General catch up

As a kid I read so voraciously that I blasted through hundreds of books a year (mostly sci fi and fantasy from my dad's collection, but other stuff too). I was always the girl sitting out of recess reading a book, in case my super nerdiness wasn't clear. Anyway I fell out of the habit of reading because I read so much on the internet and I'm so busy, but then this fall I bought myself a new Kindle (with a light!) and I read 21 books between October, when I got it, and the end of the year.

In vague order of reading:

• Scandal Wears Satin, Loretta Chase
• Them, John Ronson
• A Night Like This, Julia Quinn
• Cloud Atlas, David MItchell
• The Ugly Duchess, Eloisa James
• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
• Snuff, Terrry Pratchett
• This Book Is Full of Spiders (seriously, dude, don't touch it), David Wong
• The Men Who Stare At Goats, Jon Ronson
• Lost At Sea, Jon Ronson
• The Signal and the Noise -- Why so many predictions fail but some don't, Nate Silver
• Seduced by a Pirate, Eloisa James
• The Duke is Mine, Eloisa James
• Fingersmith, Sarah Waters,
• Argo -- How the CIA and Hollywood pulled of the most audacious rescue in the world, Antonio Mendez
• Death from the Skies! the science behind the end of the world, Philip Plait
• The Poisoner's Handbook -- Murder and the birth of forensic medicine in the jazz age, Deborah Blum
• The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson
• Unspoken, Sarah Rees Brennan
• Venus in Blue Jeans, Meg Benjamin
• A Night like This, Julia Quinn

It would take too long to write much about them but the kindle is great for romance novels (which I love, clearly) and also big fat books I otherwise wouldn't be able to lug around on the subway (Tolstoy). It was also great for all my overnight bus trips home and flights wherever. Nate Silver's book was great and really made me think about stuff like weather predictions. I probably read too many Jon Ronson books but mostly I'm sad there aren't more. Cloud Atlas made me cryyyyyyyyy and Fingersmith was amazing. 

I am always looking for book recommendations if people read something amazing this year! I think this is a pretty good idea of the stuff I enjoy. Romances, science books, non-fiction of just about any stripe, and apparently lesbian YA romances. 

Originally posted 2013

In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, by Tom Holland

That's a very flashy name for a book that's basically just about the historicity of the Koran. I have read a bunch of books about how the New Testament was assembled and picked over by early Christian church; this book is a very interesting look at early sources about Mohammed and how he fit into the landscape of the late antiquity Middle East, and how/when the Koran was put together. I enjoy the way Tom Holland writes; all his stuff is good.

Grade: B

Originally posted 2012

Reamde, Neal Stephenson

Just finished Neal Stephenson's Reamde. (It's slated to come out 9/20.) Like, I just finished it about 3 minutes ago and I just read 981 pages in four days so I'm trying to clear my head.

I will try to summarize the plot, because the back of the book doesn't really do much besides say, "High stakes technological thriller!!" which is SORT OF true. It's about Richard Forthrast, who runs an online computer game that competes with World of Warcraft. It's about some Chinese hacker kids who invent a virus to steal money from people in the game. (I wish it had been more about them, actually.) It's about Richard's niece, Zula, whose boyfriend makes a terrible deal with some mobsters. And it's about a bunch of international terrorists whose secret hideout in China just happens to be in the same run-down building as the hackers. 

It's super typical Stephenson; there's computer stuff, there's shooting, there's traveling the world, there's about 500 pages of climax where I had to keep putting the book down or I would forget to breathe. (I had to flip to the last page to make sure my favorite character survived, and she did.) But then it's NOT typical Stephenson, at the same time; there are no 25 page digressions on obscure mathematical concepts or long flashbacks to how Newton invented the calculus. And weirdly, I found myself really missing those. This is like a Bourne movie or a Bond movie; it's all action and adventure and shooting. It's almost like he decided to redo Snow Crash for the 2010s but it's got even less "here is how technology works" than Snow Crash. 

As an interesting note: this is the first Stephenson I can think of that has lots of important female narrators. Eliza was important in the Baroque Cycle but not as important as Jack. America Shaftoe was more of an idea than a character in Cryptonomicon. Same with Y.T. in Snow Crash. Reamde features three different female protagonists, all of whom have tremendous agency, smarts, and personality. AND not a single one of whom is white. Stephenson still can't write a convincing romantic relationship but this was a huge improvement, women-wise.

This is going to sound weird, but instead of 981 pages of excellent action-adventure I wish it had been 1,000 pages and included more weird technological digressions. I read Stephenson and I feel smarter afterwards, usually. Anathem is magical just because it spends so much time being about higher math concepts. I love the dense and weird history in Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle. This is JUST an action-adventure story. 

Anyway, if you enjoy Stephenson this is great. And if you've never read his stuff this is probably his most approachable book in a long time -- the page count sounds intimidating but it reads really, really quickly and I found myself staying up until 1 or 2 to get to the next section.

Grade: A

originally posted 2011

Hero, Michael Korda

This is a great, great biography of Lawrence of Arabia. I not only got to know Lawrence but also a lot of the root causes of conflicts in the Middle East at the moment, since he helped create the map (and he wanted it to look very different than it does). The book dips heavily into psychology -- did Lawrence never date because he was gay or because he was afraid of his mother? -- which bugged me a little bit, but mostly Korda uses those passages to refute other biographers who claim really stupid things about Lawrence. Korda, on the other hand, is so desperately in love with Lawrence that it made me laugh out loud every now and then. (And there should be a warning for the rape and later kinky sex chapters, but I guess we don't warn for real life.)

Grade: B

Originally posted in 2011

Moonstruck Madness, Laurie McBain

Lord is this a dumb romance novel. Sabrina is the granddaughter of a Scottish lord and then he gets killed by the English and she and her little brother and older sister (who has the Sight) have to go live in a house in England but they're neglected by their father so Sabrina becomes a highwayman. Sure, why not? And then she robs this big angry dude named Lucien (of course that's his name) and he vows to figure out who she really is. Many spoilers follow. 

So he sets a trap and she gets caught and he realizes she's a chick and nurses her back to health with lots of sex, but then he offers to make her his mistress because he doesn't know she's the daughter of a Marquis, so she runs away and then they meet up later and he thinks she's whoring around with everyone AND MEANWHILE his grandmother will only let him inherit if he get married but he has two evil cousins plotting his death who murder the fiancee he didn't like anyway. Meanwhile Sabrina's dad finds out she's hot and tries to sell her off to this creepy old man and Lucien decides to ruin her whore-y good time and makes out with her to ruin that deal and she's like, "THANKS A LOT, NOW WE'RE ALL GOING TO STARVE IN THE STREETS," so he decides to marry her himself but she can't have that so she runs away to go be a robber again. And he follows her and I forget why but at some point here his cousins attack and also she gets amnesia. AMNESIA. Obviously she forgets that she hated him so he marries her and they have like, 6 idyllic months together before she remembers and hates him and has his baby and then they get madder and madder at each other because they both think the other one is whoring around and it's like the worst version of Gone with the Wind ever, and then her little brother finds out there's treasure in Scotland so the two of them ride off and her husband follows and one page from the end they finally realize they love each other. (I didn't even mention the sister's ridiculous subplot with her visions.) Lord this was silly, but as airplane reading it wasn't bad, even if it was weird to have to switch my book to airplane-safe mode.

Grade: C

Originally posted 2011

In the Bleak Midwinter, Julia Spencer-Fleming

This book was slightly weird to read because it takes place not very far from where I grew up. I know what a kill is and I knew most of the places they visited. I also recognized the rural poverty the book talks about, which was uncomfortable. This is a murder mystery and the beginning of a romance between the local sheriff and the new (woman) priest in a small town in upstate New York. There was one chapter I had to skim through because after ten different warnings that her car was unprepared for winter in the Adirondacks Clare still drove off to help someone in a snow storm and it was so obvious that it was going wrong that I couldn't bear to read it. But it turned out not to be quite as dumb as I was fearing. On the other hand I had a lot of trouble with the burgeoning romance because the sheriff is married, and I know it goes on slowly through lots of other books, but I'm not sure there's a way to resolve that without making me mad at one character or the other.

Grade: B

Originally posted 2011

Anathem, Neal Stephenson

I don't know where to begin. This is a fascinating, weird, amazing book that throws together a billion different ideas from Plato's ideal forms to Schrodinger's Cat and Occam's Razor and the way light particles can be everywhere at once until they are observed. It takes place on a distant planet where society has split into seculars and those who live in cloisters and study math and science. It's full of made up words but they're all so close to understandable that it's not hard to follow, although if you haven't studied physics or philosophy I imagine it's confusing. Stephenson builds worlds like no one's business, and the first half the book is mostly just that. It was so interesting and well-done that I would happily have read history books just about the Third Sack and the Harbingers and the Terrible Events. The second half of the book is about what happens when thing start to happen in the secular world. There's some action adventure and some hard scifi at the end. Now and then Stephenson gets so caught up describing things and how they work that I skimmed but in general it was so damn fascinating that I blasted through 800 pages in about four days. (It helps that I've been too sick to leave the house since Friday.) I think I like the Baroque Cycle better, but it's been so long I might have to re-read that and check to be sure.

Grade: A

Originally posted 2011

How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu

I read this whole weird, baffling, lovely book in one day and I'm still sorting it out in my head. Our narrator is a time machine repair man in a science fictional universe that's only 93% actually built, so there are areas and characters that aren't entirely fleshed out. Time travel depends mostly on changing your tenses (this is science FICTION, after all) but really the book is about a guy who misses his father. Time travel, he explains eventually, is the idea that right now you're experiencing the present and remembering the past. All you have to do is experience the past while remembering the present and voila. The narrator tells us that most people rent a recreational time travel device to go visit the worst day of their lives and then break the machine because they can't fix that experience, but of course he's trying to use his to find his father. 

I was expecting a much twistier twist ending, but instead the book is mostly a meditation on regret and how much you can accidentally hurt your family without ever really understanding them. And at the same time it's full of sci-fi jokes, particularly about Star Wars. It's not really a book about time travel, it's more a philosophy thesis written as a novel. I think I loved it, but I'd have to re-read it to be sure.

Grade: A

Originally posted 2010

Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett

Still working my way (deliberately slowly) through the Tiffany Aching books. I really like her, and I really dislike Annagramma. Reading the first couple I suspect that if I lived in Discworld I'd be a witch, but I bet most people who read these books feel that way, too. I thought the Wintersmith was pretty sweet, and just happened to be reading this book as a blizzard hit, so Tiffany can feel free to come take care of that any time she'd like. I love the Feegles although I don't quite understand the bit with the cheese, and while I quite like Roland I have never 100% bought any "romance" Pratchett's written. (And Tiffany shouldn't need saving, she's awesome.)

The scenes with Granny Weatherwax and the kitten, by the way, were clearly written while spying on my dad, who has, in fact, named a kitten, "Hey you!" 

Grade: B

Originally posted 2010

The Reformed Vampire Support Group, Catherine Jinks

I'm making my way through the ALA's list of top 10 YA novels, (except I keep skipping ones that are written in the present tense or about teenage suicide). This one was great. Set in Australia it's kind of an anti-Twilight story; vampires are listless, tired, often sick, and can't do anything fun like go out or meet people. Nina, our heroine, has published a couple of books about a kick-ass vampire out of sheer boredom because her real life as a vampire is so miserable. She is stuck with the same group of vampires bitching about their lives every Tuesday night and has been for 30 years. The only people she gets to talk to are the local priest who runs the support group, and her mom. Then someone kills a member of their group, and Nina is forced to try and be the brave, smart, daring vampire she's only ever written about. 

There is a very sweet little romance, some moral debate over when (or if) it's ever okay to kill anyone, some terrible bad guys, and a lot of super annoying background vampires (and other things, too) that I had a little bit of trouble telling apart because I read it so fast. But if I were a teenager THIS would be a vampire story I'd actually enjoy and identify with, and I am totally going to read the sequel when it comes out; The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group.

Grade: B

Originally posted 2010

Freedom, Jonathan Franzen

This is a book about a deeply unhappy family, how they came to be unhappy, and how their unhappiness makes them treat each other. It has a sort of happy ending, although I would have liked one more wrap-up section with Joey, because teenage marriages based on cheating and misery don't usually go well. The narrative voice is really interesting and I liked the way the beginning of the book basically tells you everything that's going to happen because I'm the type to get confused during a sprawling three generation book. Selfish people make me really unhappy, so there were a bunch of passages about family interaction that made me wince and almost walk away.

Every time anyone used the word "freedom," whether they were talking about cheating on each other, dying, saving the South American birds, or the invasion of Iraq, I was I kept wanting to underline things, as if some English professor was going to jump out from behind a bush and demand I write a 20 page essay on the way "Freedom" affected each member of the Berglund family and whether Franzen is ultimately arguing that freedom is good or bad for them. (...bad? I think?) I came away with the same feeling I had in college lit seminars; I know I understood the book as a story about Patty and Walter's marriage. I am not sure I understood all the themes and meanings and I am going to have to ask some of my smarter friends to explain what I missed.

Grade: C

Originally posted 2010

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, Helen Simonson

This book suffered for not being what I wanted it to be; a nice seaside romance between two mismatched characters filled with witty British people. Sorry, book. Instead the Major is stuffy and full of himself, and his family are AWFUL; so horrible that i couldn't understand why he hadn't just walked out on them years ago, particularly his son. Anyway, the Major falls in love with the widow Mrs. Ali, who runs the local shop, and her family is awful too; they give away her books and hide her letters. Meanwhile all the people in town make snide remarks about her having to use the servants entrance and other hideously classist stuff which is probably realistic but not at all what I want in a novel about falling in love. I spent the whole thing angry and at the end I wanted Mrs. Ali to set her entire family on fire instead of inviting them to the wedding. Bah.

Grade: D

Originally posted 2010

John Dies at the End, David Wong

Comedy horror is REALLY hard to pull off. The first third of this book is more horror, and I was totally creeped out; then the horror part settles down and it's kind of funny, mostly when John (the narrator's unreliable best friend) is around. After a while the unspeakable horrors just get kind of dumb, and I felt like the ending wasn't nearly big enough, but damn if I didn't just check to make sure no one was inside the TV watching me with their hands pressed against the other side of the screen just now. Ack. Apparently there will be sequels? Apparently I will read them.

Grade: B

Originally posted 2010

The Grand Sophy, Georgette Heyer

Everyone told me this was the best Heyer, and they were totally right. This is the platonic ideal of Regency romance. Sophy is somehow the greatest manic pixie dream girl ever and yet totally wonderful and lovable and perfection. She swoops in, is hilarious, fixes everyone up into the right couples, steals horses, shoots people, and is never obnoxious or eye-rolling. She also never has to be humiliated For Her Own Good, which I find often in books about super competent women. The side characters are hilarious, the couples are all good for each other, the plot ends with a giant operatic "I love it when a plan comes together" scene when everyone converges on the same place, and the hero is both brooding and stern AND hilarious and wonderful, and he is never taken in by Sophy's plans. This is just great. I would like to read this book a thousand times.

Grade: A

Originally posted 2010

Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld

Cool! Alternate WWI where the British splice together animals to make flying whale airships and the Germans build giant walking robots to fight them. Sheltered-little-prince learns to be a regular boy isn't my favorite trope but I liked the way our two main characters decided to be friends instead of fighting, and I appreciated that the whole "THERE ARE TERRIBLE SECRETS WE CAN'T EVER TELL YOU BECAUSE THEY ARE ABOUT YOU" thing was basically explained and went away. I also wish there had been more background characters to flesh out the world. There was a LOT about the technology and not much about the other people, and I'm more about characters than world building. I loved the lady scientist, though. Grumpy lady scientists rule.

Grade: B

Originally posted in 2010

Scoundrel, Zoe Archer

The second half of this book is pretty good, so if you can get by all the stupidity in the first half it's fun. (If you can't get by the stupidity of the first half, go read Mr. Impossible by Loretta Chase, which is the great version of this story.) She's a sheltered Victorian widow, he's a rogue who seduces women and fights magic until they fall in love and she turns out to be the daughter of his enemy. Nothing about her character in the first half worked for me; she's utterly innocent and trusting yet for some reason willing to betray her family almost instantly. (Seriously, it's like ten lines of dialogue in one scene and she's all, "Yeah, I guess magic IS real and my dad IS evil!") She's supposed to be pure and innocent -- despite being a widow -- who never questions anyone and has never rebelled before, but she totally did when she taught herself Greek. Oh, and after reading a few books as a kid she speaks fluent Greek and Latin and like 100 other languages. That's not how language learning WORKS. If she's never spoken to anyone she certainly can't chat fluently. Ugh. I know that is the kind of thing only I would be hung up on, but it really really bugged me. Anyway they have adventures, the story picks up a lot, they are both terribly brave at each other and it gets quite nice. I like the part where they discus monkeys in hats. I awwed out loud. Otherwise, eh. I wish I'd cared enough to pick up the rest of the series.

Grade: C

Originally posted 2010

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

Written in the present tense, didn't work for me at all. I constantly felt like the author was unclear about who was speaking and what was going on. I hate that. There was something deeply pretentious about the book, and even though I enjoyed it enough to keep reading it I rolled my eyes about a million times at how incredibly seriously it took itself. The (few) moments of levity were nice, though, and I liked Mary Boleyn.

Grade: D

Originally posted in 2010

Fire from Heaven, Mary Renault

Wonderful, awesome, lyrical, beautiful story of Alexander the Great as a child. I was in raptures over his relationship with Hephastion (which I am normally anyway, but this was GREAT). I just wish it were less densely written about Greek politics; I've studied and read a lot and followed it just fine, but I can't give it to any of my Local Teens.

Grade: B

Originally posted 2010

The Billionaire's Fake Engagement, Robyn Grady

>:(

It's only 110 pages long and it's called "The Billionaire's Fake Engagement," so it couldn't be THAT BAD, right? 

>>>:(

I can't remember the main characters' names, but what I do remember is this: BABY. See, she got knocked up in high school and decided to keep the baby, because babies are the most precious thing that have ever happened, but then the baby died, and she wanted to die, because she lost her baby. (Fine.) Also, complications from the pregnancy meant she could never get pregnant again, which made her feel like she wasn't a real woman because real women can have babies. No man will ever want to marry a woman who can't have a baby.

Just when you think, "Oh, lady, you'll meet a nice man who will talk you out of your tree about all this baby crap," she dates a guy who is a billionaire, whose ONLY REQUIREMENT IN A WIFE is that she have an unsullied past and bear his masculine babies. 

He knew what he wanted in a wife. He expected the woman he married, who bore his children, to have an unsullied past. Getting pregnant at seventeen did not fit the bill. What had her parents been thinking to have let this happen? She'd said she'd had everything she'd needed and implied her childhood had been a happy one. Had she been lying? After this revelation, how could he trust her?

BECAUSE SHE MUST BE A LYING WHORE FROM A BROKEN HOME IF SHE GOT PREGNANT IN HIGH SCHOOL. Or:

He didn't know what he was talking about. How could he belong with a woman who couldn't bear children? She might as well not be a woman at all.

IN CASE YOU THOUGHT I WAS KIDDING.

Another woman claims to be pregnant with the billionaire's baby; he's upset, but his girlfriend is THRILLED because she might get to raise another woman's baby. Because BABIES. So he proposes to his girlfriend for reasons that don't make a lot of sense, she says no because of her Dark Past and inability to bear children, they go off and have a lot of sex on the beach, she eventually reveals her Dark Past and he flips out but thinks he can get through it, until she drops the I CAN NEVER HAVE BABIES bomb, at which point he breaks up with her. Because HE MUST HAVE MASCULINE BABIES OF HIS OWN LINE. And this only reinforces her belief that she is broken and sub-human because she can't have babies. She can't marry him and keep him from marrying a real woman who could have babies!

Then his sister convinces him that he's a dick so he goes and meets the fiancee and takes a walk with her and then everything is okay. The other baby isn't his! And his best friend the OBGYN can fix her and in the epilogue they have a baby. A boy baby. OBVIOUSLY.

Oh my god it made me so angry. And I like babies.

Grade: F

Originally posted 2010

Sunnyside, Glen David Gold

I absolutely love the way Glen David Gold puts words together into paragraphs. His narrative voice is hilarious without being intrusive, it creates pictures without getting too Tom Robbins and cutesy about what he's doing. It is the kind of writing where I bookmark pages so that I can read them out loud to people later because I am so delighted.

He caught a blur: a left hand that had, on the bitter spring mornings on the steppes of Dorhitchen, during troubled whelpings, pulled calves from their mothers' wombs with a single tug, found Hugo's shirt collar. It yanked him forward and off the train.

This was excellent news, briefly, in that the first brick hurtling through the air missed Hugo. It thudded against the train cab stairs just as Hugo's entire field of vision filled with a permafrost of impenetrable white beard surrounding a pit of angry teeth that had known only Russian frontier dentists.

Or this passage. The book is about Charlie Chaplin having a breakdown over his next movie, his mother, his marriage, and some of the early studio problems in Hollywood. (It's about other things, too, but the Chaplin passages are so brilliant that it was almost a let down when the narration switched to Hugo or Lee.)

On every movie, his creative spirit followed this arc: absolute certainty, doubt, dread, horror, despair, new certainty (sending him into a new compass heading that was 45, 90, or even 270 degrees different from where his first certainty had sent him), and then the Sargasso. Then something saved him. Then he was home.

That is exactly what the creative process feels like to me. 

I love books that are historical fiction; this takes place mostly during World War I. I love books about rivals; quite a lot of this book is about Chaplin and his "relationship" with Mary Pickford. I love stories about fucked up genius; Chaplin certainly qualifies. (The book does a lot to create a sympathetic view of his marriage to a teenager. Your mileage may vary.) I absolutely loved this book, even the sad parts, even the parts I didn't entirely think fit in with the rest of the story. There were a few parts where I felt the narrative started to get distracted and wander off, but the writing and the main plot more than made up for it for me. I love this book and his other book, Carter Beats the Devil, so much.

Grade: A

Originally posted 2010