Books and Books!

Something very exciting happened at work this week: one of the librarians handed out sheets for everybody to make "Staff Picks," which will be displayed at my library this summer. I get to have an "expert" opinion!

I'm writing this post to serves three purposes. 1: get my thoughts in order about what I've read recently to brainstorm about what I want to staff-pick 2: review what I've read so those of you that are interested can investigate or steer clear (I talked to two of my friends on the phone last night and started to talk about books, but got distracted before I mentioned more than one) 3: solicit more book recommendations from you, in case there's something you think I need to read before I need to submit my picks at the end of this month. Let me know in the comments!

So here are the books I've read since roughly the beginning of 2010 (unless I'm forgetting something):

Laughing Gas by P. G. Wodehouse
Of course it's funny and involves English upper-class twits, because it's P. G. Wodehouse. It also makes fun of Hollywood and, oh, is a body-switching story (a la Freaky Friday, but not with ladies, because why would Wodehouse write from the perspective of ladies?). A light read; I liked it pretty well.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
This is one of those books where, once I started, I had to keep reading--I had to find out what was going to happen; yet I can't assert with confidence that I actually enjoyed it. It's certainly different from any other book I've read (although not mind-bogglingly so) and, at first, it's super-interesting. However, it steadily runs out of steam. The beginning is engrossing, but by the end, it's hard to tell what the point is anymore. And it just ends because it ends. Do I recommend it? 51% yes, 49% no. And definitely no if you don't like dark stuff because it is, after all, about a teenage girl who gets raped and murdered. So there's that.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
I'm a little surer that I like this one. The protagonist isn't as likeable, and I felt that it went one last plot-twist too far near the end, but I also feel like I learned a lot about Afghanistan from an Afghan perspective. I'm glad I read it and might even read it again.

The Kid by Dan Savage
I don't think I've mentioned in this space how much I like Dan Savage, because I feel that many of my readers would not. He's a snarky, gay, sex-advice columnist. Some people read his columns because people with weird, kinky problems write to him (as opposed to, say, "Ann Landers"), but I like him because I think he gives really good advice. He's the only advice columnist I've read who will straight up tell people to dump their scumbag girl- or boyfriends, because sometimes that's clearly the right answer. ("Ann Landers" and Ann Landers, when she was alive, would frustrate me with their constant "try counseling!" Sometimes you should get counseling. Sometimes you should just dump the scumbag.) Anyway, Dan wrote a book many years ago about how he and his boyfriend adopted a baby. It's funny and interesting (I learned a lot about open adoption) and I enjoyed it--although I knew going in that I liked Dan Savage's writing, so it wasn't a big gamble for me.

The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons
I am perfectly indifferent to the NBA. No, that isn't true--I'm actually very slightly hostile toward it, and have never been a fan. But again, I already knew I liked the writing style of the author of this book, so I checked it out anyway. I made it through the first several chapters, before it got pretty technical, and even though I didn't have much of an NBA knowledge base, it still made me laugh. What can I say? Bill Simmons is funny.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
OK, I'm only including this for completeness' sake. I read a good review of it, and it's about Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII, so it's in my wheelhouse, and I therefore checked it out. If it weren't so new, it wouldn't be as in demand and I could re-check it and only then would I have been able to finish it. I had two weeks to work on it but didn't get around to reading more than the first couple of chapters; it's sort of interesting but not deeply so. The writing style is kind of original but also kind of confusing and . . . I dunno. I wanted to like it more than I did. Maybe I'll return to it someday.

Persepolis by Marjan Satrapi
This is a graphic novel that got turned into a movie, apparently. It's about a girl growing up in Iran in the late 70s and early 80s--that is, when crazy stuff started to go down. It reminded me of The Kite Runner in that it's an inside, personal perspective of a country I usually only see in outside, hostile, geo-political terms, so that was good. (The moral of the story is also the same: it's BAD NEWS when religious fundamentalists take over your country.) But it's definitely more simplistic than The Kite Runner (and the illustrations, while charming, are also simplistic--you basically have to tell characters apart based on context) and, since it's about a self-centered teenage girl, not always very sympathetic. Still, I think I'll seek out the sequel, because it was easily worth the investment of the short time it took to read.

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
I always meant to write up a review of the movie for this blog, since I saw it over Christmas break. But then, Christmas break was an uncongenial time for blogging, so there you go. I liked the movie more than I thought I would. Sandra Bullock was very sassy. And I heard that the book was better and had more hardcore football stuff in it. It turned out that both were true. This, too, was a super quick read and well worth the small time/effort it took. There are three or four chapters that focus on football history and strategy instead of the heartwarming rags-to-riches Michael Oher story, but if you aren't interested in the pure football parts, you could easily skip those chapters. I was surprised to find out the movie didn't really add any sappy parts--the sappy parts really happened in real life, changing them in my mind from "cheesy" to "genuinely touching." I really liked this book.

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
Now, this! This was a book, man! It's the first of a series (followed by A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows) and that series ate my life for a week or two. It's a fantasy series; it's a bit influenced by the Wars of the Roses (there are knights, dynastic struggles, crazy families, etc.) but there are also dragons and zombies. Dragons and zombies. The first installment is the best one, but once you're involved with characters, you can't stop. (I got Neal to start reading them and I think he'd agree.) There are two problems: first, by the fourth book I was starting to get kind of annoyed. Martin apparently started off claiming it was going to be a trilogy, but then he changed his mind to a seven-parter. But it seems by book four that he's just stretching things out to stretch them out. My second-favorite charcter (and I'm not going to go into specifics, in case anybody reading this takes my very emphatic recommendation and reads the books) just keeps having these ever-more pointless side-track adventures that, in some cases, just don't seem to fit her character at all. The second problem is that Martin hasn't gotten around to releasing the fifth book. There's a letter at the end of the fourth one saying that, hopefully, the next installment will be released the following year. The letter is dated July, 2005. So . . . I have little hope that I'll get to find out what happens to these characters I'm so invested in anytime in the foreseeable future. (He'll still have to write two more after #5!) But even with those concerns, I still wholeheartedly recommend these books. I love them.

And here's one final dis-recommendationn (I really thought I'd have more of those in this list--weird): The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry
I like Stephen Fry, but I got about 30 pages into this book before I put it back where I found it. It was aggressively obnoxious and mean-spirited. All thumbs down. All thumbs that exist.