I'm going to attempt to keep this index with direct links to book reviews up-to-date, but I make no promises!

( Index )

It's interesting how different people talk about history. The first lecture-on-tape I heard that discussed the Gracchi brothers (Ancient Rome, if you need your memory jogged) portrayed the Gracchi as almost martyrs - they stood up for the common man against the oligarchical senate, and in response the senate flouted all the rules of democracy ever and beat Tiberius Gracchus to death with clubs in the street, using the flimsy excuse of 'he was making himself a king! You could tell because he was pointing at his head!'. The podcast I am listening to now also talked about the Gracchi brothers, but framed it much differently - according to podcaster, the Gracchi were right in that agrarian reform was desperately needed, but they overreached like crazy and were the beginning of the end of the Republic, and there's a line between the Gracchi and Julius Ceaser. 

So, you know, clearly I have to read more. Preferably historical fiction. Yay historical fiction.

So I've been reading Divergent from Veronica Roth. It's a YA dystopia, and people like to compare it to the Hunger Games. As I'm reading it it's all right, but I have one big spoilery issue.

( Spoiler cut )

There are other things that bug me too, but I'll wait ti l finish the book to make up my mind about it all.

I finally saw the end of Friday Night Lights (for ALL TIME EVER), and I cried so much it was embarrassing. My eyes still hurt ~_~. Seriously, how is the show so damn good? I think it's the most successful kids-graduate-from-high-school style cast turnover; I wound up caring about Luke and Vince and Jess just as much as I cared about Matt and Jason and Smash, and that's a job well done.

I will attempt quick reviews/reactions to all my March books. This is probably a highly ill-conceived idea.



Title: Five Flavors of Dumb
Author: Antony John
Pages: 352
First Sentence: For the record, I wasn’t around the day they decided to become Dumb.

I loved this book. The protagonist is Piper, a deaf girl whose parents use her college fund to pay for a cochlear implant for her baby sister- a choice that is especially bitter for Piper because they did not pay for her to have the same cochlear implant as a child. Piper talks herself into the job as manager for Dumb, a rock band at her high school, in order to try and make back the money she will need for college. There was so much to love about this book. I love how Piper comes to view Dumb, and music in general, as something more than a means for a paycheck, even though she is deaf. I love how I, the reader, learn more about deafness and its many variations without ever feeling jarred out of the story. I especially love the way that Piper and the girls in Dumb come to understand each other and become friends, overcoming the fact that their high school niches (nerdy deaf Piper, angry punk Tash, pretty It girl Callie) seem to have them set out as natural enemies. Antony John really does a fantastic job making the character relationships complex and interesting, from Piper and Dumb, Piper and her family, and Piper and her best friend who moved away. I really cannot say enough good things about this book; I'm so glad that I bought it on a whim instead of getting it from the library, because that means I can reread it as much as I like.



Title: Hijas Americanas
Author: Rosie Molinary
Pages: 278
First Sentence: I never had Latina girlfriends growing up.

I picked this up on a whim since I've been meaning to read more nonfiction, and think I saw it mentioned on someone (Eva from A Striped Armchair?)'s library loot post. The author conducted interviews and compiled survey results from a wide range of Latin-American girls and women, and wrote this book to discuss her findings. It was interesting enough, but I didn't love it. I think maybe one of my problems was that the responses Molinary got were just so varied that she couldn't really tie them all together with a thesis more specific than 'the experience of Latin-American women is varied.' Which, okay, I knew that already. And I can't really fault her for keeping the focus so wide - I mean, I wouldn't want her to force a generic Latina Story on all these girls and women. Life is complicated and every individual's experience is different, and it is good to recognize that. But the result for me was that the book felt like I was just reading a summary of her research. I didn't get into any of these women's stories, and even though I know that the same women came up again and again, I honestly couldn't remember what they had said last time. The big exception to this were the portions of the book concentrating on Molinary's life. I feel a little silly saying this because I am remembering that when I read Once Upon a Quinceneara by Julia Alvarez I really hated all the random sections about Alvarez's life. I guess the difference is that Alvarez had a more focused topic, the Quinceneara, and when Molinary just talks about Latina life in America in general the book wants focus, and telling her own story gives it the necessary bounds and structure. So I guess I wish that Molinary had profiled a few different Latinas that she interviewed more completely to give the book greater structure and impact so that it didn't just feel like 'some Latinas think this! Or that! Or something entirely different! Moving on!'



Title: Summer of Shadows: A Murder, a Pennant Race, and the Twilight of the Best Location in the Nation
Author: Jonathan Knight
Pages: 446
First Sentence: The image of Cleveland, Ohio, as a great American city – one once known as “The Best Location in the Nation” – died at four minutes before noon on a cool, overcast Sunday morning in June.

I was pleased to 'win' a free copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program because I love Cleveland, and am always interested to read books that take place there or talk about its history. Summer of Shadows, which could be described as a nonfiction book about the summer of 1954 in Cleveland, had plenty of really fascinating information for me. I found the prologue about the infamous burning of the Cuyahoga River to be interesting and engaging history. The story of Dr. Sam Sheppard, a wealthy doctor accused of murdering his wife that summer in a police investigation driven in no small part by the press, was dramatic and, at times, even riveting. However, I hadn't realized the extent to which this is a sports book about the Indians and their bid for the pennant. Personally, I find baseball to be excruciatingly boring, and these sections of the book really dragged for me. Finally I started skimming over the baseball sections to concentrate on the Sheppard story and the general atmosphere of life in Cleveland in the 50s. I imagine that someone with a greater interest in baseball than I have would enjoy this a good deal more than I did. Even so, I still enjoyed the book overall as I found the non-baseball sections of the book truly interesting.




Title: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Author: Sherman Alexie
Pages: 230
First Sentence: I was born with water on the brain.

I reread this book for my book club, having read it already some years ago. It was interesting because what I remembered about this book was that it dealt with a lot of tragic events, but was still amazingly funny. This time, the tragedy took much more center stage to me. I was also impressed all over again by the voice of Arnold; I love the kid, and I want him and his best friend both to just do well in their lives. Even though they are fictional. At any rate, the book holds up really well on re-reading.



Title: A Northern Light
Author: Jennifer Donnelly
Pages: 383
First Sentence: When summer comes to the North Woods, time slows down.

Wow, who knew Jennifer Donnelly could do this! To explain, I associate Donnelly with her historical romances, The Tea Rose and The Winter Rose, which are great fun to read but kind of silly, and maybe a little bit trashy. When I picked up A Northern Light I was expecting more of the same, but was very pleasantly surprised. A Northern Light is the story of Mattie, an intelligent girl who lives in the Adirondacks during 1906. Her desire to educate herself and become an artist is countered by her feelings that she ought to stay and care for her family, and her desire for a neighbor boy who is romantically interested in her but does not understand why she would want to ever leave their home. The book does an excellent job exploring whether art is inherently incompatible with the family life Mattie is also drawn to, and of portraying both of Mattie's conflicting desires in a compelling way. I also appreciated Mattie's constant frustration that she felt great literature always was about important people or great cities, and was never about simple people like her and her community in the rural Adirondacks. All right, Jennifer Donnelly, count me as impressed.



Title: The Mockingbirds
Author: Daisy Whitney
Pages: 335
First Sentence: Three things I know this second: I have morning breath, I’m naked, and I’m waking up next to a boy I don’t know.

I have conflicted feelings about this book. It is essentially a story about date rape. As the book opens (and the first scene is really very compelling; I wasn't sure which book I wanted to read so I read the first page of a whole stack, and The Mockingbirds really grabbed me), Alex wakes up naked next to a stranger and comes to realize that she had had sex with this boy the night before, and doesn't remember any of it. Because the teachers of Alex's elite boarding school never believe that their students could possibly do anything wrong, Alex feels that she cannot go to them for help - instead she turns to the Mockingbirds, a secret student organization dedicated to policing the student body to prevent bullying and other unpleasantness. I had a couple of problems with the book. On the one hand, I didn't understand why Alex felt that school wouldn't take her seriously if she reported her rape. I mean, the book *says* 'oh the school would never buy it', but it left me wondering, why? The feeling I got was that the school was oblivious to wrong-doing, not that they chose to cover it up when it was reported. If there had been some character saying 'oh, so-and-so reported rape/bullying/whatever and the school told her to stop making up stories', or something to that effect, then I would understand why the Mockingbirds had to exist. As it was, I just kept feeling like the book hadn't done its due diligence showing why they need to operate outside the system this way. The whole vigilante-student-justice committee just rubs me the wrong way when I don't see why they can't go through the school. I also didn't understand why Alex wouldn't go to the police. I know that there are many reasons a rape victim feels she (or he) can't come forward - not wanting to admit that this could have happened, the trauma of reliving the experience, fear that no one would believe her/him, the feeling that everyone would be whispering about them, the pain of going to trial and being cross-examined about such an awful experience, the fear of retribution. But the thing was, going to the Mockingbirds didn't help Alex avoid *any* of that. So again - why operate outside the system? Why are the Mockingbirds better than the police? Was it just that Alex's main concern was keeping it from her parents? I felt like the book just didn't explore or explain this enough. And one last thing, under the spoiler cut.

( spoilers for Mockingbirds )

In the end, I feel like there were really good aspects to the book, but on the whole Whitney was just trying to do too much.


And as I suspected, doing all of the March books in one go is a terrible idea. I am going to stop for the time being. ~_~

Title: Among Others
Author: Jo Walton
Pages: 304
First Sentence: The Phurnacite factory in Abercwmboi killed all the trees for two miles around.

So I think it is better to think of this as a reaction instead of a review, because I'm principally writing it to vent about something that bothered me a little bit. Now I've been blathering on about this book to my friends for weeks and weeks now because I really loved this book. Morwena is a Welsh girl who, after an event that leaves her crippled and her twin sister dead, runs away from home. She winds up being taken in by the father she never met, and subsequently packed off to boarding school. Mor is an amazing protagonist. She is funny and clever and observant, and she LOVES to read - science fiction and fantasy in particular. As a bookworm myself, I really appreciated Mor's nerdy asides and voracious reading. The number of books she mentions just has me thinking 'I've got to get to the library!' The whole book is in the form of her diary, and she has great quotes like:

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

I love Mor, I really do. I love her voice, and her utter love of books, and her attempts at figuring out life through those books, and her loneliness and awkwardness and just everything. But. But but but, I wound up feeling very frustrated with it because it was thisclose to being utterly amazing, but it will simply never get there for me because of this One Thing. And I might as well go behind a spoiler-cut.

( spoilers for Among Others )

If anyone wants to cheer me up by reccing books with awesome female friendships, I would be a happy camper. :-)

"[I] tried to put my mind back on Paradise Lost , but it was hard going. Somniferous was my word of the day. It means sleep inducing, and it was a good one to describe that dull and endless poem. Milton meant to give us a glimpse of hell, Miss Wilcox said, and he succeeded. Hell was not the adamantine chains he wrote of, though. Nor was it the ever-burning sulphur, or the darkness visible. Hell was the realization that you are only on line 325 of Book One and there are eleven more books to go. Torture without end, all right." (p. 60, Northern Lights)

This cracked me up. I would also like to add that Paradise Lost is the only school book I've read that actually made me fall asleep in the middle of the day.

So I have been re-reading Jane Eyre, and I came across this quote, which I loved, so I am going to share:

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for moments such as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?

Oh Charlotte Bronte, how so smart and awesome? Seriously, why did I hate this book so much when I was in high school?

So I know it has been, er, since July of last year since I did these Narnia chapter-by-chapter reactions, but I felt like starting them up again. As always, these are re-reading reactions, so spoilers may abound (and sometimes may be inaccurate if I'm remembering things wrong). So anyway, without further ado -

Chapter 8 - The Fight At The Lamppost

( In which we arrive at Narnia at last, kinda sorta, I make pretentious Paradise Lost comparisons, and the soon-to-be-king is a great lover of music )