| A Really Long Update Listing the Books I've Read So Far This Year |
| I have been reading so much good stuff this year and I haven’t updated about books once. Y’all probably think that I’ve given up books entirely, that I’m practically illiterate these days, but no! I still read. I just forget to update. And I really should be better about keeping up with my book reviews because it’s the only part of this website that my mom reads and understands. ("I read your webpage, Emilie, and it’s great! I just don’t know who any of the people are that you talk about.") So, for my mom, here is my book list of 2006, so far. What Remains, Carole Radziwell. Carole Radziwell lost her husband, Anthony, and their two best friends in a three week period. The best friends just happened to be Anthony’s first cousin John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. I only recommend it if you’re interested in the Kennedy connection. If you’re just looking for a memoir, or a memoir about grief and loss, there are plenty of others that are better. (A Year of Magical Thinking, for example. This isn’t even in the same league.) Gary Benchley, Rock Star, Paul Ford. Laugh-out-loud funny, especially for music geeks. I loved it. It’s light but it works.Miss Misery, Andy Greenwald. I expected this one to be part High Fidelity, part Gary Benchley, part Jay McInerney, part book-about-blogging, and it sort of was, but it just didn’t work for me. I was interested as I was reading, but I was really unsatisfied with the conclusion. Now You See It, Alison Lynn. For some reason, I like books about people who go missing. In Now You See It, a young wife disappears one day, and there’s no sign of foul play. I wanted to know more about the where, how, why, all the details that were left unanswered at the end, but that was sort of the point. It was very compelling. A Wedding in December, Anita Shreve. So bad. Rent The Big Chill and skip this one entirely. I haven’t read any other Anita Shreve, so maybe they aren’t all cliched and poorly written. This one, however, really didn’t have any redeeming qualities.Grievous Angel, Jane Hill. Any novel that uses a Gram Parsons reference in its title is a novel I’m going to buy and read immediately, and I liked this one. I don’t think it’s giving anything away to say that I enjoy a book with an unreliable narrator (that’s part of why I liked Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller when I read it a year or so ago). Grievous Angel, Jessica Hundley and Polly Parsons. Yes, you read that right. I have read two books called Grievous Angel so far this year. (I actually didn’t read them back-to-back, though.) This Grievous Angel was a memoir about Gram by his daughter and a music journalist, but it really didn’t give me much extra insight. I have still not read Hickory Wind by Ben Fong-Torres but I’m guessing that one’s better. I’ll let you know. Baker Towers, Jennifer Haigh. I unintentionally read this right after the Sago mine tragedy in West Virginia, which is fitting because the book is about a mining town. I enjoyed it as I was reading it, but there were only a couple of characters from it who stuck with me. It might be an okay airplane read, though. (Then again, there are probably quicker and more satisfying airplane reads out there, truth be told. It was good but nothing special.)A Seahorse Year, Stacey D’Erasmo. In addition to books about people who go missing, I also like books about people with mental problems. A Seahorse Year painted a very vivid, very real picture of a family helping a child struggle with schizophrenia, and I appreciated the well-drawn characters. (It reminded me in some ways of I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb, though I’m not saying it’s that good — it’s definitely not.) Mad River Road, Joy Fielding. I read every single Joy Fielding mystery that comes out and usually complain at the end about how stupid it was, but I actually liked this one better than some of the others. Now this could be your airplane read — much better than Baker Towers in that regard. Good Grief, Lolly Winston. A young wife loses her husband and slowly rebuilds her life, but Lolly Winston writes with humor and wit. I really, really liked it.Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, Ayelet Waldman. Man, I didn’t want to like Ayelet Waldman so much, but I loved this book. I still think about the characters in the book sometimes, and I read it at the beginning of the year. My book club read this one too and I think most everyone enjoyed it. It was a quick read that actually had surprising depth. I liked it enough that I went right out and bought Waldman’s first novel… Daughter’s Keeper. Riveting. I don’t know whether I liked Love and Other Impossible Pursuits or Daughter’s Keeper better because I liked them both so much.The Position, Meg Wolitzer. Imagine discovering, as a teenager, that your parents have written a Joy of Sex-esque book (complete with illustrations of the two of them engaged in the activity they write about) and have become famous for it. You’d be pretty horrified, right? So are the kids in this book. I really liked this unique take on the family novel. It was flawed, definitely, but interesting and enjoyable nonetheless. Early Leaving, Judy Goldman. Even though it kept me engrossed while I was reading, it didn’t affect me the way that Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin did. Both are about mothers who wonder what could have led her child to become involved in a violent incident, but Early Leaving was not nearly as well-developed. (It’s probably a little unfair to compare the two because they really were quite different, but still — Early Leaving just felt unfinished, somehow.)Veronica, Mary Gaitskill. I nominated this for book club one month but after I read it myself, I was glad it didn’t get selected. This was probably one of the best-reviewed books of last year, but it was just too dark for me to fully enjoy or appreciate it. I’ll just say this isn’t a book that I’ll be tempted to re-read, that’s for sure. Emily’s Reasons Why Not, Carrie Gerlach. Yes, this is the book that was adapted into the short-lived Heather Graham sitcom. With that in mind, the book is exactly what you’d expect. It is virtually indistinguishable from other similar "Why can’t I find The One?" chick lit books, but it was fine if that’s what you’re in the mood for.The Good Life, Jay McInerney. I have been so disappointed with Jay McInerney (and Bret Easton Ellis, while we’re at it) in recent years, because I truly love a few of his early books but have been sorely disappointed here lately. The Good Life was readable (which is more than I can say for his last, Model Behavior), but it still wasn’t very good. I knew about fifty pages from the end that two outcomes were possible, and I really didn’t care which one happened — that’s not a good sign. (I finished it anyway and still didn’t care what happened at the end.)The New Rules of High School, Blake Nelson. I have not been shy about my unabashed love of young adult novels, so I don’t mind telling you about how excited I was about this one. When I was in high school, one of my favorite books was Blake Nelson’s novel Girl. (I still want to go to Portland, Oregon, because of that book.) I identified with the narrator, a high school student, a lot. (Blake Nelson did an exceptionally convincing job of writing as a teenage girl.) Although the main character was in high school, Girl was not a young adult book, and I still read it occasionally and still like it. I have always liked it so much that I still check for new Blake Nelson novels at the bookstore every so often — he had one other novel after that one that I found, but I didn’t like it nearly as much. Still, my love for Girl was so pure and so strong that I kept looking to see when a new one would arrive. I was thrilled I stumbled on The New Rules of High School one day at the bookstore and found out that Blake Nelson was indeed still writing, but now he is writing YA fiction so I had been looking in the wrong section. It was no Girl (probably because this time it was from a boy’s perspective), but it was a nice surprise nonetheless. Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult. I like Jodi Picoult for those times when you’re in the mood to read the fiction equivalent of a Lifetime television movie. (In fact, her book The Pact was actually made into a Lifetime movie, I think.) It’s not going to make it into the canon or anything, but it’s fine for a Sunday afternoon when you want to stay in your pajamas, you know? I probably liked The Pact and My Sister’s Keeper better than this one, but it was fine. (For some reason — probably the partial setting — this one reminded me of a Barbara Kingsolver novel, although of course it isn’t even close to being as good as The Bean Trees. If you don’t read Barbara Kingsolver, you are for sure missing out. Read The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible — a masterpiece — before you do anything else.) Halfway House, Katharine Noel. This book is practically brand new, but I read it as soon as it came out because of a review I read. An overachieving teenage girl breaks down at a high school swim meet, and the book chronicles her family’s reaction to the breakdown over the next few years. It was a lovely, moving book that I wholeheartedly recommend.The Ruins of California, Martha Sherrill. Another brand new one that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love a good coming-of-age story, especially one that takes place in California in the Seventies and Eighties. I loved the ending. Loop Group, Larry McMurtry. Duh, it’s Larry McMurtry. Of course it’s good. It’s more The Desert Rose-Larry McMurtry than The Last Picture Show-Larry McMurtry, but does it matter? No.Love Monkey, Kyle Smith. It’s a good thing Kyle Smith references High Fidelity in the very beginning of this novel; otherwise it would be a total rip-off of Nick Hornby. It’s still a rip-off of Nick Hornby, but at least Smith is aware of that. Still, I liked it pretty well. (It’s totally different from the Tom Cavanagh television show that it inspired, though, for what it’s worth.)A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity, Kathleen Gilles Seidel. A story of the politics of being popular in early adolescence and how those same politics follow us through our lives, told from a mother’s perspective. It was really compelling (and was a super-fast read as a bonus). It wasn’t anything deep or particularly different, but it was very straightforward and felt very real and very true to me, which goes a long way. How to Be Lost, Amanda Eyre Ward. I think I read this in one day, half during my lunch hour alone. I really liked Amanda Eyre Ward’s previous novel, Sleep Toward Heaven, so I was glad when I realized that her newest had come out in paperback. I think I liked this one even better than her first, even though there was one plot twist that I thought was contrived (and there is nothing I hate more in a book than something that seems contrived — but I forgave the author because the rest of it was so good). I appreciated the ending but, oh, I wanted just one more chapter, or just a short epilogue, because I really wanted to know what happened next. L’America, Martha McPhee. I bought this by accident, thinking that it was another book by the author of a novel called Best Friends that I read several years ago and enjoyed. (I can’t even remember what happened in Best Friends, but I know I thoroughly enjoyed it.) Turns out Best Friends is by a woman named Martha Moody, not Martha McPhee, but oh, well, I had already bought the book by the time I realized my mistake. I enjoyed the book a lot, actually, to my surprise — it’s about a young American woman who falls in love with a young Italian man while she is in Italy as a teenager and follows them through their lives, when they are together and apart. I couldn’t help but think that the book would have been so much more moving, though, if the author hadn’t revealed the couple’s fate so early in the book. From the beginning you know that they marry other people and that the woman dies on September 11, and I think the story would have been so much more powerful if the reader experienced their love affair without knowing what was to come. Sometimes knowing the end of the tragedy heightens the suspense, but in this case, the opposite was true. I would have been more eager to turn the page had I not already known what was going to ultimately befall them. I still liked it pretty well, though. Charmed Thirds, Megan McCafferty. If you are one of our female readers, you need to immediately go out and find Sloppy Firsts, its sequel, Second Helpings, and this, the newly released third volume of the trilogy. I love Megan McCafferty’s books so much that I rushed out to buy this as soon as I realized it was available. I was not disappointed in the slightest and I already wish there was another one. (Once you’ve finished with these three and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants trilogy, read both of Jaclyn Moriarty’s novels, Feeling Sorry for Celia and The Year of Secret Assignments. You can thank me later.)The Bright Forever, Lee Martin. There is nothing better than randomly picking up a novel just because the cover looks nice and then being blown away by its contents. I was amazed by The Bright Forever. Think In Cold Blood meets The Lovely Bones — I adored it. I could not put it down. It might be my favorite random find since I discovered The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and y’all know how much I loved that one. The Bright Forever was magnificent. She Got Up Off the Couch, Haven Kimmel. I loved it almost as much I loved its precursor, A Girl Named Zippy. There aren’t that many funny memoirs, but Haven Kimmel has written two of the best. She rivals David Sedaris as far as hilarious family stories go, but is, dare I say it, more consistently funny.How to Sleep with a Movie Star, Kristin Harmel. Silly, ridiculous fairy tale about a journalist who interviews the world’s hottest movie star, and… you can probably guess the rest. What? There’s nothing wrong with fluff every now and again. I’ve read a lot worse as far as bathtub books go, you can be sure of that. Family and Other Accidents, Shari Goldhagen. A novel about two brothers, ten years apart, orphaned by the time the youngest is 15 and the oldest 25. The book follows them into middle age and by the end, I felt like I knew them both. This is our June book for book club and I hope the rest of my book club enjoys it as much as I did.A Place of Hiding, Elizabeth George. More than a year after I began reading all thirteen Elizabeth George mysteries, I’m almost done — A Place of Hiding is the next-to-last one. (Obviously, I’ve read a lot in between them.) Even after reading twelve of them, I still can’t predict who the killer is. (Compare that with, say, Mary Higgins Clark, where once you’ve read a couple, you can predict the murderer by page 20 every time.) I love a good mystery but they’re so hard to find — that’s why Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley series is so excellent.If you’ve read anything good lately that you can recommend, please let me know! |
| Posted in 02/03/2010 by Emile in Books |
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