book seven

the da vinci code, dan brown
rating:


i know, i never thought i'd be blogging about this book either! so this is my post-1990 bestseller and what it tells me about society is: "society has a short attention span and a deep love of ellipses." though i found the writing style lacking in a number of ways, i was actually enjoying the story before it got so incredibly convoluted that literally nothing made sense to me. i am pretty fascinated by the fact that this book, which has been an NYT bestseller since 1984 or something, basically centers on the idea that jesus christ and mary magdalene were like, a thing, and had a baby and a royal lineage. and that christianity is all a lie (actually, according to my mom, my dad refuses to read this book because he "can't get past the jesus and mary stuff"). but what was really interesting to me was that there was no code actually written in the cracks of paint on mona lisa like there is in the movie trailer. i think i've been duped!

actual book 6

uh oh, i'm already getting behind on my reading. oh, library school. how you conquer me.

and now tomorrow, rachel field
rating:


for my popular materials class, i have to read a bestseller from before 1950 and one from after 1990, then write a paper about why each was a bestseller, and what it reflects about its society. this was my pre-1950 selection. so i guess this book says: "society likes it when strict gender stereotypes are nicely reinforced. society likes it when NOTHING EVER HAPPENS." the story is all about this young woman who tragically goes deaf right before she's supposed to marry the love of her life. while she's busy trying to get treatments, he falls for her sister and the narrator is too stupid to figure it out. then she gets involved with this doctor who tries to cure her. the whole thing takes place in a mill town during the depression, but all of the poverty and labor organizations get pushed into subplots, subordinated to the TRAGIC TALE OF DEAFNESS AND LOST LOVE. it drives me crazy that she could start reading lips immediately, and that she speaks normally enough so that people who don't already know can't tell she's deaf.

my paper's due pretty soon and i still have to read my post 1990. at home i've got four blondes by candace bushnell and da vinci code by whoever wrote da vinci code. that one's a large print version so it's a little unwieldy, but it looks fast. thoughts? opinions? which should i choose????

book 5, abortive attempt at book 6

baker towers, jennifer haigh
rating:


i ran across this book on the browsing shelf the same day i checked out brick lane. i liked mrs. kimble, jennifer haigh's first book, but somehow i didn't know that she had a second novel out. this is one of those books that i really liked, but that i can't really explain why. the story centers on one family who lives in bakerton, a mining town in pennsylvania. it starts with the death of the father and follows the rest of the family up through (i think) the early sixties. i had some trouble figuring out when things were happening, because the narrative transitioned from one character to another frequently, and it sometimes seemed like a lot of time had passed. but, regardless of temporal confusion, i really liked it. i got pretty involved with the family, particularly the youngest daughter, lucy.


which is much more than i can say for chloe does yale by an author whose name currently escapes me. natalie something i think. i read an article about it last year, and was intrigued by the origins of the book, a sex column in the yale daily news (obviously, there's a nice gilmore girls connection). so i was excited to see it on the new books shelf at the public library, and i picked it up thinking it would be a nice, fast, fluffy read. BLECH. i hated it from the first page. i stuck with it for two chapters and i just don't think i can go back. and i am not the kind of reader who can stop a book once i've started. so maybe i'll go back to this painful pink book, but i think i might have to stick to my guns this time.

book 4

case histories, kate atkinson
rating:


thanks to alicia for loaning me this sweet read. it's about three "cold cases" and the private investigator that gets involved with all of them. a very nice mystery, and well-written. i liked the set-up a lot: the book starts with the three cases and ends with them, but the final pages, of course, reveal much more than the first did. i found myself actually surprised on more than one occasion, which is always nice in a mystery. i can't quite give it five robots, though, because there was some subplot stuff that i didn't really care about and found distracting. a solid four and a half, though. i may have to check out some of kate atkinson's other books, if i can actually manage to keep up my pleasure reading when classes begin in earnest.

book 3

brick lane, monica ali
rating:


i read a lot about this book when it first came out, and i always meant to pick it up. i randomly saw it in the UL browsing collection the other day, and i decided to give it a try. it's about a woman from bangladesh who get married and moves to london with her husband. for some reason, it took me a while to get into it. the first 75-100 pages didn't grab me too much, but after that, i really liked it. especially the chapters that consisted mostly or entirely of letters written from the narrator's sister, who ran away from home to make a "love marriage" and still lives in bangladesh. i also liked when the narrator started having an affair with the young, radical bangladeshi stud who brings her sewing work from a sweatshop. good all around, but i only give it three and half robots since it took me so long to get into the story.

book 2

wolf whistle, lewis nordan
rating:


i liked this book pretty well. lewis nordan grew up relatively near the town where emmett till was murdered, and this book is basically a re-telling of that story. so, of course, race takes the center stage in the story, but there are also all of these really fascinating characters who are only tangentially related to the bobo, the emmett till figure. the main one seems to be alice, a white teacher who envisions bobo's murder in a raindrop the day before it happens, but doesn't understand what she's seeing. this book has a really nice pace, and is a quick read, but it's really southern, so if you're not into that sort of thing, you might want to skip it.

excitement, adventure, and 2006 BOOK 1!!!!

the names, don delillo
rating*:


i completely resisted don delillo until last summer, when matt somehow convinced me to read white noise and i ended up really liking it. the names turned out to be pretty good as well. there's an interesting thread that goes through about cult murders related to names and letters and stuff like that. i also really liked the narrator's relationship with his estranged wife. one thing i really hate is that delillo doesn't use a lot of tags when he writes dialogue, so i'm constantly counting back to the last "he said" to figure out who's talking when. and if the conversation involves three characters, forget about it; i'm totally lost. still, there were parts in the book where i got lost in the narrative in a good way, so i guess it all evens out.


*henceforth, ratings will be based on a scale of one to five robots. one is the worst, five is the best. half robots are also considered to be valid.

okay, let's get down to business:

JENNY'S 2005 READING LIST

legend:
*=school-related reading
**=re-read

1. This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff*


2. Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld


3. Gal: A True Life, Ruthie Bolton*


4. The Ruby in the Smoke, Phillip Pullman


5. Shadow in the North, Phillip Pullman


6. Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy*


7. Lost in Place: Growing up Absurd in Suburbia, Mark Salzman*


8. Emerald City and Other Stories, Jennifer Egan


9. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote


10. Light Before Day, Christopher Rice


11. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon


12. Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett*


13. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, Gerard Jones*


14. Comic Book Nation, Bradford W. Wright*


15. At Home in the World, Joyce Maynard*


16. The Quality of Life Report, Megan Daum


17. The Manor and the Estate, Isaac Bashevis Singer


18. Perfume, Patrick Suskind


19. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger


20. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton


21. That Was Dachau, Stanislaw Zamecnik


22. White Noise, Don Delillo


23. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy Krouse Rosenthal


24. Special, Bella Bathurst


25. Circling the Drain, Amanda Davis


26. Leaving Brooklyn, Lynne Sharon Schwartz**


27. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick


28. The Wonder Spot, Melissa Bank


29. Underworld, Don Delillo


30. The Myth of You and Me, Leah Stewart


31. Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhool, Koren Zailckas


32. Love Invents Us, Amy Bloom


33. Tenth Grade, Joseph Weisberg


34. The Invisible Circus, Jennifer Egan


35. The Whole Story and Other Stories, Ali Smith


36. The J.A.P. Chronicles, Isabel Rose


37. Hometown, Tracy Kidder*


38. A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly


39. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things


40. The Field Guide, Tony DeTizzerli and Holly Black*


41. The Book of Three, Lloyd Alexander*


42. Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women who Created Her, Melanie Rehak


43. Bad Girls, Cynthia Voigt*


44. Number the Stars, Lois Lowry*


45. Snakes and Earrings, Kanehara Hitomi


46. Wickett's Remedy, Myla Goldberg


47. Shade's Children, Garth Nix


48. The Drowning Tree, Carol Goodman


49. Lying Awake, Mark Salzman


50. Josie and Jack, Kelly Braffet


51. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer


52. The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett

okay, so that's an average of 1 book a week. let's see if i can't step it up to 1.5 a week in 2006. so that's 78.

CAN...

SHE...

DO IT??



more importantly,

DOES...

ANYONE...




CARE??



more to come concerning a complicated rating system and my reading from the first week of 2k6.

really quickly, because we're leaving for the beach in mere moments-

MY 2006 RESOLUTIONS
1. read more books.
2. watch less 90210

easier said than done, i'm sure. but really, the second shouldn't be so hard now that they're at the point in the series where brandon is gone and has been replaced by some dimply, abercrombie model-esque, snoozefest lawyer guy. and if the second is easier, the first should be as well. i think it's really time for me to get back to my roots and start book blogging.


happy new year!