12 of 2011 – Part Two

I’ve pledged to read 12 books in 2011. I’ll read more, but I’m definitely going to read this 12 (one a month) this year. The first part of the list can be found here.

7. Ninteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult -

Best known for tackling controversial issues through richly told fictional accounts, Jodi Picoult’s 14th novel, Nineteen Minutes, deals with the truth and consequences of a smalltown high-school shooting. Set in Sterling, New Hampshire, Picoult offers reads a glimpse of what would cause a 17-year-old to wake up one day, load his backpack with four guns, and kill nine students and one teacher in the span of nineteen minutes. As with any Picoult novel, the answers are never black and white, and it is her exceptional ability to blur the lines between right and wrong that make this author such a captivating storyteller.

On Peter Houghton’s first day of kindergarten, he watched helplessly as an older boy ripped his lunch box out of his hands and threw it out the window. From that day on, his life was a series of humiliations, from having his pants pulled down in the cafeteria, to being called a freak at every turn. But can endless bullying justify murder? As Picoult attempts to answer this question, she shows us all sides of the equation, from the ruthless jock who loses his ability to speak after being shot in the head, to the mother who both blames and pities herself for producing what most would call a monster. Surrounding Peter’s story is that of Josie Cormier, a former friend whose acceptance into the popular crowd hangs on a string that makes it impossible for her to reconcile her beliefs with her actions.

At times, Nineteen Minutes can seem tediously stereotypical– jocks versus nerds, parent versus child, teacher versus student. Part of Picoult’s gift is showing us the subtleties of these common dynamics, and the startling effects they often have on the moral landscape.

Sophie has been trying to get me to read a Picoult book for awhile now. This one’s plot was the first to really interest me. If it makes me cry, I’m punching Sophie and Jodi in the face.

8. The Sookie Stackhouse books – My friend, Marge, very generously sent me the boxset of the first 8 or so Sookie Stackhouse books for my birthday last August. Since I’m a fan of the ridiculous show, True Blood, the books are based on, I’m really looking forward to diving in. Marge assures me that the book Sookie is not nearly as annoying as Anna Paquin’s portrayal.

9. The Confession by John Grisham –

In 2007, almost on the eve of the execution of Donté Drumm, an African-American college football star, for the 1998 murder of a white cheerleader whose body was never found, Travis Boyette, a creepy multiple sex offender, confesses that he’s guilty of the crime to Kansas minister Keith Schroeder. With Drumm’s legal options dwindling fast and with the threat of civil unrest in his Texas hometown if the execution proceeds, Schroeder battles to convince Boyette to go public with the truth–and to persuade the condemned man’s attorney that Boyette’s story needs to be taken seriously.

This, and my next selection, can be considered my super-fluff reads. They’re not particularly challenging, often predictable, very quick reads, but they’re fun.

10. Cross Fire by James Patterson – Just as Alex Cross is about to get married, a serial sniper fucks things up. See? Simple and fun.

11. The Dice Man by Luke Rinehart

I tried to find an adequate description of this very… different… story online and couldn’t. I first heard of this book in a blog post by my friend Zoe Brock a few years ago. It wasn’t available for purchase then, nor could I find it in the library. Another friend, Emily, recently reviewed it for her website and I was happy to see it’s available at Amazon.com. Here’s a bit of Emily’s review:

Dr. Lucius Rhinehart is bored. Bored with himself, his family, his psychological practice, with society and its ridiculous rules and constraints; BORED. His wife irritates him, his children are tedious, his patients never get any better. He’s stagnating in every sense of the term and is contemplating suicide. Coming to the conclusion that suicide isn’t an option, he decides that he is going to spice up his life by leaving some of his decisions to chance – that is, he assigns a certain number to each of several choices, rolls the dice, and does whatever the dice choose. No rolling again, no taking it back. Sounds like harmless fun, right? Unfortunately, Dr. Rhinehart’s black sense of humor gets the best of him and his first “decision” one evening is whether or not to go to bed with his wife, stay up reading, or go down the hall and rape Arlene, his attractive neighbor and wife of a colleague. Perhaps not surprisingly, the dice choose Arlene, and Luke dutifully trundles down the hall.

12. The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson –

An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time.

The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.

A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life—and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne’s care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete—and her time on earth will be finished.

This was tossed about as a possible selection for my book club, but something else was chosen. The description intrigued me and I promised myself that I’d eventually get around to it.

12 of 2011 – Part One

This year, I’m going to read 12 books. I’ll probably read more than 12 books, but I’m definitely going to read at least 12. In fact, these 12:

1. The Help by Kathryn Stockett – What perfect timing for this optimistic, uplifting debut novel (and maiden publication of Amy Einhorn’s new imprint) set during the nascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Miss., where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan is just home from college in 1962, and, anxious to become a writer, is advised to hone her chops by writing about what disturbs you. The budding social activist begins to collect the stories of the black women on whom the country club sets relies and mistrusts enlisting the help of Aibileen, a maid who’s raised 17 children, and Aibileen’s best friend Minny, who’s found herself unemployed more than a few times after mouthing off to her white employers. The book Skeeter puts together based on their stories is scathing and shocking, bringing pride and hope to the black community, while giving Skeeter the courage to break down her personal boundaries and pursue her dreams. Assured and layered, full of heart and history, this one has bestseller written all over it.

Sophie recommended this book to me months ago. She loved it. She said a friend of hers couldn’t get into it because of the way some of the black characters (set during the Civil Rights movement) spoke. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it from everyone that has read it.

2. Getting to Happy by Terry McMillan – Fifteen years after Waiting to Exhale, McMillan brings back Savannah, Gloria, Bernadine, and Robin–now in their 50s–for a disappointing and uninspired outing. As the story opens, Gloria is very happy, Savannah believes she might be happy, Bernadine is fighting addiction and losing ground, and single mother Robin is trying to resign herself to being alone while things at her job begin to unravel. Within the first few chapters, Gloria and Savannah are struck by disaster, and things go rapidly downhill from there for everyone. Most of the misery has to do with men who lie, steal, cheat, or disappear, or with adult children who face similar problems. Unfortunately, the beloved cast isn’t given a story worthy of them; instead, this reunion reads like a catalogue of personal catastrophes annotated with very long, rambling discussions, with more emphasis on simple drama than character.

With a review like that you might be wondering why I want to read this book. Well, Waiting to Exhale was the first “black” contemporary fiction I remember reading. It had all of the juicy love, loss, and betrayal found in other “chick lit” books, but for the first time, it featured people that looked like me, my friends, and our mothers. Going to see the movie based on WTE was a full-out girlfriend affair. And though I must say that while the review above doesn’t surprise me (I follow the author on Twitter and I swear that 90% of her tweets are bitter, angry or confrontational), I am dying to know how the characters end up.

3. The Hunger Games: Book 1 by Suzanne Collins – In a not-too-distant future, the United States of America has collapsed, weakened by drought, fire, famine, and war, to be replaced by Panem, a country divided into the Capitol and 12 districts. Each year, two young representatives from each district are selected by lottery to participate in The Hunger Games. Part entertainment, part brutal intimidation of the subjugated districts, the televised games are broadcasted throughout Panem as the 24 participants are forced to eliminate their competitors, literally, with all citizens required to watch. When 16-year-old Katniss’ young sister, Prim, is selected as the mining district’s female representative, Katniss volunteers to take her place. She and her male counterpart, Peeta, the son of the town baker who seems to have all the fighting skills of a lump of bread dough, will be pitted against bigger, stronger representatives who have trained for this their whole lives. Collins’ characters are completely realistic and sympathetic as they form alliances and friendships in the face of overwhelming odds; the plot is tense, dramatic, and engrossing. This book will definitely resonate with the generation raised on reality shows like Survivor and American Gladiator. Book one of a planned trilogy.

This is my first time reading what this trilogy is about and it’s not something I’d usually read. But there was so much buzz about the third book, Mockingjay, when it debuted a few months ago that I have to see what all the fuss is about.

4. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen –

Jacob Jankowski says: “I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn’t always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn’t a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn’t write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob’s life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the “menagerie” and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and… he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August’s wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there’s trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the “revenooers” or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena’s and Rosie’s pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it–and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely.

I’ve heard the buzz about this book for awhile now (and the movie starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon). This isn’t usually something I’d be dying to read, but I’m determined to read outside of my usual genres/authors a bit more this year.

5. The Likeness by Tana French – French’s debut novel, In the Woods (2007), introduced Dublin Murder Squad detective Cassie Maddox and earned unanimous critical praise. Cassie is back, and French has written another winner. The body of a young woman is found in the ruins of a old stone cottage in a dying village outside of Dublin, and the dead woman and Cassie are virtual twins. Lacking suspects or leads, the victim is reported by the police to be injured but alive, leaving Cassie to step into the dead woman’s life as a Trinity College graduate student and the housemate of four other students. Despite the tensions of being undercover, Cassie quickly learns to love her quirky, insular housemates and her new life in a once-grand house, even as the Murder Squad investigation yields little. Someone stabbed her doppelganger to death, and Cassie must find the killer. The Likeness has everything: memorable characters, crisp dialogue, shrewd psychological insight, mounting tension, a palpable sense of place, and wonderfully evocative, painterly prose. In the Woods was an Edgar Award finalist; this one just might go one step further.

French’s In The Woods made my best of 2010 list and I’ve had The Likeness waiting on my Kindle for months. Her third book, Faithful Place, is on my list, too.

6. The Book  Thief by Markus Zusak – Zusak has created a work that deserves the attention of sophisticated teen and adult readers. Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first book–although she has not yet learned how to read–and her foster father uses it, The Gravediggers Handbook, to lull her to sleep when shes roused by regular nightmares about her younger brothers death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayors reclusive wife (who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal), and especially her foster parents. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesels story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves. An extraordinary narrative.

Nina’s Book Club: February Selections

I’m going to be reading Almost Moon by Alice Sebold and I’d love it if you guys would join me. I figure announcing it now will give people time to obtain it and since I’m moving at the end of February, I won’t be writing about it till March 1st.

Also, Kali and I have decided on The Name of This Is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch. You guys are welcome to read/discuss along with us.

Also, while I’m at it, I’ll go ahead and announce the books for March and April.

March - Holler at the Moon by Tinesha Davis

April – Hold Love Strong by Matthew Aaron Goodman

Tinesha is a friend of a friend, well, a friend really, who wrote an amazing book about three sisters who turns out very differently after their mother is murdered.

And my mother-in-law gave me a signed copy of Hold Love Strong for Christmas. The author is the son of one of her clients. I started reading it and had to stop because I knew most of you would dig it and I thought it would be more fun to read it together.

Now that you know in advance and you can plan on when to get the books and read at your leisure. I’m not gonna read them until the start of each month assigned so that the content is fresh. If you’re gonna participate, as you read, think of questions to submit for discussion.

Thanks and happy reading!!

Nina’s Book Club – Vote for September’s Selection

Update: The winner is Fluke Or, I Know Why The Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore. I’ve already started. I’ll be posting the discussion blog for this book on September 30th at which time we’ll also choose October’s selection.

*****

I went through all of your selections and came up with a small list for us to vote on. Below you will find each title with a brief description to help with your vote. I tried to keep the selections “light” as (this month anyway) I’m not in the mood for anything too heavy with school just starting.

Please vote for one title only in the comments section below. Feel free to nominate a title for October by emailing it to nina@blogitoutb.com

This Charming Man by Marion Keyes -

Paddy de Courcy is Ireland’s debonair politician, the “John F. Kennedy Jr. of Dublin.” His charm and charisma have taken hold of the country and the tabloids, not to mention our four heroines: Lola, Grace, Marnie, and Alicia. But though Paddy’s winning smile is fooling Irish minds, the broken hearts he’s left in his past offer a far more truthful look into his character.

Narrated in turn by each woman, This Charming Man explores how their love for this one man has shaped their lives. But in true Marian Keyes fashion, this is more than a story of four love affairs. It’s a testament to the strength women find in themselves through work, friendship, and family, no matter what demons may be haunting their lives. Depression, self-doubt, domestic abuse—each of these women has seen tough times in life, and it’s through Keyes’s wonderful storytelling ability that these subjects are approached with the appropriate tone and candor. Her deft touch provides a gripping story and, ultimately, a redemptive ending.

Almost Moon – Alice Sebold

A woman steps over the line into the unthinkable in this brilliant, powerful, and unforgettable new novel by the author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky.

For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined. Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this searing, fast-paced novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, the meaning of devotion, and the line between love and hate. It is a challenging, moving, gripping story, written with the fluidity and strength of voice that only Alice Sebold can bring to the page.

The Gargoyle – Andrew Davidson

At the start of Davidson’s powerful debut, the unnamed narrator, a coke-addled pornographer, drives his car off a mountain road in a part of the country that’s never specified. During his painful recovery from horrific burns suffered in the crash, the narrator plots to end his life after his release from the hospital. When a schizophrenic fellow patient, Marianne Engel, begins to visit him and describe her memories of their love affair in medieval Germany, the narrator is at first skeptical, but grows less so. Eventually, he abandons his elaborate suicide plan and envisions a life with Engel, a sculptress specializing in gargoyles. Davidson, in addition to making his flawed protagonist fully sympathetic, blends convincing historical detail with deeply felt emotion in both Engel’s recollections of her past life with the narrator and her moving accounts of tragic love. Once launched into this intense tale of unconventional romance, few readers will want to put it down.

Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings – Christopher Moore

In his entertaining adventure-in-whale-researching, Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, Nathan Quinn, a prominent marine biologist, has been conducting studies in Hawaii for years trying to unravel the secret of why humpback whales sing. During a typical day of data gathering, Nate believes his mind is failing: the subject whale has “Bite Me” scrawled across its tail. Events become even stranger as the self-proclaimed “action nerds,” Nate, photographer Clay, their research assistant Amy, and Kona, a white Rasta (a Jewish kid from New Jersey), encounter sabotage to their data and equipment. They also observe increasingly bizarre whale behavior, including a phone call from the whale to their wealthy sponsor to ask that Nate bring it a hot pastrami and Swiss on rye, and discover both a thriving underwater city and the secret to what happened to Amelia Earhart. Thoughtful, irreverent, and often hilarious, Moore has crafted a tale that contains a bit of the saga of declining whale populations due to hunting and habitat destruction, as well as his over-the-top, decadent wit as applied to scientific methodology and professional jealousies. Moore notes a pasty, rival scientist “looked like Death out for his after-dinner stroll before a busy night of e-mailing heart attacks and tumors to a few million lucky winners,” and that killer whales (which are all named Kevin), are “just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.” Smart, sincere, and a whale of a story, Fluke is terrific.

Fluke  gets my vote because I am reading Christopher Moore’s, “A Dirty Job” and it is hilarious! I could go for another dose of his humor.

Nina’s Book Club – September Suggestions

I want to start a monthly book club on this site. Each month, anyone who wants to participate will vote on a book. We’ll have a month to read it. At the end of the month, I’ll post a blog/review of the book and we can discuss it in comments.

If you’d like to participate, or even if you don’t but know of a good book you think we’d like, please leave some suggestions below with a brief description of the book. I’ll narrow it down to three titles and open it up to voting before September 1st. (Also, make sure your library fines are all paid up! It will probably be easier on your bank account to participate if you borrow the books from your local branch.)

Please share this link with anyone who might be interested.

Thanks!