Minnesota Reads

Just like many pop culture nerds, I too like to impost arbitrary rules on any list I make. I think it imbibes the list with some significance, importance, or something else that lists of crap don’t have naturally. For this year’s list of Favorite Reads, I gave myself two rules. One, I couldn’t include books I’ve read before (The Giant’s House and An Invisible Sign of My Own). It’s just not fair to the books of 2011 to compare them to my all-time favorites.

Second, I decided not to include books by my friends. But I will say that I loved reading The Mostly True Story of Jack by Kelly Barnhill, Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff, and The Tanglewood Terror by Kurtis Scaletta. I loved them not just because I know the authors but because they are smart, entertaining beautiful novels that people of any age would enjoy. You wouldn’t go wrong by reading any (or all) of these books.

So with those two arbitrary rules in place, I present to you the ten books I enjoyed reading the most this year (in no particular order) not all of which were published this year.

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips: I’m not even a Shakespeare person and yet this novel about the discovery of a long-lost Shakespeare play was totally captivating and fun and, as weird as it is to say, educational. I learned a lot about Shakespeare and the theories that revolve around his famous plays. Lest you think that sounds kinda snoozy, it’s not at all. In fact, it’s super engaging and keeps you turning pages to see what’s going to happen next. Plus, most of the book takes place in Minnesota and I love that kind of stuff. [review]

The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure: It was a banner year for non-fiction as far as my reading list is concerned. I hardly ever read non-fiction and this year, I’ll have three on the list. First is Wendy McClure’s memoir about her search for the “lost world of Little House on the Prairie.” But the book is about more than that, it’s about grieving a lost mother, a lost childhood, and accepting the fact that yes, indeed, things change when we grow up. Also, a ton of Little House trivia, and what I loved the most is that McClure tries to reconcile her modern-day sensibilities with some of the seamier sides of the Ingalls. Such a good book. [review]

Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King: This young adult novel has all the great things I look to in literature: humor, sadness, smart female characters, and beauty. Vera Dietz’s story about the death of her friend Charlie and how he haunts her is at times funny and heartbreaking. But perhaps what I loved the most about ‘Vera Dietz’ is that A.S. King so brilliant illustrates Vera’s “deal” with great writing and wonderful scenes without ever saying, “hey this is Vera’s problem.” So much love for this one. [review]

Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe: If you had told me 368 days ago that I’d be including a book by Rob Lowe on my favorites of the year list, I’d have given you a withering, condescending stare along with a snooty sniff and probably said something kind of assholey about not reading celebrity memoirs or not digging non-fiction. Well, here I am, and her’s Rob Lowe’s memoir on my list. I will offer one caveat, had I not listened to this book on audio read by Rob Lowe it might not make this list. But listening to Lowe tell his story complete with dead-on impersonations of the entire Brat Pack and a bunch of other celebrities captured my heart, just like Ponyboy Curtis did the first time I read the words “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.” [review]

Just Kids by Patti Smith: Two celebrity memoirs in a row? Yeah. I guess I’m just that kind of hypocrite. But come one, Smith’s at least won a National Book Award so I got that kind of cred to fall back on, right? Actually it doesn’t matter because I loved this memoir of Smith’s life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and I generally don’t love NBA-winning books. This book is steeped in misty-pink magic that will make you long to be really poor in the fairytale New York of the 70s that was filled with rich, famous people just aching to be your friend. Also, it will make you care a lot about a desk. [review]

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline: Like Christa so wonderfully depicted in her review, the 80s worshipped in Cline’s sci-fi-y paean to video games is not the 80s I grew up in, and yet I loved spending time in Cline’s 80s. Well, it’s not really the 80s. It’s really 2044 and the world spends all it’s time in the video game called the Oasis and their a search for the keys to a huge fortune. The book is the most fun you’ll have reading. Seriously. [review]

Orientation and Other Stories by Daniel Orozco: I’m fond of making really asinine proclamations along the lines of “Everyone should just quit writing about Vietnam because Tim O’Brien already wrote ‘The Things They Carried’.” It’s fun you should try it sometime. Anyway, after reading Orozco’s hotly-anticipated short story collection, I proclaimed that everyone should stop writing about office life in corporate America now, he’s done it. I stand by that assertion because Orozco seems to bring the humanity to the drab greyness of corporate life that so many other authors forget about. This is a great, great collection of stories. [review]

Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schapell: This is a book filled with really great stories about really real women at different stages of their lives. All the stories are good. I want to emphasize that before I say the very last story, which is about the same character as the very first story, is so fucking good it’s worth the price of the book alone. For real. [review]

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell: This novel about an odd family in the swamps of Florida owes a lot of George Saunders (think about the stories “CivilWarland in Bad Decline” or “Sea Oak”) and Katherine Dunn (think Geek Love). Lucky for me I love Saunders and Dunn, and I really enjoyed Swamplandia! This is one those books where the journey is the reward because the ending kind of stinks. Still, totally read-worthy. [review]

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson: This book about a strange family of performance artists surprised be at every turn. It never went where I thought it would go and I loved that. I would say more but I’m really tired of writing this list. [review]

Either the past year in books didn’t have the same crash-bang-pow as 2010 or else I just did a meh job of finding the new and the hot to stain with my saliva. I figured out pretty early on that this list would never have the purity of being a list of just books published in the past year.

My reading style changed a bit since the last time I made this list. In 2011 I was more willing to go off-roading with my lit, picking up books willy-nilly and taking them for a spin or tackling massive hunks that I’d overlooked. I also had like four or five books I read all but the final 75 pages of, which was kind of weird of me because I really like finishing books. (This includes “Swann’s Way” and “Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test,” so now I’ll never be able to check off either when I’m taking some sort of “How Awesomely Well-Read Are You” Facebook survey).

Anyway. Here are the best books I read in 2011.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace: The tale of the Incandenza family is an epic one that requires the kind of commitment that, if you put the brain waves, page-turning power toward rocket science instead, you would be sipping a Pina Colada on Mars as we speak. It’s a must-read for Gen X and people who want to be a part of a super-secret club of the insufferables who have read it. And, it’s fantastic and mind-numbing and hilarious and satisfying. [review]

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace: On the other hand, this novel is like Infinite Jest-lite. It has so much of what makes IJ great, the characters and the humor and the mayhem, without the footnotes and math. The one is the quirky story of Lenore Beadsman, bird-owner, Converse-wearing woman whose boss Rick Vigorous is in love with her. Chaos ensues. [review]

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron: This pretty autobiographical book is about a young writer who moves to Brooklyn to create the Great American Novel and becomes the third wheel in the shitshow that is the relationship between the moody Nathan and Sophie, a woman with a tragic past who doles out pieces of her life to Stingo in half-truths and lies before finally just socking it all to him super hard and right in guts. Big love. [review]

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel: Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir blew my mind. It’s about growing up in a funeral home, a father who maybe kills himself soon after finding out that Bechdel is a lesbian, and she comes to learn a few things about his bad behavior when he was alive. It transcends its genre and is a great story in addition to being a great memoir with pictures. [review]

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver: Ker-pow! This is the story of a woman’s relationship with her son both before and after he kills a bunch of his classmates. It’s a complicated mess of events and includes some very heart-wrenching and honest feelings she has for this child she never really connected with or understood. [review]

It Chooses You by Miranda July: This probably seems like a long shot. It’s a memoir-ish and slightly journalistic side project Miranda July started working on while she was hiding from her actual project, writing the movie “The Future.” In it, she meets and interviews a handful of Californians who are selling blow dryers, leather jackets and other items in the Penny Saver. In the meantime, her writing is really funny, smart, quote-worthy and relate-able and it inspired all sorts of big love for Miranda July. [review]

Just Kids by Patti Smith: Patti Smith, you are one delicious writer. This memoir of her relationship-turned-friendship with Robert Mapplethorp and coming of age in the 1970s New York City art scene is lifestyle porn. Extra great when you pair your reading with spinning her album “Horses.” [review]

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami: Haruki Murakami’s latest novel is a hefty slab of text about an assassin and a math teacher slash author, a ghostwritten bestseller, tiny men who crawl out of the mouths of animals and make something called an “air chrysalis.” It’s hokey, it’s lovely, it’s long, it’s very Murakami. [review]

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach: This novel is about a super great short stop who gets a last-chance opportunity to play collegiate-level baseball. Unfortunately, he hits a wicked slump that really monkeys with his mind. Meanwhile, there is a great cast of characters orbiting his world, including the president of the college, his gay roommate, a solar-system sized forced who is his teammate and, of course, a girl. [review]

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel has a great trio of smart characters in his novel about a love triangle, depression and mania. Maddie is in love with the hulking Leonard and Mitchell distracts himself from loving Maddie by chasing his religious beliefs around the world. It’s a great story. [review]

Honorable mention: My Sister’s Continent by Gina Frangello, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, Gryphon by Charles Baxter, Lola, California by Edie Meidav.

Worst book of 2011: Paying for It by Chester Brown. This graphic memoir is about how Brown decided to forego relationships in favor of staying single and occasionally fulfilling his sexual urges with prostitutes. I think it just had one too many pictures of a post-coital Brown, his wormy unit shriveling on the sheets.

While I study top ten lists somewhat obsessively, I haven’t defined the qualities necessary for a book to make my own “top” list. What follows are the first ten books I thought of when I looked back over the year (in no particular order). I have recommended all of them to someone, and would do so again.

1. The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson: I’m actually only half way through this, but it’s fantastic, stimulating, entertaining, and creepy. I intend to write a review for the new year, but this already deserves to be on my top ten list.

2. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers: I was a little late on the uptake with this one, published in 2009, a mostly non-fiction account of one family’s experiences during Hurricane Katrina. Even a few years later, it is endearing and enlightening.

3. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese: My mom recommended this book to me, and I’m so glad she did. A long but fast read, it’s ideal book club fodder, with a good mix of substance and fluff.

4. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot: I’m surprised how much non-fiction is on my list this year, but these books are so well researched and captivating that I’m beginning to see that truth can be better than—or at least as good as—fiction.

5. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann: A series of connected short stories (does anyone else feel like this form is inescapable these days?) written poetically and artfully, this book made me emit constant sighs of admiration, sadness, and discovery.

6. Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick: This book is a work of art. I received The Invention of Hugo Cabret for Christmas and while I enjoyed it, I was a bit disappointed by how similar the two books are. In the end, I liked them both but prefer Wonderstruck, quite possibly only because I read it first. [review]

7. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: This is a solid work of fiction. Framed by the story of a woman verifying the authenticity of a recently discovered manuscript of the Sarajevo Haggadah, it takes the reader through tales of all of the book’s owners and caretakers.

8. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami: This was the first Murakami book that I read, and its puzzling stories have stayed with me. I’m looking forward to reading IQ84!

9. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart: This young adult novel has everything I love in a book: word play, prep school drama, pranks, a strong heroine…need I say more?

10. The Hunger Games by Susan Collins: Okay, I know I’m late on this one, too, and I did read the first one in 2010, but I was struggling to get to this list to ten, and for me this was really THE book of 2011; I taught it, recommended it, and read it in a seemingly endless loop.

Out of the books I read this year, my top ten are almost all science fiction and fantasy, and heavy on young adult novels. It was a good year.

1. By far my favorite book of the year was A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. I could not put down this young adult horror fantasy and I couldn’t stop crying at the end. The writing is beautiful and the story of a child dealing with the loss of his mother is heartbreaking. One thing I didn’t mention in my review is that the artwork throughout the book is absolutely stunning, too. I was running my hands over Jim Kay’s illustrations, pulling the book closer to my face, trying to view every little element. Beautiful. [review]

2. Over the Christmas holiday I finished Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, and before I was even a fourth of the way through I knew it would be a favorite this year. Ready Player One is for every geek who was raised in or loves the 1980s. If you were a gamer, or you know 80s sitcoms, or you can recite lines to every John Hughes film like I can, this book is like a big, sloppy kiss just for you. Okay, it’s more of a kiss to the gamers of the 80s, which I was not, but even though those gaming references were over my head, this is just one hell of an action-packed romp. Go read Jodi’s or Christa’s reviews to hear more about it, or better yet just go read the book. It’s that good.

3. Maureen McHugh’s short story collection, After the Apocalypse, is more than it sounds. I know it sounds like stories dealing with zombies or out-of-hand artificial intelligence or a future disease-ravaged planet, and the stories do involve these things, but they’re so much more. For instance, “The Naturalist” is not really about blood-thirsty zombies, but it’s about how the world is dealing with the zombies, which are put in their own preserve, and we really look at them and even start sympathizing with them. They aren’t just scary creatures that we know are the enemies but it dives in so much deeper. This collection takes these apocalyptic themes one step further and relationships between characters are really analyzed and not always resolved. The stories are surprising, interesting, and hauntingly realistic. I’m still working on a full review of this collection because I need to re-read some of these stories.

4., 5., & 6. Patrick Ness is all over my best-of list this year. From now on, I will obsessively read anything he writes. Besides A Monster Calls, I read his Chaos Walking trilogy this year which made me want to punch him in the face and hug him at the same time. That takes talent. He sucked me into the future world he created and I loved and cheered for the characters while I cried for and cursed them. Stupid, awesome Patrick Ness.

7. Another short story collection I loved this year was Machine of Death. The stories all had to include a machine that spit out vague death predictions, but the authors could go anywhere they wanted with that, and they did. The premise pulled me in, but some of the stories went so much further than I could’ve imagined. They are putting together a Machine of Death 2 and I only hope the stories are as interesting. Bravo. [review]

8. Mat Johnson’s Pym is so hard to describe but it’s so awesome. Social commentary and satire run rampant throughout Pym, all starting with the discussion of whiteness in Edgar Allen Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The characters soon uncover things, like the potential that the novel may not be fiction but fact, and this leads them to Antarctica. The novel then turns into a tale of monsters, slavery, and escape, but it all seems to go together. I’m still not sure how Mat Johnson pulled it off, but he did. [review]

9. I just finished Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and what took me so long? It’s not like I hadn’t heard of it. I think this is the case of too many books to read and not enough time. I’m sure this made best-of lists years ago, but it’s finally hitting mine now. The story is set in the early 20th century and follows young Hugo, who lives in a train station maintaining the clocks, and his passion for automatons. Using his deceased father’s notes, he works on an automaton he recovered from a destroyed museum, but problems start happening for him when he meets some eccentric people who are interested in his automaton. Easily the best parts of the book are the illustrations. The book is over 500 pages long, but over 200 of them are gorgeous illustrations. I found myself longing for more of them and less words. I even cursed when I read things that would’ve been drawn beautifully. This book is solely on my top list for the gorgeous illustrations that mimic the silent films that are discussed throughout the book. Great.

10. I debated whether I should include this young adult novel in my top ten, but I really did love Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. When I read it I was smiling and gasping and trying to figure out what was going to happen next. It’s part horror, adventure, fantasy, and even some family drama and I think all the pieces fit together perfectly. I can’t wait for the next in the series. [review]

Honorable Mentions: I can’t help but throw three honorable mentions into the mix. I don’t think these are the best books of the year, but they made me smile or laugh out loud, and that has to account for something. Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol restored my faith in graphic novels, and I can’t help but love Tina Fey’s Bossypants and Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) because I really admire smart, funny women. Grab any of these if you need a pick me up.

Picture yourself. Age, low 20s. Maybe you get a general idea that includes your favorite denim cutoffs and Martin Zellar covering Neil Diamond. Your hair styled like a teenage boy, a skateboarder, and you loved mixing Leinie’s Berry and Honey Weiss and drinking it over ice. The morning you walked home wearing the remains of a toga. Scratching out college math homework at a tall top table while your boyfriend worked as a bouncer. Snacking on spicy chicken wings, licking each finger in between bites. You were the first person you knew to kill a cactus.

It sounds … whatever. It just was. Naive, indulgent, immature. All of that comes with the territory of being that age. Now what if you had the opportunity to see yourself in full form. A letter you had written in anger resurfaces 40-odd years later. For as honest as you were in your nostalgia, there is no way it would jibe with this one true, super-real and unedited missive that you sent into the universe.

“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you witnessed,” Barnes’ protagonist Tony Webster notes at the beginning of his story.

The first half of the book focuses on Tony Webster and his collection of pseudo-intellectual high school friends as they come to absorb the new kid on the block, Adrian. He’s a bit of an enigma to them and becomes the coveted friend to the small longstanding foursome that preceded him.

“We were essentially taking a piss, except when we were serious. He was essentially serious, except when taking a piss.”

They eventually go their separate ways, off to college, and Tony gets into a relationship with Veronica, a fiery and tricky-to-read girl who doesn’t much go for anything beyond very awkward and unsexy third-base action. He meets her family, her pompous older brother, her curious mother who gives him some loyalty-breaching nuggets of advice, and her father. Eventually they break up and Veronica takes up with Adrian. No big, Tony lies to himself before firing off a letter to his old friend. Adrian, a young philosopher, ends up killing himself. Years later, Tony is divorced from a woman he remains friendly with and doesn’t spend enough quality time with his daughter. He receives word that Veronica’s late mother, a woman he met once, bequeathed him a small sum of money and Adrian’s old journal. None of this makes sense to him, and when he finally reconnects with Veronica to get to the bottom of it, he finds that things are very different from the way he remembers them.

“It strikes me,” Tony muses. “That this may be one of the differences between youth and age: When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old we invent different pasts for others.”

This book is great. Totally fun to read, totally fun to think about, with all of Barnes’-style tidbits and quote-worthy sentences. It’s a nice little thinker about how and what we remember and what we know and what we really know and what we totally don’t know at all.

But. Because the nature of a book review is to not spoil things like endings, no one is talking about the ending of this one. It’s sudden. It’s wham. It’s ambiguous in a way that seems more cinematic than lit-based. It gives the whole story a sort of Nancy Drew-ness. And it is colossal punt in the final seconds so no one is talking about it. I want to talk about it. Someone read this!

The first thing you need to know about Haruki Murakami’s hefty slab of a novel 1Q84 is that it sizzles. Seriously. Pick it up off the display at your local bookstore. It’s like 5 pounds and it’s wrapped in this higher-test version of cloudy tissue paper and there must be an electric power source, a fork in an outlet, something, coursing through this thing. At the very least, magnets. Touch it. You’ll see.

The story centers on Aomame, a sleek and level-headed assassin slash physical trainer, whose world shifts a little to the left after she climbs down a super-secret ladder during a traffic jam on an expressway. She’s late for a date involving a sharp weapon, an abusive businessman, and a discrete spot on the back of his neck.

The cab driver who alerts her to this exit warns her that if she takes this route off the expressway, not to be surprised if the world changes. Sure enough, she starts noticing subtle differences right away and begins referring to the year formerly known as 1984 as 1Q84. When Aomame isn’t stealthily killing bad men or tweaking people’s muscles into sweaty submission she likes to dress in her one remotely sexy outfit and get nuts with anonymous balding men in hotel rooms. Occasionally this involves a tag-team effort with her new friend, a bi-sexual female cop.

At the same time Tengo is a solid writer whose work lacks that certain something. His all-knowing editor comes to him with a proposition: He has discovered a 17-year-old girl with a great story, “Air Chrysalis.” Fuka-Eri just needs someone solid to re-write it and she has the potential to become a bestselling sensation — as long as no one outside the inner circle ever finds out the truth about the ghost re-write. This solitary math teacher by day, writer by night reluctantly takes the job. The book becomes a hit, but it unleashes a hoard of mysterious troll-sized critters with a pretty serious religious affiliation.

The second thing you should know is that 1Q84 has that signature Murakami-ness to it that makes it feel like he is this wordy puppeteer who blurs the landscape into something dreamy so everything feels like you’re still awake, but not awake enough to know that, I don’t know, your second grade teacher wearing a Superman costume? Or in this case, the world doesn’t have two moons. It feels enough like Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for a reader to know that these two books have the same birth father.

It goes without saying when it comes to Murakami that there are plenty of places in this book to shelve your disbelief. The difference between him and other writers is that you don’t slam the book shut and say: REALLY, HARUKI?! These Shrinky Dink beings just crawled out of a dead goat’s mouth? Or REALLY, HARUKI? You’re going to convince me that this hulking, immobile pedophile is a misunderstood conduit of religious truth and that part of this sacredness involves his . . . boner? It only seems whack when you say it aloud.

You should also know that sometimes reading Murakami’s sex scenes feels a little clinical, but clinical in this way that is like your homeroom teacher saying the word “genitalia” multiple times in a really long drawn out way.

This book is long. It’s divided into three sections and the first two slide by seamlessly, but the third is an alright-already-old-man, get-on-with-it that includes some nonessential subplots, repetition, and some almost-coincidences that are a frustration because of all the actual coincidences we’ve signed on for. It’s a little sitcom-y in the style of: one character walks into a bar looking for a character who has just left through the back door, times, like, 100. At the same time, it never settles into a boring sputter, so. Anyway, fun read.

You want magic, I’ll give you some magic: You spend a week reading a super-magical book with a magical premise, filled with mysterious circumstances, characters in whooshing formal-ware, secret spells and magic rooms and midnight dinner parties complete with a contortionist. You love it, seep into it, can see every magical illusion, every magical backdrop.

Then, when it’s over, you can’t remember what was so big about it. There must be a word for why The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern went from a four point five-ish read to a three-ish post-read. Must be some sort of slight-of-brain.

But while you’re reading, whoa. It’s a lovely way to spend a few days.

The Night Circus is a curiosity of black, white, and grey tents, caramel-flavored air and labyrinths filled with illusionists, contortionists, and aerialists. It crops up without warning in towns around the world and is only open at night. Very few people involved are aware that this is all an elaborate venue for a competition between two illusionists who are the students of two other illusionists. Celia is under the tutelage of her father Prospero; Marco is being schooled by a mysterious man named A.H., who is always dressed in a grey suit. Celia is a natural talent who can reassemble broken things, including her own flesh; Marco is book smart. Eventually they are going to have to out-illusion each other. Of course, they kind of fall in love before they really understand all of the rules of the game.

Meanwhile, there is a great cast of circus people on the fray including twins born on the night of the first circus, the aforementioned contortionist, Marco’s special lady friend Isobel who sees more in her cards than she lets on. There is the inventor of the circus, whose health is failing, and sisters who are hard to tell apart. And then there are the fans, a collection of people who follow the circus from site to site and stand out by the bits of red affixed to their outfits. In between are short bursts of description about different sights and sounds that you, as a circus-goer, would see.

It’s very easy to get lost in this book, which almost has a YA feel to it with all its grandness and pageantry. It feels like a book that would bust imaginations wide open in a way that would stick with a young reader for a long time.

It is so subtly written that the actual competition, the reason for the season of the book, the thing that is carrying the characters forward is lost and lacks urgency or impact. It becomes more about the end of an era and the inevitable breakdown of the circus as a machine and not a battle ground.

Ilsa J. Bick does not make me want to go camping. Let’s face it, I never want to go camping, but now I have another reason why I don’t want to go – zombie apocalypse. What would I do if I were camping when the zombie apocalypse happened?

Alex is a teenager camping in Wisconsin on a mission to spread her parents’ ashes. Just as she runs across a girl and her grandfather, an electromagnetic pulse zaps the planet, killing the grandfather instantly and causing Alex and the girl, Ellie, to fall to the ground in pain. Both survive and try hiking to a ranger station for answers, but along the way they witness some teenagers eating an older woman. There are some really descriptive passages of them pulling out her eyeballs and eating them like spaghetti and meatballs.

Alex and Ellie eventually add one more person to their crew, Tom, a military man who was camping with friends who either didn’t survive or were turned into zombies like the eyeball-eating teenagers. The first half of the book is about how this new-found family tries to survive by staying in the wilderness, away from the cities where more zombies may be. Eventually they know they have to leave, and this is when the book shifts from surviving a zombie apocalypse to surviving a religious cult.

The second half finds Alex, Tom, and Ellie torn apart and Alex seeking help from a religious, Warren Jeffs-like cult of survivors. The zombies haven’t gone away, but Alex, thinking she has found some solace, soon finds herself questioning all of their rules and anti-female regulations. What’s worse: being out in the wilderness on your own against zombies or being in a small town of Bible-quoting, Jesus-loving men who require young women to have guides wherever they go and who match up mates?

I liked a lot of different things about Ashes. It is a really great, fast-paced thriller that gave me anxiety because the potential for horror was always nearby, whether from zombies or cults. I never felt secure or safe and I never trusted anyone. I sympathized for Alex and wondered what decisions I would make were I in her position.

Both parts of the book do feel different, but I like the change of focus. I liked the examination of society in the second half. People would turn to their faith and look for leaders in a time of tragedy, but would they go as far as these leaders? Maybe.

While I did really like the book, some of the stupidity of characters annoyed me. Ellie is only eight years old, but she reminds me again why I do not want children. She is whiny and cranky and in almost every sticky situation she does something completely idiotic to ruin it. I suppose I should have more sympathy for her since she’s only eight, but I don’t.

The stupidity with Ellie is one thing, but at times I also wanted to shake Alex because the answer was right in front of her face. She is a really smart character, but she over analyzes everything and it seemed like she should’ve figured things out way sooner.

I really did like the book, though. I can get past some character stupidity. If they hadn’t done some stupid things it probably wouldn’t have been as challenging for them and as exciting for me. This is the first in a planned trilogy, and it ends in cliffhanger that I saw coming, but I have no idea where it’s going to go from here, so I can’t wait for the next one.

Every year the fine folks at Rain Taxi gather up a slew of signed books and bookish ephemera and offer it up for auction. This year is no different. Head on over to eBay and you’ll find a whole heap of stuff, including items signed by Neil Gaiman, Sapphire, Jaimy Gordon, and a whole bunch of other folks. Even Stan Lee!

And my personal favorite:

The auction ends in three days so you still have plenty of time to pick up something awesome.

I bawled my eyes out for the entirety of the “Friday Night Lights” television series finale (and, to be honest, several preceding episodes), so I had been looking forward to reading the book by the same name. Written by H.G. Bissinger, it inspired the movie, which in turn prompted a television series. I’m generally a book-over-movie-over-show person, as many of you probably are, so my expectations were even higher than usual.

As I began reading Friday Night Lights, I was struck with disappointment as I realized the dissimilarity between the TV show and the book. However, after letting go of the missing characters and some time for reflection, I began to truly appreciate Bissinger’s work for what it is: a stunning work of journalism, capturing a year of intense emotion in an enlightening case study of the football team in a small town in Texas. Bissinger spent a year following the players on the Permian Panthers, investigating the politics and drama that it inspired.

The book primarily flows through a series of vignettes about individual players. For each young man, Bissinger relates his life at home, at school, and on the field. Though they were times difficult to keep straight, I honestly found myself caring for and cheering for each one, from a boy who becomes violently ill before each game to one who cheats his way through school to one who carries the weight of his uncle’s unrealized football dreams. Through the eyes of an outsider, Bissinger is able to portray the players as people—as kids—instead of the mammoth, heroic figures they have become to the citizens of the town.

As you can perhaps tell already, there is much more than football in this football book. It examines the town in detail, too, to the extent that it drew vitriolic criticism when it was published. At times, adults and professionals do look foolish as they paint their faces and defend breaking rules to support the team they love; however, the portrayal seems ultimately fair, thorough, and sympathetic. Even so, it is at times hard to take. In particular, the examination of race and education, including a harsh racial divide and a lawsuit over a student’s algebra grade, are remarkable and illuminating. I will say that I enjoy football, and I still skimmed some of the tedious play-by-plays to learn which team emerged victorious. It was well worth it for the substance between the games—and so fascinating to think that for many of the book’s subjects, the games were the primary substance.

There are moments when the book’s events, having occurred in 1988, seem antiquated. Some of the disparities and realities, perhaps unrecognized at the time of publication, are now every day topics. What startled me was the number of times that I forgot the age of the book. Its discussion of difficult economic times, social inequities, the school achievement gap, and teenage drama seemed all too familiar and relevant. I did not find the TV show’s beautifully developed relationships in the book version of Friday Night Lights, but the stories of the players and the problems of the town are more than enough to provoke thought and to give me something to feel like crying about.

Even amongst voracious readers like us, there seems to be an air of decadence around re-reading books you’ve already read. How can you re-read something when there are so many books that you haven’t read yet? We ask. Or at least I ask. It seems so self-indulgent. And yet, here I am re-reading many books I’ve loved in my life. I set out on this re-reading journey, based on a conversation I had with Christa. You know Christa.

Plus, late November found me a super cranky reader. I had started and rejected five or six books after about thirty pages. (I’m happy to report that I’ve started going back to those rejects and discovered that it was me and not them.) It was these two factors that led me to pluck The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken from my shelf.

For most of my adult life, this book has been on the list of my Top 5 All-Time Favorite Books Ever (along with A Prayer for Owen Meany, Geek Love, Written on the Body, and one more that probably changes depending on my mood). So it was not without a little trepidation that I dove back into it. I was afraid. What if I was wrong? What if this is a book only a 23-year-old fresh from college would love? What if I had outgrown it?

My fear was for naught. The book is as beautiful and heartbreaking as I remember, if anything I had grown into it. Things that hadn’t struck me the first few times I’d read it really got me this time. This story of a spinster librarian and a giant boy had not grown stale or tarnished with age. Instead reading it felt like curling up in my favorite sweatshirt, so warm and comforting.

It feels weird to say that because re-reading The Giant’s House this time leveled me. At one point I was curled up in my bed crying my eyes out, and I knew what was going to happen and still it wrecked me.

The story takes place in the Cape Cod during the 50s and 60s and involves terminally-lonely, single librarian Peggy Cort, and James Sweatt, a boy who never stops growing. He’s the giant and the house in the title is his. From the time he walks into her library as an over-tall eleven-year-old, Peggy is captivated by James and the two begin an unlikely friendship. Over the years, Peggy weaves herself into James’s life and that of his family — his artist uncle, his depressed mother, his cheerful aunt.

Together these people from a strange bond and work to provide James as normal a lifestyle as they can manage for a 7 foot and then 8 foot boy turned man.

I can’t decide what I love most about this book. Is it Peggy’s loneliness that McCracken illustrates so beautifully?

“Not sad? To me she seemed like the saddest person in the world, a woman completely perplexed by her life and its trappings. Being myself a sad person, I recognized that much. My own sadness isn’t something I admit to people. If someone asked, yes, I think I might. If someone noticed and inquired, I would explain — I think I would explain — that I am a fundamentally sad person, a fundamentally unlovable person, a person who spends her life longing for a number of things she cannot bring herself to name or define. . .

Is it the way she chronicles the struggles of the abnormally tall? At one point McCracken writes about how James has to sit down to have a conversation with anyone. He’s so tall that he can’t hear anyone when he’s standing up. This small detail nailed me this time around. Though I’m only 6’5″, I find as I grow older and want to actually hear people at gathering and bars, I too often have to sit to hear people. The truth of that small detail is but a small sample of the kind of care you find in this story.

It’s all so captivating and beautiful, the way McCracken captures James’ otherness and the grace with which he accepts it and how Peggy tries so hard to make him feel like he belongs, because she so desperately wants to belong. And perhaps that’s what I love most about this book. That, much like Beezus and Ramona did when I was child, The Giant’s House reminds me that I am not alone, that there are ‘others’ and that is so comforting.

Hilary Jordan’s novel When She Woke is a modern day mashup of The Scarlet Letter and The Handmaid’s Tale. In this futuristic United States abortion has been banned because some weird STD called The Scourge has left many women sterile and the birthrate around the world has plummeted. Apparently in the future we’ll have solved the problem of over-population so well that a nearly non-existent birthrate will be a huge cause for concern. Or maybe it’s just the platform super-conservative Christians were looking for to spread their anti-woman agenda. It’s never clearly addressed, but if you just go with it you’ll enjoy the book much more.

It opens with Hannah Payne waking in a Chrome ward, a shiny white and steel cube. She’s clad in only a paper gown, her actions are broadcast to viewers around the world, and her skin has been genetically modified to appear bright red. This chroming, as it’s called, is the punishment the government doles out to lawbreakers. The colors vary based on your crime, some people are yellow, some purple, and murderers are red.

Hannah was convicted and found guilty of murder. Her crime? Aborting her fetus. She’s given extra Chrome time because she refused to name the father, a super popular married preacher, Reverend Aidan Dale, and the person who performed her abortion.

The government is not messing around with this Chroming stuff and the author does a great job explaining it. Whenever the book spent time discussing Chroming, Chromes (those who have been Chromed), and their treatment in society I was in love with this book. I, the hater of details, wanted to know more and more and more about this terrifying United States and their new-fangled draconian laws.

So the concept and the structure supporting the story are top notch, where it kind of falls apart is, well, Hannah’s story.

Hannah’s a twenty-six-year-old seamstress who has an affair with the Reverend Aidan Dale, stays silent because she thinks she’s in love and sacrifices everything to keep their secret safe. Hannah comes from a super conservative religious family where women do what they’re told, honor and obey their parents, and generally exist without any minds of their own. I think Jordan uses this as a crutch for Hannah’s naivety and gullibility. As a reader, I’m not sure if I buy it, especially because by the end of the book Hannah’s gone through a huge change and it doesn’t feel as though she’s earned the wisdom she extolls.

Anyway, after Hannah’s let out of the Chrome ward her parents send her to a sort of religious repatriation camp, full of all kinds of wicked stereotypes you’ve come to expect from those sorts of situations — the soul-matey buddy, the weak-minded child, the cold, cruel mistress, the ass-kissing tattletale. Nothing surprising really happens here until Hannah decides to step off the path in defense of her soul-matey buddy, Kayla.

From there the two women start a weird, underground railroad sort of adventure filled with nefarious men and militant women. There’s danger everywhere, and it all feels a little bit predictable complete with wholly unnecessary lesbian sex scene, and at times ridiculously melodramatic.

And even with all those complaints, I’d still say this novel falls on the better side of okay. Read it for the very interesting take on what a post-Roe v. Wade America might look like. It’s chilling. Don’t read it for Hannah’s personal insights and growth because those seem to appear out of thin air and not because she earned them.

There are two ways to read Anne Enright’s novel The Forgotten Waltz: The first, as a sexy page-turner filled with feigned nonchalance between instances of passionate hotel room hopping; The second, as one woman walking into the middle of life-as-she-knows-it with dynamite stuffed into her Wonder Bra.

The premise is that Gina Moynihan is going to meet up with young Evie, the daughter of her lover. Along the way she considers the events of the past few years that have brought her to this point, starting with the first time she saw Sean Vallely standing by a fence at a party. Him: her sister’s neighbor, middle-aged, married to an unspectacular woman with a daughter who is quietly rumored to have something wrong with her. Gina: fresh from a trip to Australia with the boyfriend who will become her husband, hiding deep in the yard because her niece and nephew have never seen someone smoke a cigarette. It’s an insignificant moment at the time, but one that Gina will revisit and paint with poetry once things ramp up between the two a few years later.

Before that, though, there is a one-night stand. Gina and Sean end up at the same out-of-town conference, ringleaders of a crew of party people who move seamlessly from all-business to after bar. It’s a poorly conceived drunk idea, last two standing, that lands them in bed playing bumbley fumbley. Then they ignore each other. Gina comes to loathe him — but it’s not a real loathing, and it feels a lot like watching a babysitter in a horror movie take a flashlight into the basement to check out a noise. It’s the kind of loathing that, instead of fading to ambivalence morphs to lust. Of course it happens again. He’s been brought in to her company as a consultant, which can only mean it’s a matter of time before one stands too close to the other or her shirt drops a notch and they’re busting loose toward a hotel near the airport.

The truth is, Sean’s kind of a creep, though not in an obvious way. A real charmer. Has he done this before? Definitely. It’s in the gifts he gives her: perfume, a scarf. Generic tokens. Once with a 22-year-old, although once while dining they encounter a power suit bulldog who seems to have a curious familiarity with him too. Does his wife know? She would say no, but the truth is probably more layered. She might just be choosing not to know. That shrapnel from Gina’s life? Good guy. Maybe a little too into the whole online scene.

It’s a juicy little story, it is, but it tugs at the eye roller and the inner “Aw, grow up already. Figure it out.” Eyes covered, begging Gina “DO NOT GO INTO THE BASEMENT!” A lot of books end and you assume that is how it ends. Not so much “And they lived happily ever after” as “I’m satisfied where you people are right now in your lives, and I trust if I checked back in ten years you would still be doing just fine.”

Not so much with this one. This one gets even messier when the book closes.

I’ve listened to the buzz surrounding Marie Lu’s debut young adult novel Legend all year. It just came out at the end of November, but long before it came out the rights were sold for a movie. It’s also been called the new Hunger Games, which I love just a little too much. I think on a weekly basis I recommend the Hunger Games trilogy to someone and I have been obsessively tweeting about the upcoming “Hunger Games” movie ever since the casting.

Legend isn’t as good as The Hunger Games, but it was still a good, fast-paced read that I finished in a matter of hours.

Set in the distant future in Los Angeles, the United States isn’t the United States anymore. It’s now split between the western states, the Republic, and the eastern part of the country, the Colonies, and they are at war. We don’t get a good picture of the Colonies in this first book since the majority of the action takes place in and around Los Angeles.

The story is told in alternating chapters by Day and June (with Day’s chapters in an annoying, unnecessary mustard yellow). June is fifteen and a military prodigy of the Republic after having gotten a perfect score on her Trials, the tests all ten year olds take that determines their future career paths. Those that score high go through military training at prestigious schools and June is just about to graduate. June is loyal to the Republic and her older brother, a military man who raised her ever since her parents died when she was young.

Day is fifteen and an outcast living on the streets in the slums surrounding Los Angeles. He’s been hiding ever since he failed his Trials and ran away from the so-called labor camps where those who fail are sent. He has made it his mission to cause problems for the Republic, so he’s stolen from their banks, messed with their machinery, and stolen food and medicine for others in the slums.

Day and June collide when June’s brother dies after trying to thwart Day’s latest attempt to steal medicine. June goes undercover to try to track down and capture Day.

A lot of what happens in Legend isn’t too surprising. Of course June meets up with Day and they struggle with understanding each other while they uncover the wrongdoings of their government. This is typically the formula for these types of novels, though, so that didn’t bother me.

What did bother me, and why it’s not as good as The Hunger Games, is that, while the pacing of action is good, some of the characters seem to discover things or change their minds way too easily. Being told that they are enemies for fifteen years of their lives, you’d think it would take a little bit more for them to start listening to each other. It all just happens too quickly for me. I would’ve loved to see some more character development and internal struggles, but the action just moves too fast for that here.

But don’t get me wrong, I liked this book. I will be reading the sequels and it’s a book I can recommend to people. I just won’t start calling it the next coming of The Hunger Games because it’s not quite there.

Necromancy: the ability to communicate with and raise the dead.

Sam LaCroix had no idea what necromancy was or that he had this power. Living a boring, fast-food-employee life, Sam could barely make rent, had no girlfriend and no motivation or drive to change anything. He was sarcastically apathetic about his humdrum life.

But when Sam accidentally damages the car of Douglas, a rich, powerful necromancer, everything changes. So begins Sam’s adventure into a world of necromancy, magic, werewolves, and secrets from his past.

I loved Lish McBride’s Hold Me Closer, Necromancer for many reasons. First, it’s a great adventure. Douglas tells Sam what necromancy is and he offers to train him. He gives Sam one week to think about his proposal, so Sam tries contacting his mother, father, and other quirky characters to learn about his power. But Sam doesn’t answer Douglas fast enough, because Douglas ends up kidnapping Sam long before the week is over. In the cage he’s held in, Sam meets a beautiful werewolf and starts learning more about this new world and the power struggles within it. He also meets a smartass harbinger (a being at service to necromancers), easily the best character in the whole book.

Second, because of the harbinger and so many others, this novel is funny. Quite often in these types of novels there may be one character around for some laughs, but overall it’s about the magic or the adventure. Here, almost all of the characters are funny. Sam and his fast food co-workers are hilarious, especially the co-worker whose head is raised from the dead. My favorite character is the harbinger, Ashley. Even in the most dire of situations she is a snarky brat. I love her.

Third, every chapter title is a song lyric or title that describes the chapter. I loved trying to guess what might happen in the chapter based upon the song, though I really don’t know why the songs are there. It’s not like Sam is in a band or is a big music enthusiast. Maybe I missed something, but I don’t really care. For me the songs were fun.

I could probably continue the list of things I liked, but those few things sum it up pretty well. It’s an adventure that made me laugh. What’s more fun than that?