Posted by Erin Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:16:50 GMT
Until this book
An interesting recurring element in Jenny's story: two Mormon missionaries who keep showing up at her door. She doesn't "get" the church, but she treats them gently.
Posted by Erin Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:16:46 GMT
The author of The History of Love
I really liked this book. There are several narrators, and sometimes things get a little confusing, but not in a bad way. It's funny and sad and complex. The characters are realistic, interesting and have plenty of depth.
Thanks to Ethan and Courtney for giving us this book! I thought it was really good.
Posted by Erin Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:03:26 GMT
The older I get, the less I want to waste time on books I'm not enjoying. (Now if I could just apply that logic to a certain TV show that I am obsessively watching online. Well, I guess I'm enjoying that. Wasting time, yes, but enjoying it!)
The Constant Gardener
This is well-written and has a fascinating setting, but about halfway through I realized that I didn't give a flying crap what happened to the characters, so I put it down.
No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a 60th Year
Mildly entertaining, but the narrator's cavalier attitude about her three past abortions bugged me too much.
Just Like Heaven
I really like the movie Just Like Heaven, so I thought it would be fun to read the novel on which it was based--I'd heard that it was pretty different from the movie and I was curious. But this book would make a perfect anti-textbook for a creative writing class; everything a writer should never do is included here, and I couldn't get past it. I guess I'm just glad that someone out there made a decent romantic comedy out of it, though I can't imagine how this book got published in the first place.
Also, "If Only It Were True" joins my list of terrible titles.
Posted by Erin Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:33:03 GMT
I listened to this novella by the actor/comedian Steve Martin, and I liked it pretty well. The author read it, and some of the dialog reminded me of David Mamet movies that Jon and I have really liked. I liked the way the characters changed and grew during the story.
Posted by Jon Jensen Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:54:00 GMT
It's been close to 3 years since Brian Dunn gave me a couple of books that he'd just read: Eastern Standard Tribe and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, both by Cory Doctorow. The other day I realized that they're not keepers for me, so I pulled them off the shelf to put in our bye-bye books box. (Books in that box sometimes get traded for credit at one of the used books stores around here, sometimes given to the second-hand store, sometimes given to the local public library for their "holiday reading" section from which anyone can take books permanently.)
First, I profusely praise the author for releasing his works under a Creative Commons license that allows for free redistribution. That's really cool, and for that he deserves lots of credit (and support by purchase of physical books such as Brian did!).
As I flipped through my copy of Eastern Standard Tribe, I found some notes I took on hotel note paper, and chuckled at my fussy copy-editor side. The notes:
To address those in turn: It is really annoying to read computer output, email, etc. in fixed-width fonts but see ligatures that (1) are quite unlike what you see in a fixed-width font on a real computer terminal, and (2) break the uniform spacing of the font and mess up the alignment of the rest of the line. It's certainly more genuinely problematic in technical books, where I frequently see it as well, but it's annoying enough in a book of fiction published by Tor, who I'd expect to know better.
Lexis-Nexus: Yeah, it's just spelled wrong, consistently. It should be LexisNexis. Perhaps it was intentional to avoid using a trademark, but I kind of doubt it.
But most significantly, in a book that's all about time zones, I sure thought I must be crazy, because the time zone differences seem to be calculated wrong! Please comment and explain how I'm wrong if that's the case, but there were numerous times that Eastern Time was mentioned as 6 hours earlier than London, but by my calculations, it is only 5 hours earlier, and only 4 hours earlier than Greenwich Mean Time (which doesn't change for daylight saving time aka summer time).
Yes, I'm a pedant, but shouldn't that really be right in this book? Toronto is in the same time zone as New York etc., right? I really hope I'm wrong about this.
As to the story itself: It was enjoyable, and it was just the right length (longer would've been a waste, and I love it when authors don't pad stories). But the story seemed really unbelievable to me. The idea of people forming tribes based on their particular 1-hour time zone struck me as fairly absurd. I work from a home office with people from all time zones in the United States and a few elsewhere. While the difference in time between California and New York (3 hours) is indeed noticeable, the difference between, say, Kansas and Idaho or Virginia on either side (1 hour) barely registers.
People seem to be getting more accustomed to working across timezones, not less so. Either there needs to be more nuance, or, more likely, the premise just doesn't really work. For me, anyway. As long as I set that fundamental problem aside, it was an engaging read.
Down and Out's premise was even more problematic for me. The whole story seemed a little absurd. Deadly serious themes revolving around ... Disneyland? Again, I'm probably a sub-ideal reader for this, since I'm not interested in much Disney, ever, much less futuristic post-scarcity Disney. But like the other book, it was paced well, and short enough not to annoy.
I'd like to read other fiction by Cory Doctorow and see if it has more staying power for me. I've enjoyed his essays unreservedly.
Links (including free downloads):
Posted by Erin Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:24:46 GMT
This entertaining young adult book is about a rebellious kid who gets kicked out of several schools and finally ends up with an artistic home schooling family. The message is positive and the characters are quirky and funny.
Posted by Erin Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:57:45 GMT
This was my other vacation novel while we were in Europe, and it was entertaining. I liked it. I kept imagining Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton, and Lisa Kudrow as the characters in the book, since they starred in the movie. They seemed to fit pretty well.
Posted by Erin Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:47:35 GMT
Michael Crichton's novel about a global warming conspiracy was my entertaining escape fiction while we were in Europe. Kind of a guilty, over-the-top pleasure, I admit, but definitely fun.
Posted by Erin Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:56:59 GMT
I was so eager to read this novel--it seemed like exactly the kind of thing I'd love--but I struggled to keep interested through the first half of the book. The second half picked up a lot, and I thought the ending was good--entertaining and suspenseful. It's possible that my expectations were too high, because it's well-written and has some very good historical parts. Anyway, I think I'd recommend it, if only to get some other people's reactions to it.
Posted by Erin Fri, 23 May 2008 05:25:05 GMT
This novel about a certain area of 19th century China is fascinating. For one thing, I learned about the secret women's writing called nu shu that has been passed down from mother to daughter in one rural Hunan province for about a thousand years. Also, the book has a vivid but fairly unemotional description of foot binding that made me feel physically ill. That's just evidence of my ignorance rather than a recommendation not to read the book. I knew about foot binding before, but only in the vaguest way. Then there's the heavy stuff about the friendship between the main character and her "old same," a friend bound to her by contract when they were young. Anyway, it wasn't a light read, but it was fascinating and important.
