Nose in a Book

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

Sarah Dessen is one of those authors I probably wouldn’t ever have discovered if it weren’t for book blogs.  As soon as I got into the world of book blogs though, her name kept popping up.  And yet, it’s taken me since April of last year to finally pick one up!  Now that I have, I will definitely be reading more though.

It’s the first day of school and Annabel is nervous.  Something happened last spring(which the reader doesn’t find out about until much later in the novel) that caused a rift between Annabel and her friends.  At lunch, she finds herself, alone, sitting near a mysterious, intimidating boy.  This becomes their routine, never speaking but always eating lunch “together”.  Eventually, of course, Annabel and the boy begin talking and find themselves becoming friends.  Also, as the semester goes on she faces what happened last spring and learns some things about herself along the way.

I loved this book.  It was exactly what I was expecting.  It was kind of like chick lit but YA, so maybe YA chick lit?  It was nothing super profound or anything but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the point.   It was just a fun, entertaining story.  And it was well written.  (To me, there is nothing more unforgivable than poor writing, in ANY genre.)  I’m not sure what else to say about this book because it was perfect.  I can’t think of anything I disliked (except maybe the cover.  When I googled the cover I found that there was a much better one out there.  Too bad my copy didn’t have that one!)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

I’ve heard tons about Chabon and this week at the library I just happened to see this book and picked it up.   I’m not sure how I feel about it though.  I kind of feel like this book had multiple personalities or something.

First of all, my summary.  Kavalier and Clay are cousins living in New York City.  Josef Kavalier has newly escaped from Prague where he had to smuggle himself out of the country.  (He’s Jewish and it’s 1939.)  His cousin Sammy Clay happens to see some of his drawings and immediately decides that they are going to draw/write a comic book together.  And that’s pretty much what it’s about.

I loved the first half of this book.  The imagery was amazing.  I could see the pages they were drawing and I felt totally immersed in the comic book world or superheros and secret identities.  It was so fun!  And the story was entertaining and flowing well.  But then something happened.  The whole story changed.  And I just realized something as I was typing that sentence…  The world changed (and with it the comic book world) and that’s when the whole feel of the story changed too.  So, although I still didn’t like it after that, I guess I can respect what he did and why.  It makes so much sense now!

Anyway, the story was really long and although I enjoyed it, it wasn’t a book that I couldn’t put down.  I sometimes even had to make myself pick it up again.  I felt that it was almost a tedious read at times.  (The book is over 600 pages of tiny print – there’s a lot of material there!)  And the ending was kind of disappointing.  The way the story was told I was expecting a nice tidy ending to bring everything together but it wasn’t that kind of ending.  And although I can enjoy a book like that, I just wasn’t expecting it here and it kind of threw me off.  The whole book I got the sense that something big was going to happen at the end and then nothing did.  I’m not sure what gave me this idea and I think I would have enjoyed the book more if I hadn’t been expecting some big ending.

I definitely will try reading another book by Chabon because I loved the writing.  And I would recommend this book but just with a warning about the kind of book it actually is!

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

After reading To Say Nothing of the Dog last summer I knew I wanted to read more of Connie Willis but I’m just now getting around to it!  (And I still want more!)

A few short years into the future (2054 to be exact) and time travel has been discovered (invented?).   Kivrin, a young student, is obsessed with the 1300s (considered a dangerous century to visit) and has finally found someone who is willing to send her there.  She is assured that she will be going to 1320, a full 28 years before the plague came to England.  However, something goes wrong, but the only person who knows what it is falls ills with an epidemic flu before he gets the chance to tell anyone what is wrong.  In the midst of a quarantine and opposition from the higher-ups, Kivrin’s tutor desperately tries to discover what the problem is and what he can do to fix it.

I didn’t like this one as much as To Say Nothing of the Dog but I still couldn’t put it down.   It had the same dry humour as TSNotD and just as fun of a story.  I also love how she’s telling two stories here.  The science fiction-y modern day epidemic story and then the historical fiction story.  And even though she was telling a story about an epidemic flu that actually killed people, it was all doom and gloom, it was actually very entertaining.  I don’t really have much else to day about this one, but I will definitely be reading more of Willis (and hopefully it won’t take me another year to do so).

Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth

Ok, so who’s sick of the vampire books?  I am!!  But this one has s a whole new take and it works.  The vampire part of the book is just an interesting side plot which adds to the main plot rather than takes away.  It’s kind of a Tom Clancy type political thriller.  Cade, the vampire, is a top-secret government agent who reports directly to the president.  I can’t say much more about the plot without giving too much away, but basically there’s a plot against the White House (which involves more undead – a “biological weapon” as it’s called in the press release) and Cade is called in to fix things.

Maybe I’m just slightly giddy because this is the first free book I’ve received that I actually liked, but it was good!  It was entertaining and exciting and intriguing.  I also liked the way Farnsworth handled the vampire bit.  I can’t help but compare him to the vampires in Twilight (I know, I know, not the same genre at all but still) and Cade is so much more likable and believable than Edward et al.

Anyway, if you like political thrillers you should definitely check this one out.

So Penguin is celebrating 75 years this year and were having a contest to win 75 of their best selling paperbacks.  Well, I just got a phone call this morning and I’m one of the winners!  I’m so excited.  It’s my birthday this weekend and I can’t think of a better birthday present!  I’ve looked at the list and there’s only 2 or 3 books on the list that I already own.  And there are some really fun books.  I can’t wait for them all to arrive on my door step!

Check out the list if you’re interested.

Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge

Hmm…I’m not really sure where to start with this one.  At first, I didn’t think I liked it, but as I thought about it more and read about it, it’s starting to grow on me.

So, Henry, an author, published a book a few years ago – a super famous, well loved book about animals (coincidence?  I don’t think so…)  Anyway, he’s got his second book all ready to go when the publishers shoot it down because it’s a little unconventional (ok, a lot unconventional).  It’s two books in one – an essay about the Holocaust and a fictional story about the Holocaust.  He wants it published as a flip book.  Meaning that you would read one part of the book from the beginning to the middle and then you’d flip the book to read the other part of the book from the beginning to the middle again.  (Guess who else wanted to write a flip book?)  After this disappointment, Henry decides to quit writing and move away to some unnamed big city.  There he meets a taxidermist who is writing a play that on the surface is about a donkey and a monkey (Beatrice and Virgil) who live on a shirt just talking, but is actually about “The Horrors” – the holocaust (and other similar “Horrors”).

I’m still not sure I liked the book but I think that Martel accomplished what he set out to do in spite of his publishers not enjoying his original idea (I don’t know the whole back story – I’m just going on other reviews I’ve read -and of course a lot of assumption based on the actual novel).  And I like that.  And I think that makes it a successful book.  It was also pretty short and besides that it was a quick read which also works in its favour.  Also, apparently Martel’s original story was about a talking monkey and a talking donkey and it seems he was able to get a lot of their conversations published anyway as they were part of the taxidermist’s play.  I love that.  (And, honestly, I don’t know if the publishers really did tell him that his flip book idea sucked but I’m assuming because that’s what happened in the book.)

It’s also a smart book, almost to the point of pretentiousness.  In fact, it is pretentious but not overly, annoyingly so.  There is one scene from the play (the first one Henry reads) where Virgil describes a pear to Beatrice because she’s never seen one before.  I really liked it, it was very well written, but somehow it knew it was well written and it came through in the writing.  (Make sense?)

I guess I would reccomend it but not as a fast paced, can’t put it down, gripping type of story.  More as a story that says something important and also happens to be entertaining.