2011 was a slow year for reading, and I do love to read. But with my last semester of undergrad, my crazy 2011 resolution to watch 365 new movies, and the stress that came with up-rooting my life and moving it six hours north to Chicago, I had little time to curl up with a book. This year is going to be different. I am going to read to my hearts content like the literature student in my wants to do at every hour of the day.
Paris Pan Take the Dare by Cynthea Lui is a book I picked up at last year’s SOKY Book Fest, so it’s signed by the author. She was a lovely lady and her children’s book was a fun read. May 11, 2012
Middlemarch by George Elliot was the intellectual stimulation I needed, but I had forgotten how long winded Elliot could be! I fell in love with character I started out hating, which is a sign that the author is workin’ it. May 5, 2012
How to Survive Graduate School & Other Disasters by Molly McCaffrey is a collect of short stories I’m so glad I finally sat down to read! McCaffrey was one of my creative professors at school and my thesis advisor. It was great to read her work, having gotten to know her fairly well. I really must turn this into the book that I pass around to my friends. And it was interesting to read a collection of her work, and see my own little writing ticks, ones I learned from her, set to a more distinguished piece. April 13, 2012
Faithless by Karin Slaughter was a quick and light read. It’s a paperback mystery novel, revolving around a religious group that has very forceful men in its ranks. Though predictable, it wasn’t a bad read. April 9, 2012
The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings was a great movie, an Oscar winning screenplay, and a very good book. Most the time, I defend the medium in which you first hear a story is your favorite. If you saw Lord of the Rings before reading the books, you like the movies. If you read Harry Potter first, you like the books better. Some stories, however, defy this theory. “The Descendants” was such a one. I loved George Clooney as Matt King (and dang it, he should have gotten that Oscar!!) and I liked the narrator, Matt King, in Hemmings’ writing. It’s a story, positioned on the absurdity of a situation and the things in which unhinged, undisciplined characters say. The movie made me laugh and it made me cry, and the book did the same, with just a higher level of understanding. What I liked best about Hemmings’ work, though, is the fact that this novel is the development of a short story she wrote years before hand. I like that–characters and story speaking to their creator, demanding more life than they were originally given. March 22, 2012
Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden is a delightful little novella out of Ireland. I’m not sure if Madden would call it a novella, but seeing as it exists without chapter or division, it reads and feels like a condensed story. The main character, Molly Fox, is an actor much revered by the narrator and (the narrator thinks) by everyone else the narrator knows. Molly doesn’t speak until the last few pages. The book is a character analyze–the narrator trying to figure out the few people in her lives she really cares about, and the reader trying to figure out the narrator based on her assumptions and her confessions. March 6, 2012
Mysteries of Uldolpho by Ann Radcliff made me sick to my stomach. Jane Austen read Radcliff’s book and it inspired one of her own, plus a favorite professor told me about this book, laughing at the Gothic humor as it abused Catholicism. I thought this book would be rich and beautiful and dark. And it was far from that. For weeks I have pressured myself to push through, to skim the lines looking for depth and something to hold onto. I struggled in vain, and the book’s only success was putting me to sleep on the bus ride home. Emily, the “heroine” of the novel, is lame and weak and the kind of girl I’d punch in the face if she spoke too often in my presence. After the FOURTH man confessed his annoying and passionate love for her, love she of course is oblivious to because she’s so naïve, I closed the book and looked it up on Wikipedia. I was hoping the summarized-ending would give me a goal, let me know that something bad ass was about to happen and the horrible reading experience was about to pay off. But nope. The end was easy, anticlimactic, and resulted with Emily in the arms of her weakest suitor who was cheesiest of them all. He walked around her house at night before she even knew him! Not, impressed Radcliff. There is a reason Jane Austen became timeless and you are only mentioned in her wake. February 29, 2012
South of Broad by Pat Conroy was recommended to me by my absolute, favorite person in the whole, entire world (outside my family, of course). Jo gets this look in her eyes when she reads a good book, and when told me about this one, that look was there. She shrugged her shoulder and almost squealed as she raved about the souther flare Conroy wrote with and how the book made her proud to be a southern. Three months into Northerness, I needed a taste of southern flare. . . only, I disagree with Jo about the books quality. It felt it was written with an unprofessional air, an unskilled mastery of storytelling, and an inconsistent yet unrealistic view of life and the characters being puppeteered through book. January 17, 2012
Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin–I do love children stories, and it was lovely to read a book about the history of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The book is about the little girl the adventures of wonderland were written for and about. It was neat. And Benjamin writes in a style close to what I think me writing style is–heavy and slightly poetic. Of course she does it much better than I do, and her story was much more than I could have done. January 2, 2012
