6. Life as We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Somehow this book ended up having been put on hold for me at the library. I didn't add my name to the list, and no one I know owned up to it either. It seemed pretty interesting, being about the apocalypse and stuff, so I read it. It ended up being not very interesting, but I went ahead and finished it.
It's the story of this 10th grader and her family after an asteroid hits the moon and knocks it in a closer orbit with the Earth. This messes up things like tides, causing tsunamis, volcanic action, earthquakes, etc. They hang out in their house and try to survive and things like that.

It had potential, but it pretty much sucked. The woman didn't really write poorly; it just wasn't anything memorable and the story was boring. There was some subplot with her being kind of obsessed with some figure skater that was from her hometown and made it big, and then he shows up halfway through the book when like everyone else is dead, skates with her on a pond, and never comes back. It was really annoying. Either take out that subplot or make it matter, woman. also, I'm not sure about the science behind it. I think she might be close, but I wanted a little more backing for all the things that happened after the moon came closer.

It was like someone took The Day After Tomorrow and made it even worse and without any LULZ. They mostly just sat around making bad decisions about water usage. "Oh no, kids! Half the world's population is decimated, we have zero government assistance or healthcare or electricity! I'm limiting us to one bath a week apiece. Our well water should last us to eternity, despite all the drought we've been having!" It was such a consumerist view of what "bad times" means. Wah wah we can't go to McDonalds wah wah I miss the microwave wah wah." Grow some balls. Ok, so in the event of an apocalypse I might miss microwaves a bit. But not very much, and guess what they never mentioned the whole book? Music! What kind of asshole doesn't even think about the fact that all their music is hiding on a dead-ass computer? I'd be hoarding batteries for a boom box, or rigging up my record player to be crankable. Or something.

The back was all "You are going to crap yourself this is so scary!" But it wasn't scary in the slightest. It was like an apocalypse novel for people that had never thought about an apocalypse thoroughly before. Which is probably lots of people, and I am probably a minority in my "what can I ask for for my birthday that will aid me after the collapse?" mentality. But still. Boring.

The main character was an SJ, too. Who writes SJ main characters? BORING. Ugh.

I think that crisis novels written from the P.O.V. of a child (or young adult) can be really poignant if done well. You're supposed to get something out of the fact that you're seeing the world fall apart through the simplified lens of a child's eye. Kind of like Persepolis! But this book didn't pull that off, and was just not very interesting, instead.

God, I could write such a good apocalypse novel.

Pages: 360
Time: Feb 16-Mar 4
Rating: 3

5. Boy Meets Boy, by David Levithan

I'd never heard of this book before a kid checked it out from my library. It looked interesting, considering my library's severe lack of GLBT anything, so I decided to put in on hold for myself. The kid took forever to bring it back, so I forgot about it, but it came back in a few weeks ago. I had it with me in my bag when I was babysitting. The kid I was sitting was engrossed in some creepy Disney Channel show, so I was bored. I had originally planned on reading another book next, but this was all I had handy, so I read it anyway.

It's a sort of day-in-the-life type narrative of this gay high schooler named Paul. He has boy troubles, family troubles, best friend turns into a bitch troubles, plans a school dance, does his homework, learns a bit about himself. That sort of thing.

At first I pretty much hated it. The plot is simple (as the title indicates), and there was just too much too-good-to-be-true gay stuff. Like, the boy scouts changed to the pride scouts because boy scouts don't include gays, the PFLAG is bigger and more involved than the PTA, and everywhere you look another character is gay. It sort of reminded me of the worst kind of fanfiction where it's like "Oh my, Harry's gone and slept with the entire Slytherin Quidditch team! He'll have to move on to the Ravenclaw team now. I hear that Roger Davies can handle a quaffle if you know what I mean." Anyone? Just me? Ok anyway, the point is that everyone does not need to be gay in order to make gay literature significant! I think it'd actually be much more effective if the world in the book was more realistic, instead of taking place in a superopenminded town where one kid's parents are religious and conservative and everyone else in town sports a rainbow bumper sticker. Maybe I'm just too used to the south, where the opposite is the norm?

To be fair, it does seem like lots of times gay people are mostly friends with gay people, so that could be why almost all of the characters in the book were gay. I dunno.

Anyway, I was real pissed this was the only book I had with me, but since this was the case, I kept reading it. And it really ended up sucking me in. Those things I said up there still bothered me, but Levithan was really extravagantly good at creating interesting, believable characters, despite the unbelievable setting he put them in. The main character in this book (Paul) looks at certain aspects of life the same way I do, and this is something I do not think I have ever seen so accurately described before, by anyone I know or in any book I have read. By this I mean, mostly, the importance of the moment. The tiny details that make a space of time meaningful. Paul is always describing the actions of people in this poetic way where he interprets them and their many reasons for doing what they do. He notes the subtlety of body language and knows what people mean between the words they don't say, talks about objects holding secrets, stories being tangible things, and understands the weight of the important balance of old love and new love. So basically his mind is analyzing everyone around him in the same way I do, and describes it better than I've ever been able to describe it. So for that I really liked the book.

It wasn't excessively campy, with dumb stereotypical gayness all over it. There was some camp, but it was in the background. I liked the universality of the feelings the characters felt, that it put forth that love is love and homosexual love isn't different in either a worse or better way than hetero love. The honest emotions and beautiful simplicity of the love story made up for the implausible setting, but dammit, the book would have been a 10 if the setting were more realistic. Also, the last few lines of this book were kind of too feelingsy for me, so that's gonna cost it some points. All in all, it was like a more gay and less lame version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Although, to be honest, I loved the hell out of Perks back in the day.

Anyway, I finished this forever ago. This seems to be a theme. It is looking like, with my current schedule, I will not make it to 50 books this year. I'll keep trying, though.

Pages: 185
Time: Feb 10-Feb 12.
Rating: I dunno, 8.75 for characterization and style and 5 for what were you thinking with that unrealistic background noise?

4. Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy

I was warned before I read this that it would be violent and gross. It is a good thing I have a strong stomach. I'd read The Road previously, and loved it, but violence has its place in a post-apocalyptic novel. I mean, if the world ended and people weren't roasting babies over an open fire I'd be surprised. But Child of God is just the story of a guy whose house gets repossessed and he gets pissed, wanders off in the woods, goes crazy and starts killing people.
It took me a while to get into the groove of the narration and until the last 20 pages to decide I liked it.

The barren, simple punctuationless prose that made me love The Road seemed less appropriate here. It actually made it hard to concentrate, because I didn't always know what was going on. It was really pretty though. Well, as pretty as a description of necrophilia can be.

I'm not sure what happened, but in the last chapter or so I started really feeling for the guy, and all of a sudden I really enjoyed reading it. I sort of felt tricked, like he'd set it up that way. Like you're supposed to be grossed out by ol' Lester Ballard, and then you sort of sympathize with him in a weird sort of way, and then you think, sort of sarcastically, "well, I guess he is a child of God, just as I am. Ah." I can't decide if it really just got good at the end, or if it just takes that long to really get the book. So I spent most of the book hoping I'd hurry up and get to the good part, while still marking passages that sounded beautiful, and then all of a sudden at the end I loved it.

Either way, McCarthy is sort of a poetic genius. The book is one long ramble about titties and gunshots that doesn't differentiate dialogue from exposition, yes. But it is a really well written ramble.

I'll just post a bit of it. Here he's in a cave, wondering if he'll be able to find his way out.

In the night he heard hounds and called to them but the enormous echo of his voice in the cavern filled him with fear and he would not call again. He heard the mice scurry in the dark. Perhaps they'd nest in his skull, spawn their tiny bald and mewling whelps in the lobed caverns where his brains had been. His bones polished clean as eggshells, centipedes sleeping in their marrowed flutes, his ribs curling slender and whitely like a bone flower in the dark stone bowl.

Damn.

Pages:197
Time: Jan 23-Feb 6
Rating: 6 for subject, Maybe 8 for how much I like the way McCarthy makes a sentence.

3. Coraline, by Neil Gaiman

Coraline was my first Neil Gaiman book. I'd always heard of him, but never wanted to read any of his stuff because I think I lumped him in with Stephen King, which was probably not the right thing to do. It was really interestingly written and very creepy. If I'd been in the intended age bracket when I read it I would probably still be having nightmares.

Coraline is a little girl leading a comfortable (but boring) little girl existence when she stumbles through a door into a world that is a lot like her own, only a little off. All of the characters from her regular life are distorted and seem, at first, to be happier versions of their real selves. Soon enough the differences become more than just the button eyes everyone has, and what starts out as harmless difference slowly slides into a life-or-death race for time against a creepy (and sort of sexist maybe in the GIMME MORE BABIES MORE MORE MORE BABIES! way)pseudo-mother.

What I liked about this book the most was the confrontation of the assumption that what you want and what you need are the same thing. Everyone seeming to have everything they want ends up coming off decidedly creepier than you might think. If the movie they made is anywhere as spine-tingly as the book, I will definitely go see it. I don't like thrillers or murder mysteries or anything like that. This book had some good, old fashioned otherworldly creepy that never felt forced or heavy handed.

I will probably want to read more Gaiman after this. Owen recommended the Graveyard Book. Any others?

Pages: 192
Time: Jan 19-22
Rating: 7.5
Also, sorry for taking so long to post this. I finished this book forever ago and am almost done with another one.

2. Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

Huzzah! I did not give up so soon! I have a more or less constant stream of quality YA lit coming at me from Owen's side of the library, so I was able to finish another one in a relatively timely manner. Sort of.

This is a graphic memoir that spans the childhood of the author. She lives in Iran during the Islamic revolution/Iran-Iraq war. This is another period of history I didn't previously know much about. Chances are, most of history is something I don't know much about. Ok, so that wasn't a very astute statement, but anyway, I was occasionally confused, as it's one of those books where the protagonist is a kid who tells things as they understood them at the time, not with the clarifying benefit of hindsight.

I really liked the hearing of the horrors of war through her lens of inexperience, though, despite the confusion. It reminded me of what I've heard about that Foer book about 9/11 that I haven't read. Occasionally it did leave me wanting more information, but when things got intense (which happened all the time- you barely have time to get to know a few of the characters before they get killed off), it is sobering to watch these things happen through the eyes of a child.

This is one of those books that makes me wish I knew more than 1.5 languages, because I could tell there were things lost in the translation from the original French. Graphic novels are full of short, sometimes disjointed sentences anyway, and the translation was sometimes awkward, but that isn't the book's fault.

I didn't particularly identify with Marjane much, as I was not a particularly political kid. I did think she was pretty endearing, though, mouthing off to her extremist teachers and talking to both God and Marx at night.

The art was cool, too. It would be pretty disappointing to read a graphic novel and not like the art, actually, but I found the simplicity of the black and white appealing. I watched most of the movie version of this book the other day, also. The movie also covered the sequel to the book I read, but I've not read that yet. The movie's art was the same as in the book, except moving, so I liked watching it a lot. The plot moved kind of fast and left things out, which was too bad, but that usually happens with film adaptations anyway. The swirly prettiness of the movie mostly made up for it, but not entirely. I want to read the second one now, but I probably won't do it right away.

I spend a lot of time griping about American politics. So yeah, a lot of things are wildly messed up in my country. But when you're reading about people getting arrested for having playing cards and executed for possibly being maybe a little Communist, and you yourself live in a country in which people can manufacture and sell presidential shaped sex toys on the internet, it sort of puts things into perspective.

Pages: 153
Time: Jan 14-18
Rating: 7

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz

So mostly I started wanting to do this review thing because of how much I was liking this book. Now that I have finished reading it and am sitting here in front of a computer, fingers hovering over the keyboard, I am finding I don't really know what to say. I got this book for Christmas from my Mom, and started reading it shortly after New Years.

This book was so many things at once. It is, on the surface, the story of Oscar, the overweight "ghetto nerd," who spends his time watching Dr. Who, reading and rereading Tolkien, writing page after page of fantasy fiction that never takes him anywhere, and falling in love with any beautiful, unattainable girl he meets along the way. The book follows him through his life from his childhood to his death, narrated by Yunior, his only real friend. It is much more than that, though, because it is also the story of his mother's childhood and youth (or loss of, more like) in the Dominican Republic and his sister's life in the states and in the DR. All three of their stories weave seamlessly (too much cloth metaphor? sorry) in and out of each other, and all of it within the backdrop of Trujillo era Dominican Republic. I didn't know much about that part of history before reading this book, but the pages are covered in footnotes (also written in Yunior's regular street-kid-with-a-vocabulary style) detailing the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, and the overwhelmingly totality of his effect on the country at that time (and after, through the "fuku" curse that supposedly followed those who opposed him).

Junot Díaz mixes rich, tragic history and the lonesome ache of being too dorky to get laid with such deftness that I am having a hard time picking a passage to type in here. Nothing can stand out when everything is written so vibrantly. here is a link to a summary, actually, so only read the first few pages of it, if you don't want to be spoiled.
The thing that impresses me the most about this book is that, at first, it seems that Oscar's life is far from what you'd think of as wondrous. From his obesity and his devastating lack of social grace or way with women to his general apathy when it came to doing anything about it, his life was not much of a wonder. In contrast, the chapters following the lives of his mother, grandfather and sister are full of guts and action and general stuff stories are made of. In the end, though, it is the realization that his story is inexorably tangled in the unending cycles of fuku and zafa (curse and countercurse) of the previous generations that makes him wondrous. What are we but the shadows of our forefathers?

I really don't have anything negative to say about this book. You should probably read it. It might help to be semi-competent in Spanish or dorkenise, in order to catch some references, but I doubt the effect will be much diminished if you are not. He really catches the astounding importance and still the smallness of existing.

Pages: 335, but full of things you can't even begin to skim
Time: Jan 1-Jan 12
Rating: 9

hello, internet

So.
I have wanted to do that 50 books project thing for a while. Now that I don't have school to distract me and I work in a library and have easy access to books, I figure it is a good time. I don't really care if anyone reads this. But if you do, I disabled that stupid comment verification thing, so comment away!

I am halfway done with my first book of 2009, so it shouldn't be long...