The Book: Little Bee, by Chris Cleave

The Story: For the first time ever, I’m just going to copy the “teaser” on the back of the book:

“We don’t want to tell you what happens in this book.  It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it.  Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it, so we’ll just say this:

This is the story of two women.  Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face.  Two years later, they meet again- and the story starts there…

Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell your friends about it.  When you do, please don’t tell them what happens.  The magic is in how the story unfolds.”

What I Thought: Rarely would I describe a book as “magical” but this one really was.

I picked this book out for my “vacation read” based solely on the pretty cover and the mysterious description on the back.  And I am just so glad that I took a chance.

Again, I don’t want to give away too much, but I just want to say that Little Bee is one of the best characters I’ve read in a really long time.  Her life, her story, her perspective was happy and sad at the same time.  I just felt for her so much and fell in love with her right away.  There were so many times that I just ached for her.  Nothing but good writing and a great character can make me develop such an emotional attachment. So frigging good.

The other woman in the story, Sarah, was going through some crazy stuff too.  While I didn’t love her like I loved Little Bee, I did ache for her.  Her life and her strength, balanced with her pure old confusion, made her a totally “normal” person who had been put into extraordinary situations and rose to some and shrunk back from others.  She just seemed very real to me.

I’m just going to cut this short because I really, truly, don’t want to give the storyline away.  Just trust me when I say that you will not regret reading this one.

Conclusion: Absolutely worth the read. A great story with seriously wonderful characters.  Don’t miss this one.

No reason other than my Borders is going out of business, and I like you guys.

This, for me, is one of the books that has both. I didn’t expect to like it at all, and I was totally blown away.  I convinced the girls in my book club to read this for our book this month, so it’s been on my mind lately.  I plan on doing a re-read in the next couple of weeks. I cannot wait.

So I bought one for one of you, my faithful readers.

Just comment.

I’m intimidated by the giveaways that have all these stipulations, so I’m opting out of that this time.  Just leave a little comment here and on Friday the 12th, I’ll use a random number generator to see who the lucky duck is.

The Book: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson

The Story: Thompson and his Samoan attorney have, “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers laughers… also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls,” when they head off across the desert in a car that.. ahem… stood out.  For 200 pages they trash hotel rooms, hallucinate, run from the “pigs”, and attend a seminar for cops about drug use. You get the picture.

What I Thought: I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect to like this one.  I kind of had this idea in my head that it was just popular because of the antics. It’s not. I get it.  Even through is drug-induced haze, Hunter S. Thompson was able to be witty and kind of capture what America was at that time.  I wasn’t there, so I can’t say if it is spot on, but I’ll tell you this much: it felt honest.

There were parts that made me laugh out loud.  I love how they got stoned and then got totally ballsy.  When they were intimating other people, I cracked up every time.  Good stuff.

Not sure if every edition does, but mine was illustrated by Ralph Steadman, and the pictures added so much to the book.  They were just ink-and-paper drawings, but they were amazing.  The picture of the attorney naked, throwing up in front of the hotel maid was hysterical and I even dreamed about it the next night.

Until I read this, I didn’t realize just how many tv shows/movies/books knocked off different parts of this.  The first thing that comes to mind is the part in Knocked Up where Paul Rudd and Seth Rogan take mushrooms and go see Cirque du Soleil.  Hilarious.

I think what made me want to read this was a video clip that my husband sent me on youtube of Hunter S. Thompson. I laughed until I cried a little. Enjoy.  (If you’re at work, may want to grab your headphones.  Ol’ Hunter has a dirty mouth.)

Conclusion: Maybe I would have enjoyed this more had I been alive when it was written or really into drug culture or whatever, but I managed to like it quite a bit anyway.  It’s a modern classic.  It started a whole little branch of reporting. It’s witty. It’s only like 200 pages. Read it.

The Giver, by Lois Lowry

Nothing gets me quite like a good dystopian book.  I love them.  The Giver was, I’m sure, the first book that I read that was set in another version of the future, and I was in love with it.

The thing that Lois Lowry did perfectly was give us just enough information about Jonas’ world to make us able to see it, but not enough to spell out what was going on.  Like in Jaws, how they didn’t show the shark until about halfway through, you really are left guessing through the majority of this book, and I think that that is what leads to such appeal.  I remember, in middle school, this being the absolute “it” book to read.  Everyone was crazy about it.  I think it is because of the guesswork that the author makes the reader use, along with the character of Jonas.  It was impossible not to put yourself in his shoes and live through what he was going through.  Just an incredibly written children’s book.

Just a side not, when I saw Pleasantville (the movie with Spiderman before he was Spiderman) this is the first thing I thought of.  I kept thinking about how the kids that were transported into the black & white tv-world were opening everyone’s eyes in the same way that the giver opens Jonas’ eyes, even down to having the flowers change color and so on. I always relate these two things in my  mind now.

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Without further ado:

I started reading eBooks recently out of sheer desperation in an attempt to stave off terminal boredom while sitting in class or at work. I started out using my iPhone using both the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble eReader programs. Using my iPhone was less that ideal, but the idea of not carrying around several books appealed to me immensely; I am a consummate reader, and being able to pull my iPhone out of my pocket and read any time that I wanted to was the strongest appeal.

My job requires me to be away from home for 24-48 hours at a time, and there’s nothing worse than finishing my book and not having a new one on hand to start. Obviously, the iPhone was fine as a temporary solution, allowing me to make sure that I could really get into an eBook before plunking the cash down for an eReader, but its small screen was far from ideal. I am proud to announce that this week I finally purchased the Nook, by Barnes and Noble.

I also looked at the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eReader, but I like the Nook better for several reasons: the Nook has more titles (over a million, according to B&N), the sleek touch screen looks better to me that the somewhat clunky keyboard that adorns the Kindle, and the ability to go into any Barnes and Noble store for support.

The Nook also allows .pdf documents to be loaded, as well as pictures and music, allowing you to personalize your wallpaper and screen savers. There is a feature allowing you to lend a book you purchased to a friend, and your friend doesn’t have to have a nook- they can just use the eReader program on the computer or iPhone/iTouh to read it.

Alright, so now that I’ve covered some background information, what do I really think of it? To be honest, I really like it. I am probably just as attached to the feel and smells of a real book as anybody out there.  Lying in bed and flipping through the pages, and seeing the left hand of the book getting fatter while the right half gets thinner is something that can’t be totally replicated by an electronic device. However, as anyone who has ever borrowed a book from me can attest, my books tend to be a mess; I like to eat and read at the dining room table, and trying to eat and hold a book and turn pages is the perfect recipe for disaster, and I don’t have a book that is free of smudges and stains. The Nook can be held in one hand, and I can even turn the pages with one hand.

My other concern was how well my eyes would adjust to reading off of an electronic screen. I have some farsightedness and use reading glasses, but the eInk technology replicates the look of a page fairly well. The nook isn’t backlit, which helps revent getting a headache. I also haven’t had any eyestrain, even after reading for a few hours at a time. The page turns are animated, and there is a display in the corner showing the current page and the total pages in the book, somewhat allowing the satisfaction of seeing yourself pass the halfway point. I also haven’t had any problem with glare on the screen from other light sources.

Of course, like anything, it’s got some faults as well. After using the iPhone, I don’t feel that the LCD touch screen or the reader screen are as responsive. When a page is turned, the screen actually blacks out as the reader redraws the page. This results in a small time lag, however it was something that I was able to adjust to fairly quickly.  I do also see a little bit of time lag when I am using the touch screen to type, such as when entering a Wi-Fi password or a book title to search for. This is something that I still haven’t totally gotten used to, but it’s not a huge deal to me, because this is something that I’ve only done a few times.

All in all, I am very happy with my Nook purchase. If you travel, or you are in a position where you find yourself away from home a lot, I highly recommend the Nook. It’s very compact, it’s easy to read, and there’s no concern about ever not having a book- just download a new one. Best of all, you can go to any Barnes and Noble and play with one before spending the money!

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,

Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

-The Lorax, Dr. Seuss

The Book: The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red, edited by Joyce Reardon, Ph. D.

The Story: This is the diary of a young woman living in Seattle around the turn of the century.  She is courted by and then marries a rich oil tycoon named John Rimbauer.  He is in the process of building a huge house when they start courting.  Things are already shaky, with workers dying during building, digging up a cemetery to build, and the foreman being shot on site.  After the wedding, the Rimbauers take off on a year long honeymoon around the world to give time for their home to be finished.

When they return, they are greeted by a monster of a house.  It is just huge and majestic and they are now super high society.  Then the creepy stuff starts happening.

People come up missing on the grounds, never to be seen again.  As a result, Ellen sort of flips out.  She starts consulting psychics and having seances in the house.

The diary documents this, but also just what life was like for a young rich woman at this time.  You can almost feel Ellen losing touch with reality as her house starts becoming crazier and crazier.  I don’t want to give too much away, but there are some goosebumpy moments in this one.

What I Thought: Maybe I’m just totally naive, but the whole time I was reading this, I thought it was real.  It’s not.  I guess when it came out, it was one of the first viral marketing campaigns that really did what it was supposed to: advertise for a mini-series that was about to come on tv.

Call me a sucker, I had no idea.

I guess, when it was published, other people believed it, then found out it was fake and got mad.  There was all kinds of hubbub surrounding the book.  I vaguely remember hearing of the book, but didn’t know any of the details. Crazy.

Anyway, fake or real or whatever, I thought that this was a worthy read.  I tend to like books that are written in diary or letters.  This was no exception.  I felt myself cringing for Ellen when John was mean to her (which happened a lot) and gasping with her when creepy stuff happened (which also happened a lot).  I really grew attached to her, which is maybe why her downward spiral was so fascinating to read.

For me, the creepiest part was her young daughter, April.  She has this model of the house that the designers used.  She kind of becomes obsessed with it and mumbles to it, and for some reason that imagery is just about enough to give me nightmares.

This is one of those books that you read more for the story than for the writing.  The writing isn’t awful, but it’s not great. I’m guessing that that was to keep up the appearance of it just being a normal diary.  The story more than makes up for it, however.

Conclusion: A quick, spooky read.  Not going to become a classic, but worth the few hours it takes to read it.

” ‘There are books full of great writing that don’t have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story, Bobby.  Don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that.  Read sometimes for the words- the language.  Don’t be like the play-it-safers that won’t do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and a good words, treasure that book.’

‘Are there many of those, do you think?’ Bobby asked.

‘More than the book-snobs and play-it-safers think. Many more.’ ”

Good stuff, huh?

I was trying to think of, for me, books that have had both. Tough question.

Off the top of my head I thought of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, The Stand by Stephen King, and (of course) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  Maybe there are more, but these are the ones that immediately came to mind.

What books, for you, have both?

Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White

Oh my word how I loved this book.  From the “Where’s papa going with that axe?” to the bittersweet ending.  I probably read this book 4,000 times.  And really, has there ever been a better first line?

Ahh, I could wax nostalgic about this all day.  This is one of those books that I remember reading to the end then flipping back to the beginning and starting again.  And again. So, so good.

Maybe it was Fern and how much I wanted to be her, maybe it was the idea of these animals having a life of their own, or just the pure old sweetness that was the friendship between Wilber and Charlotte.  I can’t peg exactly why this book moved me so much, but it did. Oh, it did.  The trip to the fair, Fern’s crush on Henry, the messages in the web, the geese, the scene where they’re washing Wilber with buttermilk…. seriously, great stuff.

In fact, when I was a little bit older, I was still clinging to this idea of having a pet pig.  I wanted, like Fern to push it around in a stroller and dress it up and love on it.  I was seriously 16 years old.  For my birthday, my mom took me to the next town, to a pig farm, and let me pick out my very own pig. I picked out the pinkest one and we turned out of our outbuildings into a pig stall.  I would go out to the stall and sing to it and sit with it after school.  It was my very own Wilber (although I  named mine George). I always looked around for spider or rat friends, but never saw any.  Dang. He was still “Some Pig.”

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The Book: Mister Monday: The Keys to the Kingdom #1, by Garth Nix

The Story: The main character of this book, Arthur, suffers a should-be fatal asthma attack and is visited by some creepy dudes who babble off some crazy stuff and then give him a book and a “key” that looks like the minute hand to a clock.  He ends up in the hospital and recovers quickly.

On his way home, he sees this new “house” in his development that is huge and crazy and no one else can see it.  Of course, the book that he was given by the creepy dudes shows him how to get in. When he gets “visited” at school by some more creepy guys who start a fire and plague in his town, Arthur figures that he should head to that new crazy house and try to figure out what is going on.

So, he goes and it turns out to be this whole wild city. He finds out that by having that minute hand, he has a lot of power within the city.  To stop all the bad stuff that is happening, he’s told that he has to get the hour hand that matches the minute hand he has.  A fun little quest begins.

What I Thought: Let me preface this by saying that I was buying some Hunger Games/Catching Fire goodies at the bookstore and the guy who was checking me out asked me if I liked that “type” of book, by which I kind of took to mean dystopian books- which I love.  Of course I said yes.  He said that the best series being written like this right now was the Keys to the Kingdom series. I immediately went home and requested it from the library, knowing almost nothing about it.

Maybe it was that I was expecting something like Hunger Games/Catching Fire, which I thought was incredible.   I cannot even comprehend where the comparison came from.  I’m not entirely sure, now, what he meant by “that type of book.” Maybe just YA fantasy? Which I’m not into at all. So maybe it was just that my expectations were just off.

This was not great.  I would be struggling to call it good. I guess that the premise has promise, but the follow through was cringe-worthy.  The writing was clunky and the dialogue was all the way unbelievable. I realize that it was science fiction, but the world just seemed so… fake. Even the “real” part of the world.  All of it.  The “rules” that existed seemed arbitrary and I never found myself in suspense at all. It was just silly.

I kind of kept thinking that it was going to come to life at some point and that something amazing was going to happen. No such luck.

Conclusion: Meh.  There are so many better YA books out there right now.  I wouldn’t waste my time on this.  I will not be continuing on with this series. And if you’re a bookstore worker or librarian, don’t compare mediocre books to great ones.  It’s not fair to the mediocre ones.