In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss 2007 (284 pgs)
Magical realism at it’s best: witches, flying cities, talking bears and all of it oh-so-real-seeming. Enjoyable author, with an old-world flavor updated by modern fantasy sensibilites.
song sung blue
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway 2008 (235 pgs)
During the siege of Sarajevo, a man watches from his window as 22 of his friends and neighbors are killed by a single shell while waiting in line for bread. He quietly puts on his tux, picks up his cello, and plays in the wreckage for 22 days. From there, the narrative shifts between three other survivors in the war zone, one of them a sniper charged with keeping the cellist alive during his “concerts.” A moving novel without veering towards maudlin or sappy. It’s a haunting look at how hope sustains people during war and how sometimes survival means creating your own hope.
emotional shrapnel
The Hour I First Believedby Wally Lamb 2008 (740 pgs)
A heartbreaking book of broad scope, The Hour I First Believed takes a look at the reverberations of tragedy. While Caelem’s back East planning his aunt’s funeral, his wife Maureen becomes a close witness to the Columbine shootings. While not physically injured, the psychic damage spins her off into a years long bout with PTSD, depression, and addiction. Unable to recover from the shootings and searching for some measure of peace, they head off to the family farm in Connecticut. Once there Caelem also stumbles upon secrets from his family’s past that begin to affect him just as strongly as his wife’s ordeal.
Lamb writes tragedy beautifully, his characters real and realistically fallible. Fans of his previous book I Know This Much Is True will not be disappointed.
surely you must be mythtaken
The Ant King and Other Storiesby Benjamin Rosenbaum 2008 (228 pgs)
Wonderful magical stories ranging from the title story featuring a modern day Orpheus and Eurydice wandering through ant tunnels that are possibly hidden in a video game, to the strangest Austen story you’ve ever seen set in a cottage on a precancerous mole, a manor carved into a rotten molar, and the perilous journey in between. My favorite was Start the Clock, where a gang of 9 year olds (who’ve been 9 for 25 years after a virus freezes everyone at the age they were) shop for real estate in Pirateland. But every one of the stories was fun.
forget to remember to forget
When Jenna wakes up, she can quote the entire text of Walden Pond, but she can’t remember her best friend’s name. Or even if she has a best friend. The parents she doesn’t remember tell her she’s been in a coma following an accident. As Jenna comes to terms with the disturbing holes in her memory, she finds that there’s more to her past than her family wants to tell her.
Good balance- enjoyable to read, while also tackling larger issues of medical ethics and the nature of identity. Made for a fun afternoon read.
Posted in coming of age, ethics, family, romance, science fiction, young adult
a modern prometheus unbound
The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem 1959/transl. 1974 (216 pgs)
Oddest of ducks: reads like a straight-up Scotland Yard police procedural in the vein of Agatha Christie (despite being written by a preeminent Polish science-fiction writer.) But it’s about zombies. Or at least risen corpses.
Instead of dwelling on the macabre, the narrative instead focuses on the lead investigator as he tries to locate what he’s sure is a non-mystical cause for the epidemic of moving dead folks. Despite a strong start, my interest waned towards the end, and the conclusion (or lack thereof) was disappointing.
Posted in adventure, crime, mystery, science fiction, zombies
catching up is hard to do
It’s slate-cleaning time. Thanks to a way-too-hectic fall (multiple vacations, several moves, loss of home internet, and an epic snow storm) I’m left with a bare blog and backlog of unblurbed books. So I’m gonna get the metaphorical monkey off my back and just total up the page numbers.
Iodine by Haven Kimmel 2008 (223 pgs)
great blurring of the line between reality and imagination
The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian 2007 (368 pgs)
a woman attacked becomes obsessed with photos she finds, convinced they prove a greater conspiracy
The Summoning (Darkest Powers, book 1) by Kelley Armstrong 2008 (390 pgs)
start of YA paranormal series featuring a group home for teens with secret supernatural powers
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff 2008 (514 pgs)
marvelous historical fiction flashing back and forth between two polygamist wives more than a century apart, one of whom left her husband and a modern day one who is accused of murdering her husband
Man in the Dark by Paul Auster 2008 (180 pgs)
gripping meta-fiction: an insomniac imagines as alternate America where 9/11 never happened, but the country is embroiled in civil war; the characters in his story blame him for their horrible fate and set out to assassinate him
Living With the Dead (Women of the Underworld, #9) by Kelley Armstrong 2008 (372 pgs)
human girl gets caught in a deadly supernatural crossfire
Backup (novella set in the Dresden Files series) by Jim Butcher, with illustrations by Mike Mignola 2008 (70 pgs)
feels more like a character treatment of Dresden’s brother Thomas than an actual story
Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link 2008 (389 pgs)
wonderful slightly magical linked short stories; great coda circling back to the first story
re-reads:
The Hitchhikers “Trilogy”: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992) by Douglas Adams (total: 1173 pgs)
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett 1996 (366 pgs)
His Conquering Sword (The Jaran, #3) by Kate Elliott (496 pgs)
from the “unfinished” pile:
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories by John Kessel 2008 (315 pgs/read 30ish)
Dorothy returns to Oz to rob a bank with her loser boyfriend in the title story; the Bennet sisters meet Dr. Frankenstein and his creation in “Pride and Prometheus”
The Year of Disappearances by Susan Hubbard 2008 (287 pgs/read 40)
surprisingly boring after such a strong first entry in the series; overly moralizing about disappearance of bees???
The James Boys: A Novel Account of Four Desperate Brothers by Richard Liebmann-Smith 2008 (261 pgs/read 20)
hilarious homage that takes 1870s America and spins it on its ear, imagining that two sets of real-life James brothers meeting on a train (philosopher William and writer Henry, and train-robbing Frank and Jesse) discover they are long-lost siblings
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams 2008 (333 pgs/read 80ish)
great layout (each story prefaced by a mini-bio and, more interestingly, a short segment on what inspired the piece) but didn’t have time to finish; seek out Dale Bailey’s “The End of the World As We Know It” -an extremely well-crafted blend of apocalyptic story and a dissection of the form itself
Discarded Science: Ideas that Seemed Good at the Time by John Grant 2006 (320 pgs/read 80ish)
surprisingly dry for such a dynamic subject matter
Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery presented by David Attenborough, essays and art by various 2007 (223 pgs/read 180ish & looked at all the pictures)
great illustration reproductions; dwells too much on specific artist, not enough on the history of the art-form in general
Blood Noir by Laurell K. Hamilton 2008 (340 pgs/skimmed 30ish)
soooodone with this series
Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall 2007 (209 pgs/read 54)
a woman heads for the hills to escape an oppressive post-apocalyptic government that has forced everyone into urban communes and controls everything up to and including their reproductive rights
When Madeline Was Young by Jane Hamilton 2006 (273 pgs/read 32)
after an accident leaves Madeline with the mentality of a child, her husband and his second wife “raise” her alongside their children
Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories by Steven Millhauser 2008 (244 pgs/read 133)
slightly magical/ slightly disturbing stories
Censored 2009: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007-2008 by Project Censored pub 2008 (400 pgs/read 40ish)
all the news that fit to under-print
The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind- and Almost Found Myself- on the Pacific Crest Trail by Dan White 2008 (374 pgs/read 152)
naive novices decide to tackle the Everest of backpacking; let the death-defying hilarity ensue
Wolves, Jackals, and Foxes: The Assassins Who Changed History by Kris Hollington 2008 (426 pgs/read 120)
riveting; under-known turning points in history
number one with a silver bullet
Kitty and the Silver Bullet by Carrie Vaughan (#4 in the Kitty Norville series) 2008 (326 pgs)
Posted in adventure, family, humorous, romance, supernatural, suspense, vampires, werewolves
you can check in any time you like…
It begins with an un-summoned ambulance in the middle of the night. They insist on taking away their patient, although she insists there’s nothing wrong and it must be a mistake. When her husband tries to track her down in the morning, she has disappeared into a bizarre labyrinthine underground hospital. The man is soon subsumed by the convoluted bureaucracy of the hospital, where every employee is also a patient and no one ever seems to get cured. Soon the man’s search ceases to matter. He ends up not even noticing that he’s not seeking his wife anymore, or really heading much of anywhere. It’s as if he’s fallen down the rabbit hole into something resembling a David Lynch film.
Compelling, but I’m not sure I liked it- during or after. I kept feeling like I was missing something, like if I understood the Japanese cultural landscape of the 1970s there would be a deeper metaphor contained in the book that I just didn’t catch.
Posted in erotica, family, psychological thriller, sociology
if i could buy the world a comic
Oodles of GNs…
I’ve steered clear of Michael Chabon’s Escapist series, cause pulp-era comics make me wanna run screaming from the room. But I’m glad I picked this one up at a co-worker’s insistence. The tale is more about the creative process of comic creators than the actual hero The Escapist, and is as delightfully meta as Grant Morrison’s Animal Man arc.
Bookhunter by Jason Shiga 2007
Chuckle-some saga of theft and the swift justice of the library police, featuring high-octane reverse-directorizing from the back of a speeding bookmobile, a duel with card catalog drawers, and other librarical action.
The NY war zone gets worse, as journalist gone native Matt Roth digs into a massive civilian slaughter by US troops. The stories are brutal and gritty and full of truth. Nobody wins in this war, and further entrenchment and disintegration on all sides seem the only possibilities. Remind you of any other war?
An arresting wordless woodcut-style that resonates with the feelings of the alienation and overwhelming disorientation of a recent immigrant, told with fantastical, real-seeming un-real illustrations.
How genius can you get- the Musketeers are immortal (and because it’s Jason, they’re anthropomorphized animals). In our century, Athos is a drunken wino, nostalgically longing for the days when he was a hero. And then he gets his chance when he stumbles upon invading Martians intent on destroying the world.
College students during finals begin turning into mindless, slobbering freaks. And then things get really bad when they turn into zombies. A hilarious, self-aware love-letter to the zombie genre. The survivors are led by a zombie film addict, who’s studied them and knows who survives. Allllll the cliches are thrown in, but the characters know it.
A Japanese-Canadian, would-be-Wiccan, arty goth girl deals with your average teenage angst in this above-average GN. Kim, nicknamed Skim, struggles with falling apart from her best friend, falling in love with her (female) English teacher, and falling into depression. The art is great, and topics like suicide, teen sexuality, and gender identity are handled multi-facetly rather than with typical “issue of the week” After-School-Special moralizing.
Noirish, wordless tale of a man who stumbles upon a number, dropped from the hand of a condemned man at the moment of his electrocution. The number seems to eerily reproduce itself in his surroundings. He sees it everywhere, and when he follows the sequence it at first appears to lead to good luck. But when he begins to let it control his decisions, his life soon spirals into disastrous circumstances.
Anti-hero, rude-grrl, surfer Brody gets her leg chomped off by a shark. She’s impossible to pity, not only because she’s just as fearless as before, but because she’d pound your face in if you tried. Sick of her shark-infested nightmares, frustrating physical therapy, and her couch-surfing loser ex-boyfriend, Brody and her best friend, and said loser ex-BF set out on a furious road trip to get rid of the loser.
Posted in graphic novel
attack of the 50 foot book 