Oh please

Dead Until Dark sucked it - and not just in a vampirey way. Its all about a waitress in Louisiana who gets tangled up with a vampire and has to deal with lots of people she knows being murdered. In this world vampires have recently come out to the world since the invention of synthetic blood makes them more socially acceptable. And there's a whol culture of "fangbangers" - vampire groupies. Sounds a bit interesting, right? Well dash those hopes right now.


The main character is dumb. The relationships are dull. The set-ups are frequently unbelievable. (Cause of course, I would drop my kids off to be babysat by a woman whose had a recent attempt on her life and is still obviously been marked to be killed. Sure!) Stupid stupid book! Only a 1 on my scale.

Shake Loose

I picked up Shake Loose My Skin for a dose of poetry long overdue this winter. Unfortunately, this dosage must be someone else's. I didn't like it much. It all felt dated and just not it. I did enoy "The Blues" and "Set No. 1" from "Wounded in the House of a Friend", but the rest just didn't resonate with me. I only give this one a 2.

Again and again and again and again

How many times can a person make the same point in one book? Apparently over and over again until you want to scream. I already have an annoying acquaintance from work who does this sort of thing - I don't need a book to do it.

Nudge takes an interesting and valid point and drives it until the ground. I gave up halfway through it. Only a two in my book.

Absolute terrification

Blindness is one hell of a nightmare inducer. Imagine if everyone went blind in an inexplicable epidemic. It would be one ugly scarey ride. Much like The Road but with no seeing.

I have terrible terrible vision and have nightmares about losing my contacts and glasses and having to muddle along, not recognizing people at a distance, not seeing the hole I'm about to stumble into. basically living a helpless helpless life.

In this book, everyone but one person loses their vision and can only see a bright whiteness. They first victims are stuffed inside an asylum to be quarantined and things get really really really bad in there. And the one lady isn't someone we envy cause when folks think you can't see them, they do some really awful things.

This is not a book for those with weak constitutions. There is unimaginable violence and serious filth. And grammar enthusiasts beware. The story runs along with little punctuation and no quotation marks. Normally I would hate that so much, but in this case it works. It seems to heighten the terror for me.

Its a really good book. I give it an 8.

(Apparently there's a movie version of this. Anyone seen it?)

Maisie

Maisie Dobbs is one I picked up after realizing that everyone in the world had read it except me. Its about a lady detective in Britain who was a nurse in the war.

I admit that the history of how Maisie came up through the ranks bored me a bit. It was so slooooow. However, the investigation was very intriguing and the romance part so sweet. The book often put me in mind of the BBC series Foyle's War which I adore. I've already reserved book number two and can't wait to see what happens next. Six stars from me.

Snippets of dreams

After reading The Girl in the Flammable Skirt I keep wondering why Aimee Bender is so successful. I get that her stories are wildly imaginative and I highly appreciate that. However, there's no real substance to her work. Its like snippets of dreams that really could be turned into something great if someone worked on them. I find them all very dissatisfying - mostly cause they do have promise that is never fulfilled.

There is one amazingly good story in there though called "Quiet Please." Its about a librarian who reacts to her father's death by having sex with every man in the library that day. A bit racy I know, but there's a scene towards the end of it that is so vivid and wonderful. It really is something.

Bearded ladies and imps

Castle Waiting is a marvelous fairy tale that begins with a very familiar fairy tale and then goes way off track. Even if graphic novels aren't your cup of tea, give this a try and I think you'll change your mind. The stories of this pack of misfits living in an old abandoned castle are so imaginative. It's full of bearded ladies and caged hearts and imps and demons. The whole thing is a merry yarn. I give it a 9.

Who knew!

Chicken Cheeks is pretty darn cute and has fueled my irrational longing for a guinea pig. More on that later. I give this a 7. Also, its by Michael Ian Black. Who knew!

Daydream fuel?

Generally i hot the library with my stack of books already reserved and waiting for me. Sometimes, I peak at the new book shelf. However, I do not ramble the library enough, and rambles are essential for adding soem unpredicatability into my to read list.

A ramble resulted in Gardening at Ginger by James Raimes. Its ugly ol' February in Ohio, and I'm pooring over seed catalogs and dreaming of crocus buds and more sunshine and all the glories of spring. A gardening book seemed like the perfect sort of escape.

What I found out was that a well-written gardening book would have been the perfect escape. This fell short.

Raimes is passionate for his subject and I'm betting he's a pretty fair gardener. However, this book finds him repeating himself a lot and rambling on quite a bit. His descriptions of flower beds are pretty un-picturable - and in a fluffy gardening book, its all about the mental picture. What else could fuel those day dreams. I did like a description of a line of iris he saw at a neighboring garden and the vision of a sleepy bat bedding down in their patio umbrella. However, too much of this just wasn't that entertaining at all. Only 2 stars - it did have a gorgeous cover.

Demons

100! Demons! is a graphic novel by Lynda Barry. I liked it even better than What It Is. In this book she names her demons - things like "Common Scents" and "Dogs." She doesn't go into all 100, but the one's she explores are always a mixture of humorous and touching and heartbreaking.

She makes me want to draw more which is something I always appreciate. I give this an 8.

Hurrah!

Tired of bitching about the idiotness of Twilight and looking for a teen read that doesn't make teen girls look like stupid, actionless dummies? Then you must pick up the Bloody Jack series!

I just read the second book in the series - Curse of the Blue Tattoo and it was a whole lotta fun! You see, Jacky isn't the type to let some dumb dude control her life. Jacky is more the type to go have a great time and deal with the trouble she got into later.

In this second installment of Bloody Jacky's story, she's been forced to enroll in a boarding school for ladies and learn about etiquette and embroidery and the like. However, her harsh past on the streets isn't likely to just disappear. She gets in loads of scrapes.

I will admit to hating one stupid story line about a horse race. I could see the end of that coming from a fricking mile away. (Authors - please start assuming your readers have watched some movies or read some books before reading your novel. That way you can avoid the asinine cliche's).

Other than that one (major!) annoyance, I loved this book. And I can't wait to see what adventures await in the next! Jacky's story so far is a solid 8.

Familiar

I read The City of Ember in one evening. Its the tale of a city in the dark that lives in fear of the lights going out. The protagonists are two 12-year old kids Lina & Doon. (Can I just say that I love the name Doon?)

What I liked? My absolute terror of absolute dark that I shared with the residents. On a tour of Mammoth Caves when I was 18, the tour guide shut the lights. I've had a life long issue with claustrophobia (likely resulting from my oldest brother's love of locking me in small dark spaces). The kind of blackness you get in a cave makes you feel like the most trapped creature ever. Even thinking about it makes my skin crawl. So whenever those lights flickered in Ember. I was petrified.

What I didn't like? The story is oh-so predictable. Maybe not all the details, but from the very beginning you know where everything is leading. I have so little patience with predictability anymore. Surprise me, dammit!

This story reminded me a lot of Lois Lowry's The Giver. I wouldn't rank it above or below that story. I'm giving this a 5. I'll likely read the next book in this series, but I won't be in a hurry to do so.

A beer brewed from anger

Why so quiet lately? My nose has been buried in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, on of my own damn books. Can you believe it?!

This tome of a book has sat on my bookshelf for years, passed by again and again by shiny library books. I like to tote my books around with me and read them everywhere. At 781 pages, this book is hefty and special provisions needed to be made to take it to work or read it in bed.

I'll admit that the first bit was a slog. There is a long beginning before you meet Jonathan Strange. Then the story becomes engaging. Its the story of the only two magicians in England right around the Battle of Waterloo. The story is deliberate and well-paced. I didn't race through this novel; I savored it.

Particularly wonderful is the interesting little bits of tales you get when a few people under an enchantment try to speak of their enchantment. Instead of saying what they mean, they open their mouths and stories come out - about bird herders or beer brewed from anger. I would love a book of nothing but these oddities.

I also loved the many footnotes throughout the story, and the complicated relationship between the two magicians. They are rather at odds with eachother in temperment, but, being the only practising magicians, there's also an interesting comradeship.

This really is a treat of a book, and I give it an 8.5.

The Courtyard Hound

Do yourself a favor and go check out City of Thieves from you local library right now. Its the story of two young Russian guys sent on an impossible mission to find a dozen eggs during WWII. Almost all of my reading about WWII focuses on the Holocaust so it was really different for me to read about the tale of a city under siege.

The story bounces back and forth between humor and friendship to absolute horrors and tragedy. I think that as a reader I couldn't have handled all the horrors of war in this story without the friendship of the two as a buffer. This is a genuine laughing and crying book, and I gotta say that any book that can do both always ranks high with me.

This book is going to stay with me for a long long time. I'm giving it a 9.

So bleak

I read Carmac McCarthy's novel The Road in a single day. The story about a father and son just trying to survive a desolate hopeless world was completely engrossing. I loved the writing style. The way he created the world - whole and never explaining more than need be. This book could have easily fallen into annoying preachy territory, but it never did.

It also avoided filling me with dread. The world is a hopeless one, but I loved that there was never an "uh-oh" mistake moment when the character does something that the reader knows will end in doom.

This is a strong strong book, and highly recommended by me. I give it an eight. But make sure to have something uplifting to pick up immediately after finishing this one. So dark!

Only half worth it

Hotel World is made up of six interconnected tales about women. A dead girl, a street person, a sick woman, a liar, a lost girl, and a chance encounter. I wish the second through the fourth stories had been cut. I loved the opening piece told by the ghost. It felt like a good whimsical modern day Our Town. However, the next three women's stories don't add anything great.

Then comes the sister's piece, and it is touching. The last story is wonderful in so many ways. I loved the snippets of people's lives in the end piece. Had we given those three in-between stories a miss, this would easily be a 9. The three women feel like small parts made big for filler, and pissed me off so well that I can only rate this one a 5.

As it is, this is a Booker finalist and short stories so I'm counting it towards 100 Shots of Short and my 101 list.

What It Is

An artist friend of mine recommended What It Is to me, and I rarely can resist a book recommendation (ermmm... unless its 1,000 pages of Ulysses S. Grant! A dilemma that has yet to be solved).

This book is a lot of things - a work of art, an autobiography, a workbook for creative impulses, and a graphic novel. It's a treasure trove.

My favorite bit was the following:

There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.

I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.

They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.

This is a book you could open a thousand times and still find something new each time. I'm giving it an 8, and declare it well worth a read especially for all you dreamers and artists.

On Rue Tatin: Living and Cooking in a Small Town was an ideal escapism read for an Ohio girl stuck with too much snow and below zero temperatures. The author write about moving to France to write a cookbook along with her husband and very young son. She discusses the fifferent way of life, the people, the food, the landscape. Its a great read for travel buffs or escapists. Food factors into the stories but only here and there and she follows each chapter with some delicious-sounding recipes.

She jumps around in time a bit in the story. And I use story very loosely. Its really more of a loose memoir and rather dreamy. My favorite bits were the tales of remodeling their crumbling old house and the description of the weekly farmers' market.

I'll give this a 6. Anything that takes my mind off the cold is alright by me.

Rousing

Bloody Jack is such an inspired YA novel. Its all about an orphan girl who disguises herself as a boy so she can join the navy and go to sea. It's full of adventure, humor, loss, and romance. It pulls no punches at all when dealing with some pretty heavy stuff which is partly why I think kids and teens will love it. Jacky is a terrific character, and the story was almost impossible to put down. I'm so glad there are more of these so I can see where Jacky's adventures take her next. Giving this an enthusiastic 9!

Dream blower

D is for Dahl is a biography of Roald Dahl told alphabetically. In it you will learn curious things such as:

Footprints - in the church-yard at Great Missenden, big friendly giant footprints lead to Roald Dahl's grave.

After-dinner chocolate - If you were invited to dinner at Roald Dahl's house, at the end of the meal, you'd be offered a red plastic box containing all of Roald's favorite chocolates - Twix, Kit Kats, Rolos, Smarties, Flakes and Maltesers.

Pretty adorable and deserving of a 7 in my book. (Woulda been higher except for all those "Don't try this at home, kids" warnings. Dahl would have never stood for that.)