Books:
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Favorite Reviews:
I have reviewed many books over the years, and some reviews have been more interesting or fun to write than others. The below list were my favorites to write.
• Ada, or Ardor
• Choose Your Own Autobiography
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• If Not, Winter
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
• The Kid Table
• Like Water for Chocolate
• Lolita
• The Monk
• The Night Circus
• Oathbringer
• Return of the Native
• Rhythm of War
• S
• Things Fall Apart
• The Unit
• The Woods Are Always WatchingCategories:
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Protected: Born of Illusion, by Teri Brown
Posted in 2013, Prose, Young Adult
Tagged historical, speculative
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Oddly Normal, by John Schwartz (audio)
Subtitled: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality.
This is a memoir about the author’s gay son, his suicide attempt at age thirteen, and the general troubles that gay people – especially gay children – meet in our current society.
So…there was nothing new in this book. It was all stuff I’d heard before, all politics that I’m very familiar with. However, despite it being nothing new, it was really good material, fairly put together without a strong political bent. The topics were discussed fairly and in a reasonable manner. Beyond that, the politics were softened by more personal issues, as the book flipped back and forth between the general and the specific.
I enjoyed the book, even if I don’t feel I really learned anything from it. The only thing that saddens me is that I believe it will continue to perpetuate gay stereotypes. Being a gay man does not mean that you love purple, play with Barbies, and dress “fabulously.” It just doesn’t. And it bothers me that this seems to be an inherent bias in our culture. Being a gay man does not mean you have to try to fit into a culturally female norm. I don’t even like the cultural norms for straight people! People are just people, and their stereotypical and cultural norms differ from society to society. What might seem “gay” here might be normal somewhere else, and I fear that too often, we overlook this problem.
I don’t think the parents in this book assumed their son was gay from an early age just because he played with Barbies and didn’t like sports, but I do think that was a major factor in their thoughts. And I think this automatic assumption influences a child’s thoughts about his or her own sexuality – whether positively or negatively – in a way that straight kids aren’t influenced. Straight kids get to figure themselves out without their parents worrying about their sexuality from a young age.
I don’t know. It’s a tricky issue, and I think that, as far as things go, this book did a good job putting together a personal story and a history of bullying and gay-rights politics. I just wish, in a way, that with a title like Oddly Normal, there wouldn’t have been all this “my son is different because he acts like a gay stereotype” bit.
Performance: Book was read by the author, which is what I would have suspected (I looked this up afterwards). Also, there was a chapter read by the son, which was kind of nice. I knew there had been a different reader, but I hadn’t realized that Joseph himself had read. Ironically, while Dad did a great job reading – I suppose he could very easily hear the inflections in his own writing – Joseph sounded a bit nervous and stilted. Ah well. It was only one chapter. Overall, the performance was engaging.
City of Lost Dreams, by Magnus Flyte
Spoilers.
The adventures continue for Sarah et al, as they search out a cure for Pollina’s illness, and Nico searches out some way to end his immortality. The book takes place mostly in Vienna this time, but with forays into Prague as well.
I was sad to learn that Sarah and Max had broken up prior to this book beginning. Boo. That made for a much less sexually-interesting book, to be honest. There were a few good encounters, but there wasn’t the tension that existed in the first book. The book also didn’t have the giant cast of characters, or the general zaniness of City of Dark Magic. It was a bit more subdued in general.
However, it was still a fun book, and after the slump of books I’ve read this November, it was great to dive back into a world I knew I would enjoy. It was good to see some familiar characters, though I do wish I’d gotten to spend more time with them, and interesting to meet new ones (again, wish I had more time, especially with Nina!). I’m hoping the next book will get back to the level of the first, but I definitely plan on reading it.
Middle book syndrome. It happens.
Protected: The Dark Between, by Sonia Gensler
Posted in 2013, Prose, Young Adult
Tagged historical, speculative
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Cooked, by Michael Pollan (audio)
Took me forever to listen to this one because I did it over NaNoWriMo!
This is Michael Pollan’s nonfiction book about cooking – the origins, the methods, etc. It’s split into four parts roughly coordinating with the four elements, so I’m going to split this review into four parts as well.
1 – Fire
In this section, Pollan talked about barbecue. You know, fire. And he pretty much spent the entire section making fun of southerners. I learned very little about the process of grilling or cooking meat with fire, except that people are really particular about how they do it, that the word “barbecue” can cause massive conflict from one person to the next, and that it takes a lot of time to grill meat correctly. But mostly, I learned that Michael Pollan is a snob when it comes to southerners, a fact which was made worse by him being the narrator and trying to imitate – in pure stereotypical fashion – their accents. Yeah…
2 – Water
So, I nearly quit listening to the book in the Fire section, it was so bad. I decided to try a little bit of the Water section, which dealt with what I’ll just call “regular” cooking (cook-pots), before giving it up completely. I ended up really liking this section. Since Pollan is not at all a snob about slow cooking, gourmet cooking, or techniques involved in this sort of cooking, he gave it proper respect, and actually got me thinking that it would be best for me to learn more about cooking in the future. So thumbs up for this section.
3 – Air
This section dealt with bread, where Pollan did spend a bunch of time showing how crazy both professional and amateur bakers could be, but not quite as bad as the Fire section. He also discussed the bread-making process, particularly from sourdough cultures, in some detail, and I was very interested in learning about the chemical processes that go on in bread-making. It was especially interesting because he talked about Celiac Disease and gluten-intolerance (without any anti-gluten-free-living snide comments, which would have made me abandon the book altogether), and some of the reasons scientists believe the condition is becoming more common. One has to do with the amount of time (or lack of it) used in making bread products now, so that there’s much more gluten left in the bread as an end-product. Also, apparently Italy has a very high percentage of Celiac. Didn’t know that.
4 – Earth
This section dealt with fermentation, and personally I think it was more of a continuation of Air than really anything to do with Earth. Lots of interesting things in here, though I have no desire to, say, make my own pickles or alcohol or cheese even after learning about the various processes. Most interesting thing: apparently the removal of bacteria from our foods might be contributing to the obesity epidemic, based on studies done with mice. So it might be a good idea to have more fermented foods around, even if I don’t want to actually make them myself.
That’s about it. As a Pollan book, it was just meh, particularly because I was uncomfortable for a huge chunk of the book. I may or may not indulge in any sort of cooking in the future, so it didn’t really change my life the way other books of his have, either. In the end, it was just okay.
Kid Cyclone Fights the Devil, by Xavier Garza
This is a collection of folktales and creepy children’s stories out of Mexico (and out of Mexican-American communities in southern Texas). There are 14 stories in the collection, which is a bilingual collection – Spanish one direction for half the book, then flip it over for the English version on the other side. It is illustrated as well.
The stories, I admit, were not the best written. They felt like they talked down to children, but maybe I’m just not a fan of stories written for the 5-7 age group. It was a bit strange to have Young Reader level writing mixed with the horror that was in a lot of these stories, a lot of blood and shooting and fear.
Laurence read this collection in Spanish last year and still remembers a lot of it (thank you book reports!). He and I both agreed that many of the stories were strange, or had very abrupt endings, sometimes unexpected (and not necessarily in a good way). But we both also found a few of the stories creepy, in particular Llorona911 and Giggles the Clown. Laurence still finds the latter one creepy a year after reading the book. So I guess it was very effective that way.
It was a fun read, easy to read between chapters I was writing for NaNoWriMo. Not something I’ll remember forever, but an interesting look at some of the stories I’ve heard bits of over the years but never a full story. And it’s cool that my friend Joseph is friends with the author.
Posted in 2013, Children's, Prose
Tagged collection, Latin America, POC, RIP-worthy, speculative
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Perfect Ruin, by Lauren Destefano
Major spoilers.
Young adult fantasy dystopia. Morgan lives on Internment, a floating city in the sky. Everything there is rigidly controlled, but relatively peaceful. The only problem is the Edge, which lures people to it, and often they’ll jump. Jumping off the edge doesn’t work – it causes injuries and disabilities, sometimes death, but the jumper will remain on Internment. Morgan doesn’t question any of this – even though her older brother became a jumper three years ago – until a girl near her age is found murdered on the train tracks one afternoon.
Fascinating book. I loved the writing from the beginning, and I couldn’t wait to find out the truth of this world. The idea of a floating city that doesn’t let people leave was just so ridiculous, so completely fantastical. It couldn’t be real. It had to be something – anything from a section of the world manipulated to look like it was floating in the sky, to a Matrix-like situation. (That latter one, heh, was even obliquely referenced!) But then, in the last quarter of the book, everything went wacky, and Morgan and Pen end up kidnapped by the King’s kids, getting away, and then they all go to the ground after all. Book ends with them getting off the spacecraft on the ground, being told to halt by whoever is there to meet them.
WTF? They definitely aren’t on Internment anymore, and they flew down from the sky, watching it out the windows, so…I guess they really were in the sky? And it’s a trilogy, of course, so I don’t know yet.
I can’t decide if I’m intrigued or so disappointed that I don’t want to read the next book. I’m glad there wasn’t a love triangle or anything – there was hints that there might be – and I’m really hoping the series doesn’t devolve. I’m not sure I want to read further. But maybe I do? Not sure.
Bang, by Lisa McMann
It’s Sawyer’s turn for visions, and Jules (and her brother Trey, and later her sister Ro) have to help him prevent a disaster: a anti-gay school shooting at a nearby university.
Not much to say about this book. I liked it as much as Crash. The characters were fun, the plot was fun, the writing has its not-for-me moments as is usual for Lisa McMann. It only took a day to read, because that’s how these books work. I do look forward to the next one, especially since we don’t know who will be having visions yet. Also looking forward to knowing if Dad has visions, too. That’s about it.
More Than This, by Patrick Ness
Major spoilers.
Seth dies. He remembers dying, but then he wakes up in a strange place that’s sort of familiar, but also not. The world seems to be dead and empty, and he wonders if this is his own personal hell. Every time he falls asleep, he dreams of the things that led up to his death, like nightmares that he can’t control.
At first glance, the book appears to be about someone who has died and who is sorting out their life and dealing with their death and their grief and their loss. It was an interesting book, filled with only a single character in the present, but multiple characters sketched out in memories. There were interesting plot developments in the past, and I loved that the world was completely dead, and that Seth was having to survive alone.
That was Part I. Then I got to Part II, and suddenly, it was like I’d dived into a version of the Matrix. I mean, except for the fact that people were living in coffins instead of pods, it was pretty much exactly like the Matrix. I kept hoping, all the way to the last page, that it would be something better, but no. So disappointing. The first part of the book was so interesting, and then it just turned into some action-adventure book with some pseudo-philosophy about death, dying, and loneliness thrown in every once in awhile. That just ruined the book for me. Boo.
The Zen Leaf 