Holy wow, batman.

This one was good. Reaaally good. Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes is a work of art. Go out, read it. It's just wow.

Interesting idea.

Under the Dome by Stephen King. There are enough reviews out there for this new one. It's pretty good, not mind-blowing. The idea was really nice but I didn't like the ending or really the explanation at all . Thought it was a little bit lazy.

Confusing but worth it.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is typical of the novel I dread being assigned to read in a class. It's confusing, told by multiple narrators, the characters are not particularly nice people, their goals are ones that I don't understand. That being said, those are exactly the reasons why I loved this novel. The confusion meant I had to pay attention, the multiple narrators made me read and re-read for simple comprehension. The fact that the characters were nothing like me made me struggle to understand their motivations. It was a short novel, but I'd recommend that if you decide to read it you really pay attention to what you're reading and how things progress and who the story is getting told by. Because with something like 14 narrators, things get hairy.

Grr.

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (the male pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans)was a novel I really liked. Until the end. Deus ex machina is, I believe, the proper term to describe what I think happened here.

Oh, Philip.

One of the few non-fiction works you'll see on my blog, ever. Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life by Andrew Motion is phenomenal. Larkin is one of my favorite poets, but his life wouldn't seem very riveting for most people. He was a librarian, poet, misanthropist and quasi-alcoholic. Not the stuff that fairy tales are made of. But the book makes fantastic work of his struggles with art, women, alcohol and people in general that makes me wish I could reach out and touch the poet who created such amazing work.

Great?

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens -- A thorough classic, this novel kept me roaring with laughter at the crazy, violent female characters, but also subdued me by reminding me that we all have it in us to estrange ourselves from those we love in the pursuit of goals that may or may not be in our best interests.

Ok, sorry.

So, I just finished my exams this week after a whirlwind semester. I didn't have any time to update, but I kept up with my reading. So I'm going to do the lazy thing here, and just list the books that I read in this time period with minimal comments. After this one, I will go back into giving more detail, but I just can't bring myself to write anything in depth yet. Perhaps I'll come back to give more info on these some day when I'm bored, but that's not especially likely.

Without further delay..

I've read:

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West -- This novel is great. I actually have read it twice in the past month and loved it both times. I may well read it again this summer. It's short, but wonderful.

Oh. Yeah.

This. Book. Was. Awesome. I read Ender's Game last summer and loved it. I'm usually pretty reluctant to get into the sequel game, but I searched every used book-store in town for a copy of the next novel in the series, Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. I even went to Chapters, and they didn't have it! I'm actually pretty sure they had every book in the series but this one. Last night I found it in ebook format. BAM! There goes my night.

I read this from the minute I downloaded it until 4am. Then I took a nap and read through until supper time. It was that good. I don't usually like sci-fi. It's okay, but there's just too much crap about slick ship captains and buxom aliens. The Ender series is classic for a reason. I don't think I've ever met someone who's read Ender's Game and not loved it. You either love it, or you haven't read it.

I don't really want to get into any specifics on plots here. Just read the novels and you'll see why. But you can definitely expect me to be posting on the rest of the books in the series. I plan to do so more in terms of quality than story, since it's not my purpose here to give plot summaries. Wikipedia does that pretty well. Oh, and it's going to be a while before I get to the other ones because I've got a lot of big classics on my plate. Expect to see more sci-fi after I'm done my final essays for classes. Then, I've got all the time in the world(s), baby.

coming soon: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life by Andrew Motion

Drivel.

I don't like movies without explosions. Accordingly, I don't like novels based solely on romance. Now, we all know that I'm a classic novel junkie, so you may be saying "Jilltheobscure, how can you love those books without liking that kind of plot?"

The thing is that there is usually some background action going on besides the love plot. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, we saw lots of romantic/marriage plots, but they were broken up with drinking, violence, aldultery, and unlawful imprisonment. You know, the good stuff. In North and South, there was another long, drawn out love plot. But it was made secondary to the plight of the working class, and the mob violence, and the conflicts between upper and lower classes.

What I'm trying to get at here is that Emma by Jane Austen was a few hundred pages of frivolous, mind-numbingly boring romances. One might sum up the novel in a few lines of dialogue:

"Oh my, I dare say he's in love with you!"

"No, he couldn't be! I'm not (insert desirable adjective here) enough!"

*next day*

"Well, I guess he was secretly in love with that other woman, but that man over there seems to be in love with you!"

Confine this superb storyline with the fact that there's only about 20 people in the whole community, and you have a story that's not just uninteresting; it's outright torture.

The only reason I finished this one is because I was leading a book club about it.

Oh, and *Spoiler Alert* When Mr. Knightley tells Emma that he's been in love with her since she was 13, that was....gross. I know that perceptions of proper age have changed over the years, but still. The guy's considerably older than her. This was no puppy love situation.

coming soon: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Speaker For The Dead by Orson Scott Card

That's Why They Call Him Great

This is the second time I've read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first time I read it for a class with a teacher who made it as dull as humanly possible. The answer to every question was "the American dream," and she actually read us the entire novel out loud in class. Note for all future teachers: If you would like to make students hate a novel, follow her example.

This time, I read the novel at my own pace, in my own head, and loved every word of it. The surface action of the novel is fantastic. It's got it all, New York City, gangsters, flashy cars, big parties...I mean, this is why we read about the jazz age, right? But underneath that there's this haunting, terrible story.

I love it when books tell two stories at once, and that seems to be present in spades here. Not that there are two plots, but the story that the action follows and the story that is implied by the narrative are vastly different. The second story is really what you learn without being told.

Great.

Oh, and that's number nine, folks.

coming soon: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Emma by Jane Austen

Fiesta

I've always been a little bit nervous when it comes to Hemingway. His clipped prose is so easy to read that I find I have to read entire novels repeatedly to get at the bits that he doesn't quite say. That said, this is a first reading of The Sun Also Rises. I really liked this novel. I loved Brett Ashley's character especially. She's wild, beautiful and a little bit heartless. It's a great combination. The way that the novel is written makes me want to write in Paris, and go fishing in Burguete. But the real gem of this novel is the festival of San Fermin. The setting is a thrilling place to set the most dramatic part of his novel, as Hemingway does by placing already hostile characters in a crowded, hot, violent setting. I love it.

coming soon: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emma by Jane Austen, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Zombies again.

I couldn't help it. As soon as I saw something about zombies in the blurb, I was sold. This was a quick, very quick read. I started reading it in bite-sized pieces before bed. This morning, I woke up, hit school and read all through my classes. It was a good book. The main character is your normal tough guy protagonist, except he's a vampire and he gets his ass handed to him on a platter about 5 times in the novel. Which is fine with me. There was one part I didn't find too creative. You remember in the old Batman tv show how the bad guy would always tell the good guy his whole evil plan before killing him? Did that ever work or was it just lazy writing? I believe the latter. A good author can find a better way to tell readers the motivations of the bad-guys, or they can leave us guessing. Outright telling a reader is kind of insulting.

I did really like the book, though. I don't read much for mystery-ish-vampirey-stuff, but I picture it as being pretty close to the top of the heap. I did read the Anne Rice novels in middle school, but that was a completely different cup of tea. The vampires/zombies in this one are infected with a mysterious virus. It's not groundbreaking, but it was a breath of fresh air.

Well, short book, short review. This one wasn't on my "coming soon" list, because I didn't think I'd finish it so soon, but there it is :)

Coming soon: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Emma by Jane Austen, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Frosty Passion from Across the Pond

As you can probably tell, I've just finished reading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. This is the first book I've read by her, and it was a little refreshing to be stuck in a smoky, dirty city after all of the natural uptopias that I'd glutted myself on in recent reads. I really enjoyed this one.

Margaret Hale can be a hard character to bite into. She's a little too high-and-mighty to really identify with for the most part. Her redeeming graces are the 1 (one) lie she tells in the entire novel, and the fact that she makes some pretty sweet decisions for a Victorian woman. I mean, she's just wild by their standards. My two favorite characters, on the other hand, are John Thornton and Nicholas Higgins (I know, I should identify with women, but women tend to be so one dimensional in these novels!). John Thornton is kind of like my uncle Paul in my mind. He's big and tall and a little bit scary sometimes, but you know he's a good guy, so it works out. Nicholas Higgins is just too good to be true. He's old, gritty, socialist and kind to boot. Both of these characters grow through the duration of the novel, and that's something that I really respect in writing. It's easy to create a consistent character. But to write people who consistently develop within the limits of their character-- that's art.

The storyline was pretty much par for the course: beautiful woman, multiple proposals, rises and falls of fortunes, life, death, birth. All of the good stuff. It wasn't a rip-roaring good time, but the characters really drew me in, as did the settings. Helstone, Margaret's birthplace is a perfect fairy-tale place, and that's dandy.
I found the portrayal of an industrial city to be much more riveting. The fictional city of Milton was modelled off Manchester. It was interesting to encounter the city from Margaret's viewpoint, since she was a higher class character who mingled and wandered through lower-class parts of town. By showing us the city through Margaret's eyes, Gaskell gives the fresh impressions Margaret has, which would not have registered on the mind of a native. Margaret's higher class background makes her hyper-aware of foot-traffic, building styles, and the way "the other half" lives.

I haven't updated in a while, since I've been reading too many books at once and haven't finished any yet. Expect a big pile of reviews in the next few weeks, because I'm nearing the end of a few. Happy reading, and keep those pages turning.

Coming soon: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Emma by Jane Austen, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Book-a-holic

Sooo I meant to make this one last, but I found it so easy to read after the density of The Ambas- sadors that I read it in a few days.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte was great for me for a couple of reasons, but first I'll explain the way it pissed me off. I'm used to this type of novel. I know when I peel back the front cover I'm in for about 400+ pages of "Oh I love him/her but she/he is too rich/poor/religious/drunk/far away," or the same number of pages of Ben-Stiller-style mishaps and painfully drawn out misunderstandings. It doesn't bother me that much, and I'm willing to deal with it in exchange for the elevated writing style and the overarching societal and historical themes, along with the fact that you can simply analyze the hell out of most of these amazing novels and never seem to find the end of it. I'm ready, in other words, to deal with the troubled love plot. When I began the novel, I expected this. So when I got about 100 pages into it, and the love plot seemed almost neatly resolved, I was thrilled. Maybe, just maybe, the love plot would be a trouble-free one and there would be a little bit more action to the novel. Maybe this novel would lead me into new territory.

No. No, no, no. Rather than that, Bronte teased me with a seemingly tidy resolution and then SLAMMED me with a 300 page journal, written twenty years earlier by one of the characters. Oooooooooh, I was mad. But once I got over that, I did find that it was a good novel. First of all, it had a lot of characters. And it had a lot of types of characters, from drunkards, liars, hussies, and rakes to lords, ladies, vicars and those sorts. And they were good characters. They were human, with their failings and inconsistencies and confusion and hesitation. There were a couple of highly idealized characters, but for the most part they were presented in a wonderfully rounded way. The second thing that I loved about the novel was that since I just read Jane Eyre, by Anne Bronte's sister Charlotte, I got to have fun picking out different phrases that they both used, or situations that both of their characters go through. The similarities and differences of novels produced in one household go to show a lot about the personalities of the sisters. I may read Wuthering Heights again soon, so I can compare the three sisters side-by-side.

Oh, and in case anybody besides me cares, I'm up to novel #6. I don't think I've been ahead of schedule on anything before!

Coming soon: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Wait. What?

So I'm writing this entry after finishing The Ambassadors by Henry James. It was...different. I guess I've got that terrible Western reliance on action-filled plots, so I found it quite difficult to decipher the novel. Once I was used to James's writing style I was more capable of following the storyline, but since the beginning of the book was quite confusing, I had to go back from about page 100 and start over again.
This book gave me a really great WTF moment right in the middle. All along I thought the story was from the point of view of Strether, looking at the events in Chad's life. Was I ever wrong! It was a book about Strether, and how he responds to the changes in his life (some of which are caused by Chad, but not the same thing at all).

Though the novel was difficult and confusing at times, especially because of the characters' tendency to talk around things instead of about them, I found it really fulfilling to decipher and probe. I'd recommend this novel to people who have been seriously injured and have nothing to do, people who need to learn how to avoid talking about what they're really talking about and to people who love literature. Because us lit junkies are addicted to the pain of being pages away from the part of the novel where it all comes together. (Though for the record, in The Ambassadors, that doesn't happen.)

coming soon: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Catch-up

Ok. I found this great challenge at http://www.read52booksin52weeks.com/. It's pretty straightforward.

My original goal for 2010 was to keep an accurate book journal, but this seems like a little bit more fun. I do have a few books under my belt so far this year, however, so I'll lead in with those. Just quick reviews of course, because I'm onto bigger and better things.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

It was my first book of the year. I went to the mall around the 1st, and saw it at Chapters. I had been meaning to buy it forever, and it happened to hop out at me from the shelf on a day that I had money with me. It was a feel-good story about an old man who dies after living his less-than-exciting life, only to find out that there were lives that he touched unawares. A very quick read, but a pleasant one.

World War Z by Max Brooks

I have wanted this book since before it was written. I had two copies of the zombie survival guide, but I NEEDED to read more. Brooks's next zombie tome did not disappoint. It takes on the fictional "Great Panic" and zombie wars through the eyes of different witnesses to its buildup, epidemic and near-elimination. The war-correspondent-style-writing allowed me the suspension of my disbelief long enough to lose myself in a silly and thoroughly enjoyable read.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Theme? Yeah! I felt like buying a few sillier books than I normally read. Note that all books mentioned so far came from one Chapters visit. So I'm a little bit obsessed. There's really not that much zombie stuff out and about. As an avid fan of classic literature, ninjas and zombies, I expected this book to sweep me off of my feet. Completely. The negative reviews I read before purchase could not sway me. Let's just say that although it was intended to be tacky and silly, I really felt that it could have been done better. The dialogue is altered very slightly to add in the extra elements, and much is left out that is unnecessary to the funny zombie plot. I really wish that it had been condensed to short-story form. It was simply not a funny enough gag to pull for an entire novel. And remember, I say this with the deepest love for all things zombie.

I still have Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters on the bookshelf, waiting until I read the original.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

This. Book. Is. God-like. It's got everything (except zombies and ninjas). This is a re-read, finished earlier this week. I read it last summer, and then it was assigned in my British Novel class. I was excited to go through it again, especially since I had the luxury of not having to focus on the plot. This time around, I had a lot of fun analyzing as I read. The book's gothic, romantic, economic and sociological themes win it over for a huge audience, even for people who are not big fans of classic literature (well, I guess I can't say that, because I live for the stuff. I take it back). It's a fantastic novel. Read it.

Coming soon: The Ambassadors by Henry James, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte