Anywhoooo.....
1) The Naming: The First Book of Pellinor (Pellinor Series) by Alison Croggon / YA / ***
Favorite line: “Light blooms the brighter in the darkest places.”
This book took me over a week to read which is why I haven't posted lately. It is very Lord of the Ringish.... the main character rushed onto a journey fraught with danger. They ride through forsaken lands trying to reach safety. They are chased by dark riders. Not all are who they seem. Darkness threatens to overtake all and only valor on the part of our hero can save the world. It even had songs or poems. I can't say I LOVED it, but it was interesting.
2) The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner / A / **
Favorite paragraph: "People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities."
This is the character sketch of a man with grandiose ideas and a restless spirit. He drags his family through a series of get-rich schemes (in search of the paradise depicted in the song that makes up the title of the book) that subjects them to a life time of transiency, poverty, and fear. The book was depressing.... it just never seemed to get any better. By the end of the book I thoroughly despised the main character and loved the mother, Elsa. I read somewhere that this book was auto-biographical for Stegner which would explain why he is so good at writing relationships with all their love, pettiness, jealousies and loyalties.
3) The Garden of Eve by K. L. Going / JF / *1/2
From the cover: "Evie reluctantly moves with her widowed father to Beaumont, New York, where he has bought an apple orchard, dismissing rumors that the town is cursed and the trees haven't borne fruit in decades. Evie doesn't believe in things like curses and fairy tales anymore--if fairy tales were real, her mom would still be alive. But odd things happen in Beaumont. Evie meets a boy who claims to be dead and receives a mysterious seed as an eleventh-birthday gift. Once planted, the seed grows into a tree overnight, but only Evie and the dead boy can see it--or go where it leads."
Sounds good right? Too bad it wasn't. It was contrived, predictable, and lackluster. It was like the author started out writing a fantasy book and then changed her mind. It was odd.
4) The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel by Adam Johnson / A / ****
Favorite line: “But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.”
I can't even really explain what this book is about. It is based in North Korea in modern times. It tells the story of the life of Jun-Do from his boyhood in the orphanage directed by his father up through his adult years as he works to save the life of the woman he loves. It is part adventure / part romance / part political commentary. And it was captivating. I admit I know little about North Korea and Kim Jong Il and knew even less about the human rights violations happening there. I don't know what parts of the story are truth and what are fiction.. although I get the sense that even the fictional parts are based on real events. This book was eye-opening. It had a very George Orwell feel. I love dystopian books, so I likely enjoyed this one as it is the story of the horrifying things humans do to each other and the trans descent power of the human spirit.
5) The Swan Thieves: A Novel by Elizabeth Kostova / A / **1/2
Favorite line: “... how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?”
Robert Oliver is a brilliant painter. And with genius often comes madness. The book opens with the artist attempting to attack a painting in the National Gallery. He is subsequently admitted into psychiatric care. The rest of the story follows his psychiatrist, Andrew Marlowe, as he attempts to learn what brought Oliver to the point of violence. He breaks all kinds of ethical rules as he interviews those who knew Oliver best.
I had to keep reminding myself that Marlowe was a man.... it took me a few chapters to even figure this out. The author is female and her writing from a male point of view was not convincing. I am also not a mental health professional but it seemed odd that the painter would obsess to the point he did and not exhibit any other bizarre behaviors. And the ending was just flat.
6) The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson / A / ***
Favorite line: this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. "
This is a story of Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century. The city wins the task of hosting the "World's Columbian Exposition" (a world fair) to commemorate the 400 year anniversary of Columbia reaching the America's. The book would have been fascinating enough with all the meticulously researched historical details that tell the story of a city basically pulling off a miracle to build and run the fair, however the author also intertwined the "true-crime" story of an urban serial killer. It was almost like the author had material on the fair and material on the murder but not enough to do a complete book for each, so he intertwined the stories. Either that or no publisher would pick up a story about a fair so the author threw in a psychopath. I am being facetious as I'm sure the author was trying to show the obsession of two men.... how one was obsessed with putting on a fair that would bring pride to his country and one was obsessed with carving up people in his basement. However, I found it all a bit disjointed. That being said, I did learn a LOT from this book and have been annoying the fam with random pieces of fascinating trivia. I usually do NOT read non-fiction and as a rule avoid true-crime. This book is the selection for my book club this month, which is why I'm reading it. But it is an example of WHY I am in a book group in the first place. It is so I read things I would not normally read. And I did ultimately enjoy this one and thought it a compelling read.
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