If I Stay -- Gayle Forman -- 3.5
Yesterday, I noticed that this YA book was due back to the library in a day or two and decided to give it a try rather than returning it unread (which happens, um, rather a lot, especially during semester-time). I think I saw it on somebody's year-end book recommendation list from a year or two ago, maybe...? Anyway. It was a quick read -- I finished it in one day and I didn't even have to be super-neglectful of my family or my duties to do so. I found it engaging and I wanted to find out what happened, which is always a good sign, though it was irritating from time to time. Example: why is it that so many authors who like punk music find it necessary to fill their novels with tedious bits and pieces about punk bands? Nothing like reading a novel that feels like a stack of inside jokes when you're outside them. (PAGING AUDREY NIFFENEGGER.) And since the entire premise of the book involved a girl having an out-of-body ghostlike experience after a car accident, it sounds bad to say that I wasn't very into the whole out-of-body ghostlike experience thing -- but even so, the story does a decent job of overcoming its shortcomings and delivering a readable, philosophical, reasonably suspenseful few hours inside someone else's head.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Project 365 - day 1 - bare
I had the rare pleasure of a long walk today. (I need to make this pleasure LESS rare, for a number of important reasons.)
This time of year, the gnarled oak trees are especially impressively gnarled because they've lost their leaves. This is one that greets you as you start up a bit of steep hill. Hello, tree.
And is it just me or do naked trees look like an artist's interpretation of a cardiovascular system?
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Oh goody goody goody! I DO remember how to read for fun!
Just because I can, I am going to tell you about what I am reading right now and it is not textbooks ZOMG.
In no particular order:
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, in which a precocious 11-year-old British girl is elbows-deep in a thrilling mystery involving a red-haired man who died in the vegetable garden on her family's estate. Claire and I are both reading this one. It's just tongue-in-cheek enough to avoid taking itself too seriously, whilst also giving us a heroine we can adore. (seriously, a brilliant young chemist with a macabre sense of joy in things that terrify her obnoxious older sisters? Who has named her bicycle Gladys and self-narrates about 'giving Gladys her head' when coasting downhill? What's not to love?) Also, it has some major laugh-out-loud moments. One of my friends shoved this into my hands when I was volunteering at the library one day, and then one of my former teachers came in, saw it in my hands where my friend had just shoved it, and RAVED about how wonderful it is, so of course I had to start it right away. (Then of course I had to study for midterms and finals and presentations and what not so it's taken me about six weeks to get to page 100 but I'm really rolling now that I've remembered how to read for pleasure.) We are also thrilled, Claire and myself, that it is the first in a series. If one book is delightful, five are five times as delightful, generally speaking.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which is a cat of an entirely different color, by Siddharta Mukherjee. I am only eighty pages into this beautifully thick book (all of which I read in a free hour and a half this afternoon), and it's one of those times when I am so glad to have so much of it ahead of me because I love it so much. I have always wondered, since I was a little girl and first became cognizant of the existence of cancer, how long people had known about it, how it worked (well, I wondered that until I took sixty-six units of RN program prerequisites), and how people explained it before they knew about things like cells and mitosis and DNA. How did we first begin to figure out how to treat it? How far have we come against it? The author, an oncologist who originally set out to write a daily journal of his own professional battles against cancer but who found himself writing something much bigger, has taken on this complex and painful (and, in some areas, somewhat... triumphant) subject in a way that makes me need... to... keep... turning... pages.
I mention this here because it's another beautiful and heartbreaking and heartwarming book (though fiction) set in the world of medicine: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese. I started listening to this on my way to and from school, and found that I hated the wait from Wednesday night to Monday afternoon when I could listen to more of it, so I got the hardcover from the library and devoured the rest of the book while I should have been sleeping over the course of a few days, a few months ago. Another beautifully thick, dense, rich, affecting story whose mental images have stayed with me since the first words floated out of my car stereo as I started off down my driveway early in the semester. It's about medicine and history (I'm ashamed to say that I knew very little about Ethiopia before or beyond the We-Are-The-World era until I read this book), and the bond between two identical twin brothers, and the families we make and the families we find.
Ah, great, now I've forgotten what else I'm reading.
Oh yes. Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger. I loved Niffenegger's The Time-Traveler's Wife -- it's one of those books that I try hard not to brag about having read before most of its fans had ever heard of it, but I usually fail. This one, though... eh. I don't love it. I liked it OK, though I found it a bit off-putting somehow, until it started to get ghosty and now I'm just not terribly fond of it at all. I will probably keep going, in between other books, just because hey, maybe it will get better. (Judging by the Amazon reviews, which I just glimpsed for the first time when I went to find the link above... maybe not.)
Because books can't be all just for fun: Spanish for Healthcare Professionals. It's on my nightstand, which is across the house, and Amazon has something like five books with that title and none of them look like mine, and I can't remember the author, and it's not like you want to buy this one anyway, most likely, so whatever, no link. This being California, I hope to be needing this information sometime relatively soon. ;)
Claire and I are putting ourselves through The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. We bought this book for Claire last Christmas. We are having SUCH A GOOD TIME. So far we have done the pre-instruction exercises, which I would scan and show you except that I am supposed to put them away and not look at them again until I'm done with the course. We've also replicated an abstract sketch by drawing it upside-down, which was fascinating. My friend Cate told me once that "anyone can unlearn how not to draw," and I think this book might prove her right. At any rate if it can do me good, you know there's hope for anyone. This time last year I couldn't even draw decent stick figures.
And that's all I can think of right now, though I feel like I'm missing something. I'll add it in if I remember. IT'S SO NICE TO BE WRITING ABOUT BOOKS AGAIN.
*****edited to add:*******
Oh yes. Heft, by Liz Moore. Memorable (I promise) heart-tugging novel about unlikely-but-likable characters including a morbidly obese man who hasn't left his house in years, a cheerful and enormously pregnant young house-cleaner, and a kid from a poor neighborhood who commutes to a snooty prep school where his mother worked until she couldn't anymore because she went what appears to be a little bit crazy. The ways in which their lives intertwine makes for a book good enough that I put off schoolwork for it more than once. (This should be me new star-rating system: How many evenings did I spend reading this when I should have been buried in index cards and powerpoint slides?)
********************
PS: Things I have been WATCHING (oh man how I love break time. Have I mentioned that?) The family has been watching Downton Abbey with me a little here and there over the course of the last few months -- I've seen it before; they haven't -- and we are all loving it. Also, T and I watched a remarkable German film (subtitled), about the last days of the Third Reich as they happened in Hitler's bunker in Berlin, called Downfall (in English) (German: Der Untergang). Oddly, we first became aware of its existence when we saw it used in a meme. Yes, OK, ha ha, Hitler found out his rare classic Mopar is a fake, very funny; wow, this looks like a really good movie and does the library have it? The library did. If you are interested in WWII history at all and can keep up with subtitles that go past rather quickly, this is well (WELL) worth watching.
And I recently watched (500) Days of Summer, which was OK but I didn't love it super much. But now I really want to watch Whip It again, because there was a preview for that at the beginning of the DVD (yes, I am one of those people who love previews on DVDs) and it reminded me of what a gem of a movie that was.
And thatisall! For now. Who knows, maybe someday I will write here again. Stranger things have happened.
In no particular order:
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, in which a precocious 11-year-old British girl is elbows-deep in a thrilling mystery involving a red-haired man who died in the vegetable garden on her family's estate. Claire and I are both reading this one. It's just tongue-in-cheek enough to avoid taking itself too seriously, whilst also giving us a heroine we can adore. (seriously, a brilliant young chemist with a macabre sense of joy in things that terrify her obnoxious older sisters? Who has named her bicycle Gladys and self-narrates about 'giving Gladys her head' when coasting downhill? What's not to love?) Also, it has some major laugh-out-loud moments. One of my friends shoved this into my hands when I was volunteering at the library one day, and then one of my former teachers came in, saw it in my hands where my friend had just shoved it, and RAVED about how wonderful it is, so of course I had to start it right away. (Then of course I had to study for midterms and finals and presentations and what not so it's taken me about six weeks to get to page 100 but I'm really rolling now that I've remembered how to read for pleasure.) We are also thrilled, Claire and myself, that it is the first in a series. If one book is delightful, five are five times as delightful, generally speaking.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which is a cat of an entirely different color, by Siddharta Mukherjee. I am only eighty pages into this beautifully thick book (all of which I read in a free hour and a half this afternoon), and it's one of those times when I am so glad to have so much of it ahead of me because I love it so much. I have always wondered, since I was a little girl and first became cognizant of the existence of cancer, how long people had known about it, how it worked (well, I wondered that until I took sixty-six units of RN program prerequisites), and how people explained it before they knew about things like cells and mitosis and DNA. How did we first begin to figure out how to treat it? How far have we come against it? The author, an oncologist who originally set out to write a daily journal of his own professional battles against cancer but who found himself writing something much bigger, has taken on this complex and painful (and, in some areas, somewhat... triumphant) subject in a way that makes me need... to... keep... turning... pages.
I mention this here because it's another beautiful and heartbreaking and heartwarming book (though fiction) set in the world of medicine: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese. I started listening to this on my way to and from school, and found that I hated the wait from Wednesday night to Monday afternoon when I could listen to more of it, so I got the hardcover from the library and devoured the rest of the book while I should have been sleeping over the course of a few days, a few months ago. Another beautifully thick, dense, rich, affecting story whose mental images have stayed with me since the first words floated out of my car stereo as I started off down my driveway early in the semester. It's about medicine and history (I'm ashamed to say that I knew very little about Ethiopia before or beyond the We-Are-The-World era until I read this book), and the bond between two identical twin brothers, and the families we make and the families we find.
Ah, great, now I've forgotten what else I'm reading.
Oh yes. Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger. I loved Niffenegger's The Time-Traveler's Wife -- it's one of those books that I try hard not to brag about having read before most of its fans had ever heard of it, but I usually fail. This one, though... eh. I don't love it. I liked it OK, though I found it a bit off-putting somehow, until it started to get ghosty and now I'm just not terribly fond of it at all. I will probably keep going, in between other books, just because hey, maybe it will get better. (Judging by the Amazon reviews, which I just glimpsed for the first time when I went to find the link above... maybe not.)
Because books can't be all just for fun: Spanish for Healthcare Professionals. It's on my nightstand, which is across the house, and Amazon has something like five books with that title and none of them look like mine, and I can't remember the author, and it's not like you want to buy this one anyway, most likely, so whatever, no link. This being California, I hope to be needing this information sometime relatively soon. ;)
Claire and I are putting ourselves through The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. We bought this book for Claire last Christmas. We are having SUCH A GOOD TIME. So far we have done the pre-instruction exercises, which I would scan and show you except that I am supposed to put them away and not look at them again until I'm done with the course. We've also replicated an abstract sketch by drawing it upside-down, which was fascinating. My friend Cate told me once that "anyone can unlearn how not to draw," and I think this book might prove her right. At any rate if it can do me good, you know there's hope for anyone. This time last year I couldn't even draw decent stick figures.
And that's all I can think of right now, though I feel like I'm missing something. I'll add it in if I remember. IT'S SO NICE TO BE WRITING ABOUT BOOKS AGAIN.
*****edited to add:*******
Oh yes. Heft, by Liz Moore. Memorable (I promise) heart-tugging novel about unlikely-but-likable characters including a morbidly obese man who hasn't left his house in years, a cheerful and enormously pregnant young house-cleaner, and a kid from a poor neighborhood who commutes to a snooty prep school where his mother worked until she couldn't anymore because she went what appears to be a little bit crazy. The ways in which their lives intertwine makes for a book good enough that I put off schoolwork for it more than once. (This should be me new star-rating system: How many evenings did I spend reading this when I should have been buried in index cards and powerpoint slides?)
********************
PS: Things I have been WATCHING (oh man how I love break time. Have I mentioned that?) The family has been watching Downton Abbey with me a little here and there over the course of the last few months -- I've seen it before; they haven't -- and we are all loving it. Also, T and I watched a remarkable German film (subtitled), about the last days of the Third Reich as they happened in Hitler's bunker in Berlin, called Downfall (in English) (German: Der Untergang). Oddly, we first became aware of its existence when we saw it used in a meme. Yes, OK, ha ha, Hitler found out his rare classic Mopar is a fake, very funny; wow, this looks like a really good movie and does the library have it? The library did. If you are interested in WWII history at all and can keep up with subtitles that go past rather quickly, this is well (WELL) worth watching.
And I recently watched (500) Days of Summer, which was OK but I didn't love it super much. But now I really want to watch Whip It again, because there was a preview for that at the beginning of the DVD (yes, I am one of those people who love previews on DVDs) and it reminded me of what a gem of a movie that was.
And thatisall! For now. Who knows, maybe someday I will write here again. Stranger things have happened.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
By the way, I let my old domain name expire when I decided it was too cumbersome a name and I was done with blogging anyway, but the blog still exists here. Lots of the images and links are probably all wonky but the navigation still seems to work, in case for some reason seven years' worth of my blathering on various topics would be of interest to you.
Books for... July? So far? And the end of June. Or... something.
I spent the last ten days of June staying at my grandmother's house, taking my turn helping to take care of her, and OH THE READING. I read FOUR WHOLE NOVELS while I was there. (Granted, they were YA novels BUT STILL.) (Also, there was KNITTING.) And then, well, it's summer break, and July has been SO MUCH SANER than June was even though I don't have as much time to sit with a book in my lap. Reading words for fun is even sweeter when I know that in thirty-two short days I'll be back in the throes of academia wherein all reading is required reading and the concept of "free time" evaporates.
(bolds are first-time reads; ratings are out of five.)
Will Grayson, Will Grayson -- John Green and David Levithan -- 4
I've been on a bit of a John Green (of vlogbrothers fame) kick lately and I have to say the guy writes some really readable, likable, thought-provoking young-adult books. I'm not familiar with David Levithan aside from his contribution to this book but the character perspective he wrote was just fine so he gets my stamp of approval as well. This novel is a book about two people with the exact same name who meet by accident just as one of them is having a major personal crisis and WHY didn't I think of this and write it first WHY WHY WHY? The writing, especially in the parts that I'm virtually certain were John Green's, was HILARIOUS (one character -- who is fixated on writing an autobiographical musical production while he is still in high school, which is something only an author who had actually been a teenager could come up with -- is described as "the world's largest person who is really, really gay" and "the world's gayest person who is really, really large" in a sentence that had me muffling my laughter so as not to wake my sleeping grandmother, whom I was caring for at the time) and also quite Deep and Important. Green's main point-of-view character reminded me very much of my own son in some ways -- self-contained, determined to go through life without drawing attention to himself or getting excessively invested in any emotional endeavors, which is not a trait with which I can identify personally, to say the least. (I know this will shock you.) His development over the course of the story gave me interesting insight into what might be going on in my boy's head and in his life.
Young Adult as a genre is very different from what it was when I was in its target demographic and it was, as far as I can tell, in its infancy. (Example: I lost track of how many books about girls reuniting with their adoptive mothers I read as a preteen. THEY WERE EVERYWHERE. I do not miss them.) Now the theme-of-the-decade is, understandably, the struggles and victories of kids who are marginalized (or not) as a result of their sexuality, and while this doesn't bother me in general the way it would have ten years ago, the fact that a book follows the current trend - any current trend - can make the story just the teensiest bit tired before I even open the cover. But Green and Levithan take the not-terribly-original thematic material and pair it with an original story and highly capable writing to produce a result that is well worth reading.
Looking for Alaska -- John Green -- 4.25
I will never forget what my dear friend Jenn said to me once about writing -- that everybody's first book is autobiographical. And whoo boy is this ever John Green's first novel. (I don't mean that in a bad way. I gave it a 4.25 out of 5, after all.) In it, a skinny (check), shy (check), intelligent (check) young man named Miles leaves his childhood home in Florida (check) for a boarding school (check) in Alabama (check) where he becomes a notable prankster (check). (Thank you, Internet. Prior to say 1997 I would have only been guessing here.) (I'm gonna go way out on a limb and surmise that John Green also made memorable, quirky friends and gained an affectionate nickname when he went off to school.) The thing is, this story really works. The characters are memorable and (mostly) knowable, the boarding-school pranks are generally hilarious (and inspiring), and the heartbreaking parts are suitably heartbreaking. If you like YA and/or boarding-school stories, give it a go.
Jellicoe Road -- Melina Marchetta -- 4.75
I saw this book at B&N back when I had a Christmas gift card to spend and I almost bought it based on its jacket-flap description, but I didn't (I, um, bought something by John Green instead. But I'm not going THAT far back in my reviews. OK, OK, Paper Towns, really good, go read it, and yes The Fault In Our Stars is also wonderful), so when I saw it in the YA section at the local library while I was wandering around over there looking for books that might spark my son's interest* (I failed) I grabbed it up and took it home -- er, to my grandmother's -- and devoured it. It's another boarding-school story, which was a total accident; it's set in Australia and centers (at first) on the unofficial hierarchy among the students there, and their rivalry with the "townies" who live nearby and the "Cadets" who come from a military school for two months' worth of exercises every spring. The first chapter or two didn't grab me, but I'm glad I kept going. As the cadets' annual visit carries on, the protagonist, an orphan named Taylor who is the leader of the boarders, discovers things about herself, her town, her friends, and her missing mother that she never knew, in a way that keeps you as the reader guessing. (I actually made a chart to keep things straight and see if I could figure things out before she did. Now THAT's a good book.)
*Getting NSLT interested in a novel happens about once every two years and requires just the right combination of post-apocalyptic grittiness and fantasy. Yes, we read The Hunger Games trilogy before you did. ;-) He also liked the Chaos Walking trilogy and the Artemis Fowl books but now we're kind of stuck and he only begrudgingly reads the stuff I assign him for school. He takes after his father, who reads maybe a novel a decade, though he listens to them much more often now that we all have iPods and he commutes for over an hour a day.
Slumdog Millionaire -- Vikas Swarup -- 3.5
I didn't know this book existed when I watched the film adaptation, which meant that I unintentionally violated my firm policy of always reading the book first. I loved the movie, and I liked the book. The two are SERIOUSLY VERY DIFFERENT from each other, and if I'd read the book first I'd probably have spent so much time yelling at the screen during the movie (which I watched at home, so that would have been OK, really) that I'd have missed out on its good points. The very basic idea is the same but the details, except for a few, are drastically altered, from what I can remember of the movie. The book reads like a series of short stories, some of which broke my heart and made me laugh, some of which made me want to skim and skip around (though I didn't).
The End of California -- Steve Yarbrough -- 2.25
The other day I was in the library just wandering in the stacks waiting for something to jump out at me and say READ ME*, and I guess maybe because of the word California in the title, this one did. And I don't quite wish it hadn't. It was written by a guy who is (or was) apparently a creative-writing professor at Fresno State, just down the highway from me, one of the two places on my I'll-probably-go-to-nursing-school-there list, and it was about a doctor/football player who moved from Fresno back to the town where he grew up in Mississippi, which is actually where Yarbrough lived before he moved to Fresno, if you can follow that. There's a murder and a teen romance and an affair or two and some deep forgiveness moments and far too many paragraphs of high-school football play-by-play, and I kept reading not so much because I was hooked on the story but because I kept thinking, this has got to get really good sometime. It was a story with a lot of potential but it ended up just feeling sparse (and not in a good artsy way; more like there were more pages than there was story to fill them) and a bit... boring, really, and much too footbally oh my gosh. (It doesn't take much.) I'm always terribly afraid of authors googling their names and finding my negative reviews so Mr. Yarbrough, if you're reading this, I'm sorry and it's nothing personal and I'm sure you're a lovely creative-writing instructor. At Emerson College (I just looked you up), in Boston, which is probably at least much cooler than Fresno is right now.
*related: I cannot tell you how many books I have taken home from the library because their spines looked interesting and their authors happened to luck out and have a last name that came just before or after the name of a really famous writer. I've discovered some great ones and some graah ones this way. I guess if that one girl who ALWAYS sat in front of me in junior high because her name started with G-O-R-G and mine started with G-O-R-H ever hits the NYT bestseller list, I'll have to see if maybe I really do have a book inside me waiting to come out because I could never have a better opportunity.
(bolds are first-time reads; ratings are out of five.)
Will Grayson, Will Grayson -- John Green and David Levithan -- 4
I've been on a bit of a John Green (of vlogbrothers fame) kick lately and I have to say the guy writes some really readable, likable, thought-provoking young-adult books. I'm not familiar with David Levithan aside from his contribution to this book but the character perspective he wrote was just fine so he gets my stamp of approval as well. This novel is a book about two people with the exact same name who meet by accident just as one of them is having a major personal crisis and WHY didn't I think of this and write it first WHY WHY WHY? The writing, especially in the parts that I'm virtually certain were John Green's, was HILARIOUS (one character -- who is fixated on writing an autobiographical musical production while he is still in high school, which is something only an author who had actually been a teenager could come up with -- is described as "the world's largest person who is really, really gay" and "the world's gayest person who is really, really large" in a sentence that had me muffling my laughter so as not to wake my sleeping grandmother, whom I was caring for at the time) and also quite Deep and Important. Green's main point-of-view character reminded me very much of my own son in some ways -- self-contained, determined to go through life without drawing attention to himself or getting excessively invested in any emotional endeavors, which is not a trait with which I can identify personally, to say the least. (I know this will shock you.) His development over the course of the story gave me interesting insight into what might be going on in my boy's head and in his life.
Young Adult as a genre is very different from what it was when I was in its target demographic and it was, as far as I can tell, in its infancy. (Example: I lost track of how many books about girls reuniting with their adoptive mothers I read as a preteen. THEY WERE EVERYWHERE. I do not miss them.) Now the theme-of-the-decade is, understandably, the struggles and victories of kids who are marginalized (or not) as a result of their sexuality, and while this doesn't bother me in general the way it would have ten years ago, the fact that a book follows the current trend - any current trend - can make the story just the teensiest bit tired before I even open the cover. But Green and Levithan take the not-terribly-original thematic material and pair it with an original story and highly capable writing to produce a result that is well worth reading.
Looking for Alaska -- John Green -- 4.25
I will never forget what my dear friend Jenn said to me once about writing -- that everybody's first book is autobiographical. And whoo boy is this ever John Green's first novel. (I don't mean that in a bad way. I gave it a 4.25 out of 5, after all.) In it, a skinny (check), shy (check), intelligent (check) young man named Miles leaves his childhood home in Florida (check) for a boarding school (check) in Alabama (check) where he becomes a notable prankster (check). (Thank you, Internet. Prior to say 1997 I would have only been guessing here.) (I'm gonna go way out on a limb and surmise that John Green also made memorable, quirky friends and gained an affectionate nickname when he went off to school.) The thing is, this story really works. The characters are memorable and (mostly) knowable, the boarding-school pranks are generally hilarious (and inspiring), and the heartbreaking parts are suitably heartbreaking. If you like YA and/or boarding-school stories, give it a go.
Jellicoe Road -- Melina Marchetta -- 4.75
I saw this book at B&N back when I had a Christmas gift card to spend and I almost bought it based on its jacket-flap description, but I didn't (I, um, bought something by John Green instead. But I'm not going THAT far back in my reviews. OK, OK, Paper Towns, really good, go read it, and yes The Fault In Our Stars is also wonderful), so when I saw it in the YA section at the local library while I was wandering around over there looking for books that might spark my son's interest* (I failed) I grabbed it up and took it home -- er, to my grandmother's -- and devoured it. It's another boarding-school story, which was a total accident; it's set in Australia and centers (at first) on the unofficial hierarchy among the students there, and their rivalry with the "townies" who live nearby and the "Cadets" who come from a military school for two months' worth of exercises every spring. The first chapter or two didn't grab me, but I'm glad I kept going. As the cadets' annual visit carries on, the protagonist, an orphan named Taylor who is the leader of the boarders, discovers things about herself, her town, her friends, and her missing mother that she never knew, in a way that keeps you as the reader guessing. (I actually made a chart to keep things straight and see if I could figure things out before she did. Now THAT's a good book.)
*Getting NSLT interested in a novel happens about once every two years and requires just the right combination of post-apocalyptic grittiness and fantasy. Yes, we read The Hunger Games trilogy before you did. ;-) He also liked the Chaos Walking trilogy and the Artemis Fowl books but now we're kind of stuck and he only begrudgingly reads the stuff I assign him for school. He takes after his father, who reads maybe a novel a decade, though he listens to them much more often now that we all have iPods and he commutes for over an hour a day.
Slumdog Millionaire -- Vikas Swarup -- 3.5
I didn't know this book existed when I watched the film adaptation, which meant that I unintentionally violated my firm policy of always reading the book first. I loved the movie, and I liked the book. The two are SERIOUSLY VERY DIFFERENT from each other, and if I'd read the book first I'd probably have spent so much time yelling at the screen during the movie (which I watched at home, so that would have been OK, really) that I'd have missed out on its good points. The very basic idea is the same but the details, except for a few, are drastically altered, from what I can remember of the movie. The book reads like a series of short stories, some of which broke my heart and made me laugh, some of which made me want to skim and skip around (though I didn't).
The End of California -- Steve Yarbrough -- 2.25
The other day I was in the library just wandering in the stacks waiting for something to jump out at me and say READ ME*, and I guess maybe because of the word California in the title, this one did. And I don't quite wish it hadn't. It was written by a guy who is (or was) apparently a creative-writing professor at Fresno State, just down the highway from me, one of the two places on my I'll-probably-go-to-nursing-school-there list, and it was about a doctor/football player who moved from Fresno back to the town where he grew up in Mississippi, which is actually where Yarbrough lived before he moved to Fresno, if you can follow that. There's a murder and a teen romance and an affair or two and some deep forgiveness moments and far too many paragraphs of high-school football play-by-play, and I kept reading not so much because I was hooked on the story but because I kept thinking, this has got to get really good sometime. It was a story with a lot of potential but it ended up just feeling sparse (and not in a good artsy way; more like there were more pages than there was story to fill them) and a bit... boring, really, and much too footbally oh my gosh. (It doesn't take much.) I'm always terribly afraid of authors googling their names and finding my negative reviews so Mr. Yarbrough, if you're reading this, I'm sorry and it's nothing personal and I'm sure you're a lovely creative-writing instructor. At Emerson College (I just looked you up), in Boston, which is probably at least much cooler than Fresno is right now.
*related: I cannot tell you how many books I have taken home from the library because their spines looked interesting and their authors happened to luck out and have a last name that came just before or after the name of a really famous writer. I've discovered some great ones and some graah ones this way. I guess if that one girl who ALWAYS sat in front of me in junior high because her name started with G-O-R-G and mine started with G-O-R-H ever hits the NYT bestseller list, I'll have to see if maybe I really do have a book inside me waiting to come out because I could never have a better opportunity.
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