Currently viewing the tag: "friday reads"
Sometimes when I read a book I really love I go on a quest to relive the experience. For example, when I read The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfeld, a gothic pageturner, I went on a gothic kick that lasted months and included highlights such as John Harwood’s The Seance, Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger and Jane Harris’ The Observations.
Sometimes this quest goes on for years and is never really satisfied. Three books in particular have led to fruitless searches for me: Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier, The Magus by John Fowles and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It occurs to me as I make this list that these books are somewhat similar. There’s a sense of mystery and secrecy and youthful innocence destroyed. All three of these books are among my very favorites and I’ve read them all more than once trying to get myself lost in them. They all have a strong sense of atmosphere and foreboding and they’re the kind of books I like to read for hours at a time.
But every now and then I run into a book that reminds me of one of my beloved books and even if it’s not the same, it brings back a similar spirit. That’s what happened when I read The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood. I don’t know if Wood has read The Secret History, (which is among my all-time top 5 most-loved books) but his novel brought back many of the same sensations I felt the first time I read The Secret History and I mean that in the best way. It’s not derivative, it’s more beautifully reminiscent.
Image via goodreads
So maybe I should actually tell you a little bit about The Bellwether Revivals. Oscar is from a lower-middle-class upbringing, a working family who never expected much of him. He escaped to start his own life and works as an aide in a nursing home. He isn’t happy per se, but he’s satisfied in the way a young person who’s making their own way is. He doesn’t feel demeaned by his work, or at least he doesn’t until he finds himself entangled with Iris and Eden Bellwether, two siblings from the upper class with a sense of entitlement and ease completely unfamiliar to Oscar.
Oscar and Iris form a romantic attachment but it’s never free of the influence of Eden’s eccentric musician brother, who is obsessed with playing the organ, music, philosophy and himself. They bring Oscar into a type of life he’s unfamiliar with, but gradually he becomes uneasy with his own lack of privilege and Eden’s strange narcissism.
The Secret History connections are definitely there. The protagonist who finds himself taken in by an “elite” group of sorts at a college. The mysterious leader who is more than he seems.
Ultimately, though, The Bellwether Revivals is its own unique story. Iris enlists Oscar’s help in finding the help she believes her brother needs. But the more Oscar takes part in her plan, the more he’s convinced Eden has strange delusions of supernatural grandeur, and the more he finds himself at odds with Iris, who is both a victim and a follower of her brother.
I do wish the book was a bit longer. I didn’t feel as though I got as much of an opportunity to get to know the other members of the social circle. But I found the plot very intriguing and though I’ve been rather lax in my reading lately, I found myself stealing time to read and find out what was happening.
The book starts with a strong tease of the danger and violence that will come later on in the story and I’m a big fat sucker for such things. Especially when the book will have a nice, long slow burn. The pacing is excellent and even when not much was happening, I felt drawn to see where things would go.
While I consider it a page-turner, The Bellwether Revivals is definitely in the “literary fiction” category. This wouldn’t be classified as a thriller, even though I found it thrilling.
This is Benjamin Wood’s first novel and I’m really excited to see what he writes next.
Thanks to Edelweiss and Viking Books for providing me an advanced e-galley of The Bellwether Revivals. It will be released on June 14th, 2012.
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Recently Vulture published an article ranking all 62 books by Stephen King. (Including those under his pen name, Richard Bachmann, and those he co-wrote with others.)
I haven’t read anywhere close to all 62. In fact I’ve read only 17, that’s less than a third. I’ve read only one story collection and none of his Dark Tower series. But I have read most of his big and popular stuff so I feel like I have grounds for an opinion. (17 is still a lot of books, right?)
I found myself disagreeing with a lot of the rankings on the list. Sure, Dreamcatcher was not great. But #60 out of 62??? That seemed unduly harsh. I read it recently and it had real moments of brilliance and terror even if it got steadily worse as the book went on. (And, of course, major loss of points for a supernaturally-gifted boy with Down’s. That’s the kind of thing I expect from 80′s Stephen King.)
And Cell all the way down at #53? Perhaps I was influenced by low expectations or the fact that I listened to it on audiobook, but I found it to be rather enjoyable. I don’t know if you can call a horror story a romp, but there was a little bit of that.
At the top I found trouble as well. I think the vast majority of us can agree that IT is one of the most terrifying books ever written. However, I wouldn’t put it as #3. It suffers from huge flaws. Chief among them one of the worst endings of all time.
So I thought I’d put together my own list. It’s not a ranking, per se, but the way I view King’s fiction more in categories.
Ambitious but Hopelessly Flawed
Yup, this is where IT belongs. Its ambition is admirable. Its scares are real. But its flaws ultimately devalue a lot of the book.
I know there are a lot more of King’s books that I’d probably put here that I’ve avoided chiefly because I don’t want the disappointment, but there is one more that I’d definitely put here. (Pull out your pitchforks….)
This is the place to put The Stand. I am sorry, I really am, I know that many people list this as one of their favorite novels of all time. It is so big and has so much promise that it hurt to see it turn into a mess. I know a lot of people disagree with me, but there it is.
Fun But Forgettable
‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, Cell and Dreamcatcher would go here. All have their strengths and their scares. And they’re great fun for serious horror fans or for an airplane read. You could do a lot worse. I think it’s these books that people who don’t read King assume make up his whole oeuvre.
Solid, With or Without Scares
The thing is, people who don’t read much King may not realize how he’s evolved. Take exercise in narrative Dolores Claiborne, told in the first person as one long monologue, with regular flashes forward and back in time and a distinctive voice. It’s not a particularly scary book, it’s more about the real life horrors we encounter everyday than the supernatural ones. The same is true of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, about a girl lost in the woods who survives through her devotion to the Red Sox.
Or some of King’s newer doorstops like Bag of Bones or Duma Key, both excellent ghost stories with a strong sense of place and character. (While reading Duma Key the whole world seems to exist in shades of Floridian coral.)
Or take a look at the behemoth Under the Dome, which takes a lot of King’s strengths (a multitude of characters in a small town who have plenty of baggage in their history, an unexplained phenomenon that throws everything out of whack, a long twisty-turny plot) and delivers it with gusto. It is not a ghost story. There aren’t really any monsters. The supernatural is mostly ignored. The joy of the book is watching the characters scheme and plot against each other or to help each other and to watch the chips fall. It’s some masterful storytelling. I particularly enjoyed the audiobook, ready by one of my favorite actors, Raul Esparza.
I’d also put some of King’s story collections here. I loved his recent effort Full Dark, No Stars, packed with tales just as dark as the title implies.
The Classics
I think more people are starting to catch on to King’s new and impressive abilities thanks to 11/22/63, which I was even able to convince my Mom to read. (She is not a King fan. It took some doing.) And now she is telling other people about it. It seems to be that kind of book that is spreading beyond the usual crowd. And deservedly so. King is getting better and better as years pass and his writing shows strengths it never has before.
And my favorite, Lisey’s Story, a book about marriage and family and love and imagination and storytelling and so very many things. Reading this book for me was like a revelation. It remains one of my very favorites and if someone is dissing King, I send them to it immediately.
Aspiring writers probably know that On Writing is one of the most-recommended books out there. There’s so much you can learn from it, whether you want to write novels or just blog entries. I own a copy and I’ll never get rid of it. It’s a homey book, too, where you feel like you’re having a great conversation.
Not His Best
King has admitted to spending a lot of the ’80′s in an alcoholic haze, which probably explains why a book like Pet Sematary, which has a horrific idea behind it, ends up with just a Passable grade. I assume it explains misfires like The Tommyknockers and Needful Things. Not terrible ideas, but reading them can occasionally be a chore.
There’s still a lot more King I want to read: Firestarter, Cujo, The Long Walk. And I need to re-read The Shining. It’s been so long that I’m not sure which category it would fall into. (It’s also a movie I love love love, so it’s hard to separate myself.)
Where do you fall on Stephen King? Do I really need to read the Dark Tower books? What would you rank as his best and worst?
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There’s something about dance, isn’t there? Something about watching a person in such complete control of their body. There’s such dedication in every movement, even though they make it look effortless.
I’ve had dance on the brain ever since I started reading The Cranes Dance by Meg Howrey. It follows Kate Crane, a member of a prestigious ballet company in New York. For those of us on the outside, watching her on stage as she dances a solo would make it seem as though she’s perfect. But for Kate, life is a constant battle.
This isn’t just one of those behind-the-scenes books about ballet. If you find it as fascinating as I do, you probably won’t be surprised by the horrors that lurk inside those toe shoes. Or the competition that goes on among even the most talented and successful dancers.
Image via Goodreads
Kate narrates us through her life, a breathless whir of practice and performing. Kate has recently lost her boyfriend and her sister, Gwen. Though Gwen is Kate’s younger sister, she’s been more successful in the company. She’s gone back home to live with their parents, everyone in the company believes she’s injured but Kate knows the truth: Gwen had a nervous breakdown.
Still weighed down with her sister’s presence and constantly fighting a neck injury, Kate fights to make her way through the end of the season. It’s a physical and a mental battle and it may decide whether Kate continues to have a career in ballet.
For those of us who find dance fascinating, this book doesn’t disappoint. There is all the closeness and competition of a company, the choreography of several different ballets and the rigor of diet and physical strengthening.
If you’ve never had much of an interest in ballet, you’ll probably change your mind when you see it from the other side. Instead of some lovely looking ladies in tutus, Kate lets you in on the injuries and jealousies that happen backstage. The beaten up feet and the bottles of Vicodin. The drama is high and you don’t have to know what an arabesque is to enjoy it.
I admit I’ve been on a serious ballet kick thanks to this book. I watched Mikhail Baryshnikov in White Nights and The Turning Point. (Both on Netflix Streaming!) I have Mao’s Last Dancer all queued up. I’d also recommend Black Swan, The Red Shoes and Robert Altman’s The Company. I didn’t realize I had such a ballet thing!
The Cranes Dance by Meg Howrey will be available on May 15, 2012. You can pre-order at your local bookstore or at any online store. Or if audiobooks are your thing you can also find an audio copy.
Thanks to Netgalley and Vintage for giving me an e-galley for this review.
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Mulholland Books is a new imprint of Little, Brown that focuses on suspense fiction. So of course I took notice and looked through several of their titles. Today I’m reviewing two of their 2012 releases, one that’s already out and one that’s coming up this summer.
Image via Goodreads
First up is The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi. The influx of European crime novels has been rising each year. It’s no longer just the Scandinavian writers that you see, they’re now from all over Europe. The Whisperer is by Italian author Donato Carrisi, and in Europe it’s as popular as Stieg Larsson’s novels. It’s not hard to see why. Carrisi has a great hook, strong characters and a plot that keeps you guessing right up to the end.
These days every crime novel has to start with a big hook and The Whisperer has a memorable one. After a string of kidnappings of young girls, police find 6 severed arms in a field. One problem: there were only 5 kidnapped girls.
When testing indicates one of the girls is still alive, police find themselves on a chase from body to body. Except the placement of each body is itself a clue to another, older crime. This killer seems to know a whole network of other killers and criminals but leaves few clues to his own identity.
Hunting for him is Mila Vasquez, famous for finding kidnapped children. Her uncanny intuition and her own troubled history make her very good at what she does. But this case challenges her like nothing before. Especially since she is joining Goran Gavila and his team, who have their own approach and aren’t always welcoming.
Mila and Goran are both the kind of troubled characters you often see in crime fiction, but I found them to be more than just the scarred, grizzled cops you normally see. The team relationships and their gradual adjustment to Mila make a good counterpoint to the crimes and the investigation itself.
I wouldn’t dare reveal the plot to you, but let me say that it is a constant road of twists and turns. Even when a pattern arises you never know what will be around the next bend. And the ending is a doozy.
While The Whisperer is a classic serial killer novel, The Demands by Mark Billingham is a more unusual situation.
Image via Goodreads
Detective Helen Weeks is just stopping in to her neighborhood shop when she suddenly finds herself held hostage by the normally-friendly shopkeeper. He is Javed Akhtar and he isn’t asking for a ransom. Instead he demands an investigation into the death of his son, Amin, which was dismissed as a suicide.
Tom Thorne is put on the case and finds this is no ordinary investigation. Young Amin was in prison for manslaughter after he killed another boy who attacked him. He seems to have killed himself by overdosing on pills while in the prison infirmary but no one knows how he got access to them. The more Thorne looks, the more he’s convinced this is a murder, but the clock is ticking and the motive is hard to find.
What makes this novel unique is the point of view of Helen while she goes through the hostage situation in the shop. She feels both sympathy and fear towards Akhtar and watches as he gradually unwinds from day to day.
Reading the book does require some suspension of disbelief. It seems unlikely that the police would respond to a demand like Akhtar’s, but if you’re willing to set that aside, you’ll find The Demands to be a satisfying police procedural.
I look forward to see what else Mulholland Books has in store.
Thanks to Netgalley and Mulholland Books for allowing me access to e-galleys of these books. The Whisperer is available now. The Demands will be released on June 12, 2012.
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I read this book right after Tessa was born while I was in the hospital. So I’ve had to wait for A WHOLE MONTH before telling you about it. I should be waiting a few more weeks since it isn’t released until April 17th, but I just can’t wait anymore.
You know how last year everyone and their dog read Bossypants? I read it, too. And I thought it was quite funny. But it wasn’t really effective as a book. It was inconsistent and kind of all over the place. The utterly hysterical parts were utterly hysterical, but there were plenty of clunkers that fell flat to me. Perhaps the biggest disappointment for me when I read that book was that I didn’t feel like I was any closer to knowing Tina Fey as a person by the time it was over.
It’s probably inevitable that Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson (also known as The Bloggess) will be compared to Bossypants a lot. And probably to David Sedaris as well. But I think those comparisons aren’t fair to LPTNH. Because LPTNH is funnier.
That’s right, I said it. It’s funnier than Bossypants. And not by a little.
Image via goodreads
I recommend you not read this book while laying in a bed with your husband and sleeping baby right next to you. Because then you won’t be able to guffaw loudly lest you wake them up. I think I was deprived of some of the deepest enjoyment this book provides because I was trying to let my babies get some much-needed sleep.
It helps that Lawson herself is a funny writer. She keeps you consistently engaged and chuckling when she tells a story, no matter what the story is. But what’s astonishing about LPTNH is how funny the stories themselves are. I can’t imagine that I’m alone in wondering if the story in chapter 3 involving a squirrel (I will give you no more details so I won’t deprive you of the absolutely uproarious experience) is true. Can it be true? Can this actually happen to someone?
These stories happen over and over again. Lawson had a singularly unusual childhood. She also has a rather unusual adulthood, as she struggles with near-crippling anxiety.
What ultimately makes LPTNH far superior to Bossypants and other “funny” books is that there’s a big beating heart at its center and a life all around it. You actually get to know Jenny. You get to follow her through her major life decisions and her small daily activities. There’s her childhood in a small Texas town, her determination to escape, her college years, her romance with her husband, her jobs, her anxiety, her experience as a mother and, most unlikely of all, her unexpected return to small town Texas.
Despite the fact that Jenny admits to having difficulty around people, you will be sure upon finishing this book that you and Jenny are totally already best friends and that should she meet you she would immediately make you her best friend. And you would be the luckiest person in the world.
(I admit, whenever Jenny would mention her friends I would get jealous. I got jealous of her real-life friends because WHY NOT ME, JENNY?)
Also, have you noticed how I went from referring to her all authorly as “Lawson” to calling her “Jenny” because I have already made her my best friend in my head?
Sure, this book isn’t for everyone. A dark sense of humor is required. Also you must be comfortable with cursing and casual references to sex toys. And most of Jenny’s childhood stories involve her father’s ventures into taxidermy. So feeling comfortable with dead animals is also a must. It’s a random assortment in the best possible way. I guarantee you haven’t read any other memoirs like this one.
I’d also add that you don’t need to be a reader of Jenny’s blog to enjoy the book. While I’ve known of the Bloggess (you can’t really be active in the blogosphere and NOT know her) I have rather shamefully not been following her actively until recently. (Super sorry, Jenny. You know we’re besties, right?)
When I read this book, it was like making a good friend. Don’t you love that experience?
Thanks to Edelweiss and Putnam Books for providing me with an advanced e-galley of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. It will be released on April 17, 2012. Here’s the pre-order link from The Bloggess.
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I should just take the Friday off these posts. Cuz I haven’t posted one on Friday in 3 weeks. Ah well.
You probably haven’t heard of Heidi Julavits, and that’s totally okay. She swims in a very specific literary pool (she co-edits The Believer, which you probably haven’t heard of either). Her new novel, The Vanishers, is her 4th and (in my opinion) her best, but you may never have seen or heard of the first three.
If you have read any of her previous novels, you might have hated them.
It’s not that Julavits is a bad writer. Quite the contrary. But her books can be quite deceiving. Her second novel, The Effect of Living Backwards, had an airplane hijacking. Her third, The Uses of Enchantment, had a disappearance. They involve plot devices that make you think “thriller” but her books aren’t thrillers at all. They are weird existential exercises that often leave you wondering what just happened.
Image from Goodreads
The Vanishers doesn’t really break from this mold, but it feels like more of a cohesive whole than her previous novels. So it’s probably a good intro for someone new to Julavits’ work. (Also, the cover is gorgeous. So there’s that.)
Our protagonist is Julia. At the beginning of the novel she’s a student. Kind of. She’s at a school for psychics. Not like Hogwarts for psychics. But a legitimate educational institution. In the world of the novel, being a psychic is kind of like being a musician or a linguist. You go to school, you study, and if you have enough ability you can become a professional or an academic or something.
Julia is a promising student. She gets a position as an assistant for one of the school’s most prestigious professors, Madame Ackerman. Julia’s powers are on the rise just as Madame Ackerman’s seem to be failing. Julia can “regress,” and find herself in another time and place, able to watch what happens. People can feel threatened by such abilities, but Julia can’t generally control where she goes and what she sees. Nevertheless, working with Madame Ackerman she becomes more and more powerful. Julia finds herself in a strange rivalry that turns into something dangerous.
As tends to be the case in a Julavits novel there are a lot of other threads. There is Alwyn, who enlists Julia to help her in a search that will lead them through Europe. There are the mysterious titular “Vanishers,” people who decide to abandon their lives and identities, leaving behind only a video to explain or not explain their decision. There is Dominique Vargas, a French filmmaker and performance artist who is somehow at the center of everything, as is Julia’s mother, who committed suicide when Julia was just a baby.
The themes here involve female rivalries and mother/daughter relationships, as well as the complexities of identity. The Vanishers will certainly give you something to chew on. It’s an ambitious book and one designed to send your brain in different directions, not one that will wrap itself up in a bow.
If you want something different in your reading, this is a great book to try.
Thanks to Knopf Doubleday and Netgalley for providing me with an e-galley of The Vanishers.
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Find the Mess
My Life’s a Mess and That’s Okay
Jess is a procrastinator, a former working mom who is suddenly staying at home, a Dr-Dr's wife, a non-practicing lawyer, an Autism Mom, a devoted reader, a penny pincher, a coupon clipper, a new New England-er, a low-key agnostic, a nice girl, a top-notch speller, a hardcore blogger and a Twitter fiend.
The blog covers everything from coupon tips to Autism support to adorable toddler pictures to hilarious tales of my daily grind with the occasional review & giveaway thrown in for good measure.
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