Book Review: Starting from Happy by Patricia Marx

I'm starting to think that intended-to-be-funny books need to come with a series of codes on the back that indicate the type of humor involved so that I can better avoid awkward comedies of neuroses by un-funny Yankees. Try as I might, I don't find anything in that particular comedic vein (which also includes Woody Allen and David Sedaris) particularly amusing. Rather than laughing, I find myself rolling my eyes, all, "Seriously? That was a joke?"

I know that humor is largely cultural, and this may be one of the few areas in which I retain the cultural values of my upbringing (the other one is gambling: I don't do it, ever) rather than the more, uh, bougie ones I've adopted as a result of my high-fallutin' education. I wouldn't be caught dead watching NASCAR, reading an "Inspirational Fiction" novel, or owning "Red Solo Cup" in any audio format, but my sense of humor is just like that of the rest of my family's: very stereotypically Southern (if you're thinking Larry the Cable Guy, stop. 1) He's not funny. 2) He's a Yankee). You'd have to see us in action to get the gist of it, but it mostly entails incredibly cutting put-downs, sarcasm, well-timed happy hours, and, sometimes, things that could get us landed in a Jeff Foxworthy monologue, like shooting armadillos with handguns in the dark (my mom lives in Memphis, apparently it's okay to do that there) and riding a four-wheeler in flop-flops and a sundress.

Anyway. Starting From Happy.

Basically, it's a unfunny-neurotic-Yankee novel about weirdos in relationships, with drawings and obligatory self-conscious smashing of the fourth wall. It has a few amusing moments, but I mostly found it tedious. You probably won't if you're into that sort of thing. If you're still bemoaning the end of Frazier, you'll probably enjoy it.

I'll be over here, eating my fried green tomatoes and judging you.

3 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Snivel (Circles of Heck Series) by Dale E. Basye

I can't stop reading this series. It's a sickness that has progressed to the point where I pre-order  new installments from the nook store, which isn't something I do very often (the only other authors I do that for are Toni Morrison and Lauren Oliver-- interesting combination, I know), and I'm sure you're all judging me for being this stuck on a children's series. I cant't help it, though: the premise is so creative and the books are really, really funny.

Since this is part of a series, I'll put most of the review behind the jump:

Book Review: Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Setepys

Before commencing this book review, I would like to let it be known that I am talking about Between Shades of Gray, not Fifty Shades of Grey. I quite enjoyed the former, and have absolutely no intention whatsoever of reading the latter because there are very few things I find less appealing than so-called erotic fiction, BDSM culture, and Twilight, and Fifty Shades of Grey is apparently a terribly-written mishmash of all of those things. After reading the excellent two-part review over at Book Riot, I feel that I can go the rest of my life without acknowledging its existence.

Moving right along, Between Shades of Gray is really an excellent book. I saw it while perusing the e-book section on the library website, and decided to download it because I was totally unfamiliar with the subject matter: the plight of the intelligentsia and their families in USSR-occupied countries. Lina, the narrator, and her family, are highly-educated, well-placed Lithuanians. After Stalin-controlled Russia annexed Lithuania, her family is torn apart by Soviet soldiers, who load Lina, her mother, and her brother into wagons and pack them off to Siberia (her father is taken separately).

Lina's tale is eerily reminiscent of Holocaust memoirs in many ways: families are torn asunder, innocent people are taken captive and brutally abused by soldiers, they must endure long rides in cattle cars with no food or water, and are eventually forced to labor in starvation conditions and freezing weather. Many, if not most of them, eventually die. In an effort to stay sane in that environment Lina, who had previously hoped to go to art school, spends much of her time drawing what she sees in hopes that she will be able to escape and tell the truth of what happened to her family.

Highly recommended. 4 out of 5 stars. 

Book Review: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

A few months ago, I decided to turn over a new leaf in terms of how I choose books. Previously, I'd simply scanned the library shelves for something that looked interesting, occasionally asking for recommendations on Facebook and Twitter when I couldn't find anything or was after something specific. These days, I'm revisiting all of the authors whose books I have previously reviewed and enjoyed and am reading every book they've ever published. For some writers (like Michelle Goldberg, who's only published two books), it's relatively easy. For others, like Sherman Alexie, it's more of an undertaking.

There are two reasons for this. First, Alexie's written a lot of books. Second, these books are really heavy. Much like Toni Morrison, another favorite author of mine, Alexie doesn't pull punches when it comes to pointing out how incredibly screwed up and racist American society is, nor does he hesitate to honestly and brutally depict those realities in the lives of his characters. Reading their novels isn't just a literary undertaking; it's often an emotional one that can be more than a little taxing.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is the third novel of Alexie's that I've read and reviewed on this blog (you can see my review for Flight here and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian here). From what I've gathered from reading the back covers and reviews of his other works, this is more typical of his style. Rather than a cohesive narrative, the novel consists on a series of inter-related short stories that center on a few main characters, a reservation, and a nearby city that touch on Alexie's usual subject matter: racism and the social problems it inflicts on the reservations and their inhabitants, and how tribe members try to cope with and rise above everything that gets thrown at them. Most of the things I liked about Flight and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian are present here: the strong narrative voice, the intense social commentary, and the thought-provoking nature of the story.

Overall, I give this one 4 out of 5 stars. 

Book Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

I heard about this book from a facebook friend, and decided to download it when I came upon it while browsing the North Carolina Digital Library. I figured it would be a fairly quick, uncomplicated read, especially since I enjoy reading YA fantasy when I don't feel like thinking. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children didn't disappoint.

Sixteen-year-old Jacob has grown up listening to his grandfather's stories about his childhood, poring over the pictures he has saved throughout the years. Born into a Jewish family in Europe, Jacob's grandfather was spirited to a lonely island off the Welsh coast, where he resided in a children's home full of unusual children. As Jacob grows older, he comes to believe that his grandfather's stories were fairy tales and the photographs were fake-- until his grandfather dies under mysterious circumstances. Haunted by the memory of his grandfather's death and the mementos he left behind, Jacob travels to Wales to uncover the true nature of his family's history.

This book reads a lot like A Series of Unfortunate Events, so if you liked that, you'll probably enjoy this. Full of weird, old-fashioned photography and intriguing characters, it's a highly entertaining light read. 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

Confession: I'm not really into memoirs. As far as genres go, they rank below everything except for crimesploitation, bodice rippers, sexy supernatural creatures (exception: Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and anything involving dragons (this includes tattoos) or spaceships, tying roughly with chick lit. I have a variety of reasons for that, but that's mostly because autobiographers tend to be navel-gazing, self-important liars. Or, more kindly, truth-stretchers. When I read an autobiography, I assume that a good part of it is at least exaggerated, and it has served me well over the years.

Apparently, James Frey embodies all of those negative aspects of autobiographers and is gigantic, plagiarizing jackass to boot. This is good, because it means I don't have to feel bad about thinking that A Million Little Pieces was freaking terrible and that he's a godawful writer. I kept finding myself wanting to take a red pen to the text and leave snarky notes like, "Dear James Frey, You are not e. e. cummings. Knock it off with the Quirky Capitalization; it highlights your Mediocre Writing and makes you sound like A Pretentious Jackass."

I also had a running monologue that was in the key of, "Oh my god, people actually believed that this guy was for real? Are you KIDDING me?" Like, seriously. People are so gullible.

2 out of 5 stars, because it's not as bad as Twilight and is mercifully shorter than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. 

Book Review: Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver

I don't buy a lot of books these days. Grad school ate my life and my wallet, after all, and I've therefore been getting the vast majority of my reading materials from the library. Unfortunately, it takes the library a while to get new releases, especially in the kids section, and I didn't want to wait to read Pandemonium, Lauren Oliver's sequel to Delirium, which I really enjoyed and reviewed here.

As is my custom, I'll be putting my review of Pandemonium behind a jump so as to not spoil the ending of Delirium for those of you who haven't read it yet.

Book Review: Hana by Lauren Oliver

I pre-ordered copies of Hana and Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver back in January. They were finally ready to download a couple of days ago. I have since finished Hana and am about halfway through Pandemonium. You all know how I get about these dystopian YA novels.

Hana is essentially Delirium from Lena's best friend Hana's perspective; the reader gets to see what was going on with Hana during that tumultuous summer. I can't go into the plot without revealing too much about the end of Delirium, but I can say that it provided an eye-opening look into the world of Delirium and provided the reader with some much-needed context of why things happened the way they did.

You don't have to read it to get the other books, but at only sixty-four pages, it's not a big commitment and is fairly enjoyable (though I found the ending a bit jarring and abrupt). 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

Now that school has started again, I am back to listening to audiobooks on the long trip between Asheville and Cullowhee. I found someone to carpool with on Mondays, but I'll be driving myself on Tuesdays. That's almost two and a half hours of driving a week, plus all the regular driving I do to my job, internship, and bars. I'll probably be able to knock out around two a month. Luckily, the Asheville library system has a pretty good collection of audiobooks, and once I've exhausted them, I can use the digital library to listen to them via my cell phone or tablet.

Technology is so neat. Speaking of which...

It's hard to describe The Adoration of Jenna Fox without spoiling most, if not all, of the major plot twists. Instead of a plot summary, I will ask a series of rhetorical questions:

What would you do if you woke up and weren't you anymore?
What does it mean to be alive?
What does it meant to be human?

and, as the cover asks,

How far would you go to save someone you love?

I really, really liked this book. It's a thought-provoking meditation upon the nature of humanity, technology, and the ethical dilemmas that surround them. Pearson does an excellent job humanizing her characters as she delineates why they have made the choices they made and how they led to the "present" Jenna Fox.

Highly recommended. 5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Goliath by Scott Westerfeld

I finally got my hands on the third and final installment of the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, I can't really describe it or its plot points in detail without spoiling the end of the first book and all of the second, so I'll hit the high points: Siberia, Japan, the United States, hot air balloons, Tesla, espionage, assassination plots, and cute critters. It wraps up the previous two books nicely, and all of the things I said about the series (good and bad) in the previous reviews hold true for this one.

Overall, it's a very entertaining and engaging read. 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides is probably my all-time favorite writer. I first read The Virgin Suicides in high school, and it remains among the most beloved books on my shelf. It came into my life at just the right moment and continues to resonate with me years later. I imagine The Marriage Plot will occupy a similar place for me in the future; it was just what I needed to read at this point in my life.

The Marriage Plot departs from Eugenides' other works in a few ways. First off, it isn't set in 1970's-ish Detroit and Greek heritage and culture do not figure prominently in the narrative. It also has less of an epic scope to it than The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex; it's subject matter is comparatively banal. Nevertheless, I found myself enjoying every page-- probably because of the extent to which I related to it.

When I posted about having finished and liked The Marriage Plot on facebook, the younger sister of a very close friend of mine asked if she would like it. "That depends," I responded, "How do you feel about dysfunctional, over-educated humanities majors who are having difficulties reintegrating into normal life?" As a member of that category, I have a love/hate relationship with the characters, especially Madeleine. On the one hand, I, too, majored in English because I liked to read and experienced a certain amount of personal fallout and professional angst as a direct result of that (in hindsight) incredibly poor decision. On the other, Eugenides managed to embody just about every thing I don't like about myself in her, so I often found myself incredibly frustrated-- just like the time I read Madame Bovary.

At the same time, though, the writing was really, really good and I found myself caring quite a bit about the characters and their questionable decisions. It was also remarkably true to life; even though it was set around students who graduated from Brown in the 1980s, it rang true to my (and my friends') experiences as students who graduated from Vanderbilt twenty years later. Some of us got menial jobs, others of us traveled the world and found enlightenment (...or lots of drugs, whatever), others went off to engage in scientific progress, most of us were underemployed, and virtually all of us made incredibly bad choices in our love lives (I had a particularly unfortunate knack for getting involved with crazy people). Much like Eugenides' characters in The Marriage Plot, we muddled our way through and emerged on the other side of our twenties more or less intact.

Strongly recommended. 5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Fibble, The Fourth Circle of Heck by Dale Basye

I've been following the Circles of Heck series since the first installment came out in 2008. I'm a sucker for both young adult novels and satire (plus Dante), so I've really enjoyed the series thus far.

Fibble begins where the previous installment, Blimpo, has left off. It continues to follow the exploits of Marlo and Milton Fauster, who have switched bodies and been sent to different parts of Heck. Fibble, the circle that is home to children who lie, is a demented circus run by (who else?) P.T. Barnum, with a special appearance made by Richard Nixon. Milton, in Marlo's body, must rescue Marlo, in his body, from Fibble and avert a giant celestial calamity.

Entertaining, as always! I really love the way Basye has adapted Dante. And I'm looking forward to the next book, Snivel, which is due out in May. 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

 A few weeks ago, I posted the following request for book recommendations on facebook:

I have $25 to spend on frivolous (read: not school-related) books. I am looking for recommendations.

Parameters: no bodice-rippers, crimesploitation, "chick" lit (if the plot could be an episode of Sex and the City, I'm not interested), spaceships, unicorns, dragons (this includes tattoos), sentient beings that ~sparkle in the sunshine~, architecture, or railroads.

YA is okay if it's well-written. Same goes for speculative fiction (think Jasper Fforde). French language recommendations are always welcome. I also enjoy non-fiction of a sociological bent.

A lot of my friends are avid book readers, so I knew that they should come up with a few good ones. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was mentioned by several people, so I decided to check it out of the library on my next visit.

Overall, this book was very good. I'm a sucker for modern coming-of-age stories, especially those involving the hopelessly awkward, so Oscar Wao was a character/novel after my own heart. Set in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao discusses the family's fuku, or curse, that had been set upon them by Trujillo, the brutal, American-backed dictator who terrorized the DR's inhabitants from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. The fuku follows the family from the DR to New Jersey, ultimately afflicting Oscar, the youngest son, who is fat, nerdy, and terminally virginal.

Told from the perspective of multiple family members and set in a variety of times and places, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao paints an elegant yet terrifying account of the long-lasting effects of brutal, repressive governments and the immigrant experience. Diaz did an excellent job highlighting the differing experiences of the characters, deftly revealing the role that intergenerational trauma plays in current relationships. I also learned several Spanish words that probably shouldn't be used in polite company.

My only complaint about the book is that the pacing was uneven, making a few parts in the middle something of a slog to get through. Otherwise, it's a great read. 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

You guys, I was visited by The Suck Fairy the last few weeks. I first read Joseph Heller's Catch-22 in middle school after a classmate had gone on and on about how good it was. At the time, I thought it was hilarious and enjoyed it immensely. I decided to pick it up again at the library last week for a bit of light reading. The fact that I remember Catch-22 as a light-hearted wartime frolic rather than an extremely pessimistic, black-humored gape into the void speaks quite well as to how incredibly naive and immature I was in middle school. The fact that I considered it among my favorite books speaks to how unaware of racism and sexism I was at that point, as well.

So, while I can see why it's considered a classic piece of social criticism and war commentary, I can't enjoy it anymore. Sadtimes.

(No plot summary because everyone has read this, seriously.)

3 out of 5 stars. :(

The Other Books I Read This Year

...That I didn't have time to post individual reviews for. Hold on, folks, this is gonna be a long one.

First up is Sharon Hays' Flat Broke with Children, which I read for a research paper on the 1996 PRWORA legislation, commonly known as "welfare reform" in the US (yes, all of my papers were on similarly cheerful subjects). Overall, I really enjoyed it-- as much as you can enjoy a book about poor single mothers getting screwed over by judgmental, affluent male politicians and their supporters. Hays combines reviews of scholarly literature and her own long-term observations of a cohort of TANF clients in a few cities in her illuminating account of the true motives of the legislation and the effects it has had on AFDC/TANF participants.

Now, whenever I recommend books on poverty in America, I always mention this one along with Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On not Getting By in America. Together, I think they paint a fairly accurate picture of why upward mobility in the US is so difficult.

5 out of 5 stars.

More reviews behind the jump: War is Boring by David Axe, The Card-Turner by Louis Sachar, Shine by Lauren Myracle, Bumped by Megan McCafferty, When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris, and The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson.

Book Review: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Since I'm still doing a lot of driving these days between attending two schools, working, and volunteering, I've gotten back into audiobooks. It's nice to feel like I'm reading again, even though it takes me a lot longer to get through books that way. Currently, I am listening to David Sedaris' When You are Engulfed in Flames, but I finished Steinbeck's Cannery Row last week.

Believe it or not, this is the first Steinbeck novel I've ever read. I know reading Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath is a high school rite of passage for many, but for whatever reason, my tenth grade English teacher decided that the Honors section would read The Great Gatsby instead. Since I didn't take a lot of American literature courses in college, I never had the opportunity to read Steinbeck in a formal setting. I stumbled across Cannery Row in the audiobooks section a few weeks ago, and decided to give it a try when I saw that the recording was only around six hours long. 

Overall, I really liked it. The voice acting was very good (this is a critical thing: I have abandoned several audiobooks over that) and fun to listen to. The story wasn't half-bad, either. While I'm not generally a fan of Depression-era literature, Cannery Row was funny, interesting, and gritty, all without being plagued by the preachiness common to literature of that time. Steinbeck deftly creates a world and populates it with all kinds of unique characters, each of whom has his own clear voice. I'll probably read more of his work in the future.

5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is one of my all-time favorite authors, so much so that I wrote my undergraduate thesis on her novels. A Mercy is her most recent work, and while I enjoyed it immensely and highly recommend it, I'm not sure what to say about it. Even though I finished it over a week ago, I'm still processing it. This is unusual for me, but for the time being, I'll roll with it.

5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Fool by Christopher Moore

Before I headed out to Bristol to visit my little sister on Monday, I stopped at the downtown library to pick out an audiobook for the trip. I figured I may as well get into the swing of listening to books rather than reading them, as I'll be spending quite a bit of time on the road this semester. Western is just over an hour away from where I live, so that's four hours a week right there, not to mention all the time I spend driving to and from work, the gym, and AB Tech. Audiobooks seemed like a good way to pass the time.

As I browsed the books on CD section at the library, I stumbled across several volumes by Christopher Moore. While I'd heard of Moore before (a lot of my friends really like his books), I'd never gotten around to reading any myself. I figured then was as good a time as any, and selected Fool, a take on King Lear written from the perspective of Pocket, Lear's favorite court jester. I tend to be something of a sucker for this sort of thing, and I was very well-rewarded.

There are many reasons to love Fool. First and foremost, it's absolutely hilarious. Since it's told from the perspective of a Fool, bawdy jokes, sarcasm, and black comedy abound; it reads quite a bit like the dirtier stories in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Moore does an excellent job translating medieval humor for modern audiences, and the result is nothing short of hysterical. Beyond that, Fool provides an interesting and insightful take on the morality of both the play and the title character of King Lear, along with a certain amount of social commentary that some modern readers might find a tad disconcerting. For what could be advertised as a lighthearted romp, it's really quite heavy in places. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it immensely.

Also, the voice acting was awesome.

A few caveats, though: this, like much of Moore's work, Fool is not a book for those who are easily offended. If cursing, drinking, sex, violence, and unfavorable comparisons of Christianity to paganism because Christian holidays don't involve orgies would send you into a froth of pear-clutching self-righteousness, you should probably avoid this one. I also wouldn't recommend Fool to anyone who hasn't already read King Lear. While it would probably still be fairly amusing, the plot would likely be a little hard to follow.

All in all, I loved it. 5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke

I stumbled across Dream of Ding Village in the new fiction section in the library a few weeks ago. I'm not very familiar with Asian literature, mostly because I don't speak any Asian languages and I prefer to avoid reading books in translation. The premise was so interesting, though, that I checked it out anyway. I'm very glad I did. Not only was Dream of Ding Village beautifully written, it was an eye-opening look into the casualties of runaway development in modern China.

Ding Village, a small town in Henan, China (Lianke's home), becomes a bloodselling boomtown in the 1990's only to be decimated by AIDS some ten years later. Narrated by the murdered son of the town's leading bloodhead (or blood collector), Ding Hui, Dream of Ding Village tells the heartbreaking story of the town and its occupants, detailing a multitude of abuses perpetrated upon the citizens by their fellow villagers and the Chinese government and how they coped with the outbreak. Bloodheads, including (especially?) Ding Hui, were known for reusing supplies and needles, filling up the bags to the bursting point and undercompensating the peasants, and tricking people into donating more blood more frequently than they should have, not to mention lying about the true risks of blood-selling and the spread of AIDS, which is known to the villagers as "the fever." People were told that it was their civic duty to sell their blood; not only were they helping people who needed it, they were enriching their families, village, and province.

Henan was and remains one of the poorest parts of China, so the people there were especially vulnerable to heavy-handed tactics and misinformation campaigns about AIDS and how it is spread. For years, the party line of the Chinese government was that HIV/AIDS were diseases of decadent, Western society and limited to "perverts." They denied the presence of HIV in the Chinese population for years, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, which resulted in the disease spreading like wildfire through rural populations, who were unaware that needle sharing and heterosexual sex could spread the disease. Beyond that, medications available in the developed world that can slow (if not stop) the transition from HIV to AIDS simply weren't available to impoverished Chinese villagers, so when they got infected, they were left to sicken and die. In droves.

According to a few interviews of Lianke I've read online, Dream of Ding Village is a sanitized version of what actually happened; Lianke had self-censored a great deal in order to prevent it from being banned by the Chinese government (it didn't work). He had apparently left out some of the worst abuses he had come across in his research (a fact that I find frankly horrifying) and limited discussions of the Chinese government's involvement, portraying the tragedy as the work of unscrupulous local government operatives and private bloodheads. The international angle wasn't discussed, either. There's been talk of Lianke and the anthropologist he conducted his research with publishing a non-fiction work or a documentary. I hope that happens; the victims of the Chinese blood merchants deserve to have their stories told.

Overall, an excellent read. 5 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Where She Went by Gayle Forman

I wasn't a huge fan of If I Stay (you can read my review here), but I guess I cared enough about the characters to see how their story ended. I had to wait a few weeks since there were a few people ahead of me in the library's holds queue, but it wound up being worth the wait. Most of the things I complained about with If I Stay weren't present in Where She Went. I think that's mostly because Where She Went is 1) told from Adam's perspective (so the Mia whininess is kept to a minimum) 2) three years after the accident (so they're not teenagers anymore, so there's that, too). Meanwhile, the things that made If I Stay great continued to shine, namely, Forman's ability to balance past and present narratives in a cohesive manner and her delicate crafting of characters and their relationships.

The ending was still sort of cheesy, but you can't win 'em all. 4 out of 5 stars.