, family struggles, the relationships between generations, traditionalism vs. modernism, and a large group of people attempting to make sense of the world in the midst of incredible changes of a magnitude that far exceeds their ability to cope.  In some cases, this plays out almost ironically. When Daniel Dorai decides to return home to Chevathar and reboot the family farming colony, he finances the endeavor with earnings from his skin whitening cream. He knows how to be...

★ ★ ★ ★ When I saw this book on the shelf of the Edisto Island Bookstore this summer, I was instantly interested in reading this.   I should admit up front that part of the appeal of this book was that it was fictionalized Jewish history. I love books about Jewish people.  When I said that to Patrick, he looked at me like I was crazy. It does sound exoticizing*, but I feel this way because books about Jews make Jews less exotic, not more.  Growing up in South Carolina, I knew one Jewish person, and I had no idea what it meant to be Jewish.  I certainly never got any history lessons or world culture lessons about Jews.  I did not understand, for instance, that they are a vast and diverse culture spread across the whole planet that is made of many different groups with their own individual cultures.  Even more interesting is that I was raised in a Baptist church and grew up with the stories of the Old Testament, but no one ever told me...

★ ★ ★ ★ I read the first book in the series years ago, and only just now returned for 2 and 3.  In the intervening years, Stieg has lost none of his appeal.  I think we all know what an incredible character Lisbeth Salander is, and honestly Blomkvist is still about as appealing as an over the hill playboy ever is - so sometimes a lot, sometimes less so.  The confusion I felt about her being hung up on him at the end of the first novel was reiterated once again at the beginning of the second.  He proves incredibly loyal through books 2 and 3, and clever besides, and yet it never becomes at all clear why Lisbeth would fall in love with him.   I think the primary appeal of the novels lies neither in the plot nor the characters, but rather in Stieg Larsson's writing style. He is practically a documentarian, providing details continually throughout the entire novel that most authors wouldn't have provided to begin with.  For example, he provides incredi...

★ ★ I'd heard a lot of comparisons between Battle Royale and The Hunger Games , so I wanted to see if they were well founded.  Other than the central concept of kids battling it out, it is not particularly similar.  I realize that to say that them having the same central concept yet being totally different sounds ridiculous, but I think they are. The main act of Battle Royale is the fighting, and while the fighting is important in The Hunger Games, it's used as a way to pull out other issues.  The relationship with the state and the purpose of the games is much clearer in Hunger Games.  I think this makes the violence in Battle Royale more menacing, in that it seems without purpose, but it also makes it seem less important, almost trivial.  This is stupid, kids are killing each other. There is, perhaps a lesson there, that we need the context of Rue and Katniss's family and relationships made clear to us before we care that kids are killing each other. So...

★ ★ ★.5 When I first picked up this book, I thought the title was referring to an entire continent.  I was intrigued by the idea that the title was reducing a whole continent down that way, as simple the light between two oceans.  As it turns out, the title is both more literal and more metaphorical. The main characters are Tom and Isabel, and the story is told largely through Tom's eyes, although the omnipotent narrator provides insight into the other characters increasingly more often as the book continues. The story begins as Tom returns from the Great War to Western Australia, where he begins tending lighthouses for the government. The work is governed by strict rules and an order that Tom finds appealing after his experiences at war.  At one point he says that rules are what prevent man from becoming savages.  He clings to the safety of this order as well as his dedication to something he perceives to be larger than himself - the Janus lighthouse guidin...

★★★★ As I observe my neighbors across the street yelling at their kids as they are often wont to do, I think about Nell and her primer.  I'm also thinking about the Mouse Army and whether they ended up better or worse off than the boys born into their families. They didn't have families, but they had each other.   Patrick and I are having an ongoing discussion about what men and women (generalizations, heyo!) look for in media.  Someone posited that women look for a story, words they can sing along to, characters they like.  We're narrative.  Men look for a mood, an experience, a feeling, a setting.   I didn't immediately agree or disagree with him, but I've been gathering information and observations and I keep revisiting the conversation, both mentally and with him.  It's made me wonder how we would perceive this story differently. The technology is a huge part of it - it's at the center of the story - the fate of nations and the entire ...

★★★★ It's not that I resisted reading this, it's more that it just wasn't really on my radar.  It was gifted to me by a friend as an epub, and I knew it was fairly long so it appealed to me as something that I could read while traveling.  I made the mistake of starting it last Thursday, and devoured it in a weekend, and anticipate starting the second book in the series as soon as I can get it loaded on my iPad. I resisted looking at anything about the HBO series until I was finished with the book.  I really like being able to imagine the characters and wonder about how they look when they do things.  Characters are seldom well visualized from the beginning for me.  It takes a while before I know what they look like in my head.  I didn't want to spoil my own imaginings with how some producer thinks they look.  I took a peek after I finished the book because at that point, I felt like my ideas were well enough ingrained to resist alteration by some pict...

★ ★ ★ ★   I was ridiculously ill with a sinus infection when I found this on the living room sofa like a literary present to the part of me that wanted to be a kid, reading in bed while my mom brought me something hot to drink.  I had to make my beverage myself, but finding the book was a really nice treat.  It was Kristen's and I stole it for the 2 hours it took me to read.  The Bad Beginning is a short little novella and a great read.  Having never seen the movie, I was still able to very vividly conjure up images of the characters.  The descriptions are not particularly thorough,  but the details Mr. Snicket (a pseudonym) does provide are incredibly evocative and allow you to fill in all the gray areas with the physical characteristics you think go along with his opinionated descriptions.   The writing is clever enough to be entertaining for an adult, but simple enough to be appropriate for children. I was really surprised by how many thin...

★ ★ ★ I'm sick of Chuck Palahniuk, which is kind of too bad since I've really enjoyed his books in the past.  I like his stories, I like what he has to say, but it's so damned heavy handed.  There's no subtlety - it's all shock and awe and in your face. A few other trends I've noticed.  His characters find themselves in cars a lot.  It's like they don't belong anywhere, so they have to be mobile.  Also, they are almost universally awful.  Would it kill him to write a character I don't hate once in a while?  Finally, only batshit crazy things ever happen to them.  I find it hard to identify with individuals who are clearly nutso. I listened to this in the car on the way to SC - it took a little less than 6 hours, which is pretty short for an audiobook.  It was good for listening in that the fast pace kept me interested, but I didn't find the characters particularly compelling. The girl who read the audiobook did the best Evelyn (prono...

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Bill Bryson rocked my world with A Short History of Nearly Everything, and this one book is somehow even better, maybe because the histories he's telling deal with our most intimate surrounds. Bryson marches through our houses room by room, answering questions most of us have never even thought to ask. It's a fascinating premise for a book, made even more so by Bryson's conversational writing style*. I stretched out the reading of this book because I didn't want it to end, but found no difficulty picking it up and putting it down and devouring it in little bites. It's like running into a particularly fascinating friend on the bus. Even better, the information turns out to be so immediately applicable all around you. For example, I read about Henry Dreyfuss and his design of the cradle desk telephone and then that day went to buy stamps and he was featured on the pioneers of industrial design stamps, and I knew why. It was oddly satisfying. Since...

★★★ I listened to this on my drive down to SC.  My friend Rob loves the book and wanted to know why I only gave it 3 stars - what did I not like about it.  It wasn't that I didn't like it, I just don't believe in grade inflation.  It worked as a book to listen to in the car because I was exhausted and Alice has scarcely experienced one thing before something else strange has befallen her.  It's not a long book (only 112 pages according to Amazon), but there's a lot of adventure.   I think had I read it the first time when I was a kid, I would have liked it more, but as an adult, the shallow plot didn't offer much more than amusement.  That's not a bad thing, as it is, in fact, written for children.  I imagine that someday I'll read it to my kids and they'll love it.

★★★★ Loved it.  I read The Girl Who Stopped Swimming  and felt kind of meh about it, but this book won a number of awards, so I decided to give Joshilyn Jackson another try.  I'm so glad I did.  The characters in this book are so incredibly real, so real that the whole time I was reading the book, I kept imagining the characters as people I know.  I couldn't help myself.  In one particular instance, it's a bit painful, but more on that later. Our heroine, Nonny Frett is between things, in about as many ways as you can imagine.  She's not quite divorced, but definitely not single.  She travels back and forth on a regular basis between where she lives in Athens and Between, where her family lives.  She loves Fisher, her great-niece like a mother, but hasn't really stepped up to be like a parent to her.  I identified with Nonny so strongly.  She's so torn between all these different places and things and parts of herself, ideas abou...

★ Why is chick lit so annoying?  Why are books aimed at women or about women usually about them coming into themselves or of themselves or with themselves or any of these things in the company of other women in such a way that you are immediately supposed to feel a camaraderie with every other woman over how awesome women are?  That's why I don't normally read this stuff. I think I have a healthy appreciation for female friendships - I'm not very good at making them, so when I have them, I try to treasure them.  And I also have an incredible respect for the self-journey, the one you have to go through to grow up.  However, how hard is it to write a book in which a woman is just a person that stuff happens to?  In books about men, they go on adventures, and at no point in the book does the man stop to think, Am I awakening?   No, because he's awake.  While thinking of his friends, does he stop to ponder, Dude, I am so happy to be here and ...

★★★★ I couldn't understand what the big deal is about this book, right up until I read it, that is.  People who love it, really love it.  Now I'm one of them. Yes, the characters are rabbits, and that might lead you to believe it's a children's book.  Assume that, and you miss out on some really amazing fiction. By making the characters rabbits, Adams has the option of giving them their own history and mythology.  It also makes it somewhat magical, in that it forces us to think about what other layers of existence are occurring alongside our own.  However, having rabbits as heroes and villains doesn't limit the story in any way. The rabbits are real characters from the very beginning.  There are leaders and followers, bullies and friends, prophets and warriors.  Some rabbits are as ingenious as others are stupid.  Throughout the book (which comes in at a healthy 476 pages), you really start to identify with the characters.  I think Bi...

★★ It's not that it was bad - it just wasn't much of anything.  It's reasonably witty and entertaining.  The satire of zombies seeking "human" rights, is clever, but Zombies doesn't really delve into anything deep enough to be more than a quick light read.   This counts toward the 100+ Challenge .

★★★★ I loved it.  Love, love, loved it.  The narrator, a girl named Rose, can taste the emotions in food.  Any book that starts with an usual idea like will have to try hard to screw it up.  Aimee Bender does the opposite.  She turns it into a tremendous story, not just of Rose, but of her entire family.  Her brother and father, who have their own strange powers, her sort of love story with her brother's best friend, her mother's affair.  The central fantastical premise becomes a lens through which the story of an otherwise normal family is told. The writing is lively, the characters are sympathetic, and the story moves at a pace fast enough to keep you interested.  I also like that you root for Rose, not because she's special, but because she's likable.   One of my favorite parts of the book was when she discovers her ability, she performs a series of experiments to find out if what she's experiencing is real.  She tests foods. ...

★★★★ I'm a sucker for any book by a Deborah (my momma's name).  Even so, I'm happy to be hooked on this series. It reminds me of the Outlander series somewhat.  There's time travel.  There's fantasy.  There's romance. The supporting characters are interesting, too.  The vampire characters have a kind of world weariness that I've always imagined people who've been alive for hundreds of years must have.  The witches are regular people, and the fact that there's a lesbian couple doesn't get any more attention than it deserves, which is refreshing. This book counts toward the 100+ Challenge , and the Chunkster Challenge .