I can’t really do a summary without any spoilers for the previous two books so I’ll just say that this picks up just where The Girl Who Played with Fire left off.  And it’s more of the same intense story.

I still think the first one of the three was the best but this one (and the second one) weren’t any slouch either.  After finishing this one, I wanted to go right back to the beginning and read all three again.  I just loved that this trilogy was just go, go, go.  From the first page of the first book to the last page of the last book.

The only complaint I had with this (and the second book) was that if you haven’t just read the previous book (and I hadn’t) you’re going to be a little bit confused.  Larsson just has so many characters that it’s almost impossible to keep track of them.  It’s not that big of a deal because he does a pretty good job of bringing you up to speed about what happened in the previous books (without if being boring and redundant if you have just finished the previous books.)  Also, I found that even though I couldn’t totally remember who was who, it didn’t really matter.  As long as I remembered, good cop or bad cop (and even if I didn’t – it became pretty obvious very quickly) I was okay.

I think what sets this book apart from others like it is the fantastic story-telling.  Larsson sure knew how to weave a tale.  And weave he did.  There were so many different things going on that all had to come together in the end and make sense and they did!  Just like this others, I couldn’t put this one down but when I had to, I wasn’t completely lost when I was able to get back to it.  Sometimes I find books like this with so much going on are hard to follow but that wasn’t the case with this one.  I’m just sad that I won’t be able to read more from Larsson.

(This book is called The Love Verb in the UK and I actually think that title works much better for the book.)

The book is about a group of friends and family that are happily living their lives when they are devastated with the news that one of their group is dying of cancer.  It’s the story of how they come together to deal with the illness and imminent death of a close friend.

I didn’t really like this book.  First off, I was expecting it to be light hearted chick lit and obviously it wasn’t.  It was a lot heavier and emotional than I was expecting.  (Which isn’t really a flaw in the book but still colours how I feel about it in the long run.  It may be a marketing flaw but it was probably just a mistake on my part.)  Second, I found that the story took a really long time getting started.  Over half the book was character development and setting the stage for the real story to start.  I think I would have appreciated the book more if there was more story after the diagnosis.  This is what the book really should have been about (and I think is what it’s supposed to be about) but this part of the story just isn’t developed enough for me.  Third, I wasn’t a huge fan of the writing.  It wasn’t really bad, but it wasn’t great either.  And fourth, there were recipes between each chapter and while they weren’t really distracting or anything, I just didn’t really get what the point of them was.  One of the characters was a chef and really loved cooking and if she had been more of the main character it might have worked better.

I didn’t totally hate the book though.  It definitely pulled at my heart strings.  The dying character has two young children and I found myself just sick at the thought of dying and leaving my own children without a mother.  I really think the story had potential because it’s such a real story, such a familiar story.

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!

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.

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.

A young scholar, Nathan, stumbles across an extremely old manuscript while doing research on Hebrew poetry.  He translates the manuscript and finds that it is a letter written by a man who was a disciple of John the Baptist and Jesus.  The contents of the letter “threaten to turn long-held principles of Christianity on their heads.”  According to the book summary Nathan “finds himself thrown into an agonizing struggle against powerful forces committed to discrediting him…As he races to verify the authenticity of the letter, he faces rejection by his fellow scholars and sinister opposition from within the Church that aims to stop him at any cost.”

I really didn’t like this book and here’s why:

The story lacked flow.  The story was told in three alternating parts: the letter, Nathan’s narrative and the story of a shady priest who’d spent at least 30 years murdering, stealing and plotting.  There was way too much unnecessary detail in the letter and it was so boring.  The part of the book that told Nathan’s story was too impersonal and the writing was stilted.  This part of the story didn’t have enough detail.  As a result the characters were not adequately developed and I never got to know the characters.  Because I didn’t know them, I didn’t care about them or the outcome of the book.  The shady priest parts of the book were so random.  I think the author was trying to show us what a bad guy he was but so much of what he did was so completely unrelated to the rest of the novel that it was confusing.

The book summary was one of the things that bothered me the most about the book.  I thought the story was going to be exciting, and suspenseful, and controversial.  But it wasn’t!  The book moved so slowly, I didn’t find it to be suspenseful at all.  And controversial?  I don’t think so.  You’d think with the subject matter of the letter that it wouldn’t be that hard to find some controversy but I suspect that if the letter had been real most Christians wouldn’t be all that bothered by it.  I wouldn’t anyway.

After trashing a book like that, I usually like to find something good to say about it but in this case I just can’t think of anything.  I always feel badly, saying I didn’t like a book because I know a lot of blood, sweat and tears go into writing a book.   I’m sure there is someone out there that would enjoy this novel, it just wasn’t for me.

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge and What’s in a Name Challenge

In Sarajevo a cellist is sitting at a window watching his friends and neighours in line for bread when they are all killed by a mortar.  He decides to go out into the streets every day at the same time for 22 days to play and Adagio for each person killed in the attack.  The novel tells the story of three people living in Sarajevo during the siege in the 1990’s.  Each of them is affected by the cellist and his actions.  I actually found that although the book was named after him, the cellist wasn’t actually the focus of the book.  It was more about living and surviving in the city during the siege.

It was interesting (that’s not quite the right term but it’s the best I’ve got right now) to read about living in Sarajevo at the time.  In the past few months I’ve also read Left to Tell about the Rwandan genocide and A Thousand Splendid Suns about the Taliban in Afghanistan (and last year The Book of Negroes about slavery).  I’ve known that these kind of things were happening in the world but reading about them inspires me to find out more about what really happened and why and because they are so much more modern than books I’ve read about WWII or other conflicts they hit so much closer to home.  I am consistently amazed at the incredible cruelty that human beings have the ability to inflict on each other.  It’s really disgusting.

I think it’s really important to read books like this and feel that disgust and anger about the atrocities that occurred.  We need to remember so we can try to prevent these kinds of things from happening in the future.  A common theme in these books is the people who never thought it could happen to them.  That really hits close to home because that’s what I’m constantly thinking as a I read these novels.  “That could never happen in Canada.”  But who knows, maybe it could?

Anyway, back to the book!  I thought it was well written but sometimes I felt it was a little contrived.  It just didn’t feel completely sincere to me at times.  Possibly that’s because it’s impossible to write a book about something you don’t know.  It sounds like Galloway did all the research he could but I just don’t think it’s possible to really understand what it’s like to go through something like this unless you’ve actually experienced it.  (Not that you’d ever WANT to!)

The thing that’s cool about this book is that there really was a Cellist of Sarajevo.  The details aren’t exactly the same but there was a man, Vedran Smailovic, who played Albinon’s Adagio during the siege.  Apparently Smailovic wasn’t too pleased about the book though!

I’m not really sure what to say about this book.  I gave it 100 pages but I just couldn’t finish.  Perhaps it’s just timing but I could not get into this book.  It was really just too wordy.  Every time I’d start to get pulled into the story, like something was actually happening, I’d find myself bogged down again by all those words!

It really is well written though.  I’m sure at a different time in my life I could sit down and enjoy what this book has to offer but right now I only get short moments to read and I think this is a book that is better read if you have an hour or two at a time to devote to it.  I’m also operating on small amounts of sleep which makes it hard to concentrate on anything that’s even slightly complicated!  So, I’ll put this one back on the shelf and perhaps come back to it in a few years when I’m done with small children demanding every other second of my attention.

Read for: Book Club

I wasn’t sure about this book when I first found out we were going to be reading it for book club – I wondered why I’d be interested in reading about Alzheimer’s.  But I really enjoyed it.

Alice is a super smart, famous Harvard professor of linguistics when at 50 she is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.  The book is really just about her struggle with her declining memory.  It shows a little bit about her family’s struggle as well but what I liked most about the book was that is was told from Alice’s point of view.  It was really interesting to see inside her mind and hear her thoughts as the disease progressed.

I’ve never had any experience with Alzheimer’s.  My family has a strong cancer history but I’ve never had any family member with Alzheimer’s.  It was quite an eye-opener for me to read this book and really understand how frustrating and depressing this disease would be to have or watch a family member struggle with.  In the book, right after her diagnosis, Alice states that she would rather have cancer than Alzheimer’s.  I had actually thought that myself before she even said that.  The thing about Alzheimer’s is that there is no fighting it…and there aren’t really any amazing treatments either.  The other thing that would be tough is that if you have the particular gene that Alice has, you have a 100% chance of getting the disease.  The gene that is inherent in my family only carries an 80% chance of developing the disease (which isn’t great statistically but I’ll take it over 100%!).

At first I had a couple of complaints but I think I’ve resolved them.  First, the book became increasingly choppy and less detailed toward the end and it seemed almost like Genova had just gotten bored and just wanted to get it over with, but then I realized that because the story was told from Alice’s point of view, it totally made sense.  Of course things would be more choppy and less detailed because her life probably seemed like a series of small moments – she was basically living entirely in the present with really hardly any memories of the past.  The second complaint I had is that is seemed like there was a lot of technical stuff.  Normally, I don’t think this would have bothered me but I was trying to read the book quickly (I forgot about book club and didn’t start reading the book until the morning of – oops!) and I just didn’t need all that extra.  But it wasn’t overly complicated or in depth so I don’t think it would bother most people.

The other thing about reading this book is that it’s made me oversensitive to lapses in my own memory.  I’ve been very sleep deprived lately so there are a lot of gaps in my memory and after reading this book I started to realize just how many things I was forgetting but I also noticed where the strengths are in my mind.  I’m really good at remembering dates and appointments (I have a calendar but hardly ever look at it) but I’m terrible with names (which as a teacher is a terrible thing!) and my vocabulary is definitely suffering lately.  It also reminded me of a migraine I had once.  I get regular migraines with no memory loss but once I had one and I couldn’t remember people’s names, including my cousin, a colleague, Tylenol and my own son!  It was really scary not being able to remember my own son’s name, I can’t imagine going through that on a regular basis.

Overall it was a great book – I learned a lot.  The book club discussion was great.  There was a lot to talk about.  There are several people in my club who have family members with Alzheimer’s and they all thought it was very realistic.  I can’t wait to read her next book, Left Neglected, about a woman who suffers a brain injury and no longer perceives information coming from the left.

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge

It is in the future (the near future according to the book jacket) and the bees have all disappeared.  Then randomly (or not as it turns out) five people across the globe are stung.  Each of them are then brought into special isolation rooms to be studied to find out why they were stung and how this information could be used to bring back the bees.  I found this part of the book interesting but then it took an odd turn.  After the stingees are sent back to their normal lives, they are again gathered up, and this time brought together on a remote island and told to tell stories to each other.  Then there are a bunch of their short stories in the book (which I’m sure had some deep meaning to the story but it wasn’t readily apparent and I just didn’t feel like thinking that hard to figure it out).    Then after all that weirdness, there’s some zombie references and then you find out why the bees disappeared and how the scientists plan on getting them back.

So, how did I feel about this book?  I’m still not sure.  It’s taken me a while to get to this review because I’m still deciding what I think.  I did enjoy the first half and I was satisfied with the ending, but the middle part was strange.  And I can’t decide if the beginning and the ending make up for the strangness of the middle. you know?

As always with Coupland, though, there were definitely parts that made me laugh out loud and many of his characters were pretty witty which made for enjoyable reading even in the weird parts.  I think overall it was a decent book and it wasn’t too long or deep so I can see past the middle part (which wasn’t bad – just different and isn’t that just typical Coupland?)

Note: I’m labelling this as dystopian fiction because it kind of has that feel, but it’s not typical dystopian either.