Rated Master and Commander 8/10
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Rated The Unfinished World and Other Stories 8/10
Really lovely, uncanny short stories, with something of the feel of fairy tale or legend. Absorbing and strange.
Rated All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers 8/10
clever, heartfelt essays about "troublesome" famous women like Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, Lil' Kim and Princess Diana, shot through with personal details about the author's life. you'll need a tolerance for a confessional, heart-on-sleeve style but it's a quick read and rewarding.
Rated The Wallcreeper 6/10
I had a hard time getting my head around this book. It's sort of less than the sum of its parts, though many of its parts are quite good and I'm definitely glad I read it. There are some beautiful images and clever, devastating turns of phrase, but it's also kind of a bummer - the narrator is very frustrating and the story she tells ends up being wishy-washy in a way I think is intended but doesn't quite work. I compare it unfavorably to After Birth, which is also about a brief slice of the life of a woman who feels very isolated and lonely, but manages to cohere and sell it even though it has less "plot" than the Wallcreeper.
Finished reading Elementary Number Theory and Its Applications by Kenneth H. Rosen
Rated The Age of Innocence 10/10
Wharton, man.<br/><br/>She just perfectly conveys all these little nuances of these elaborate, obsolete rules and conventions of society and the informal ways they're enforced and how crazy they end up making people.
Rated Dept. of Speculation 6/10
Very prose-poemy and MFAish, really pretty and compelling story of a marriage undergoing a crisis. Brief and affecting.
Rated The Girls 8/10
Creepy, lyrical, intense story of a woman who was caught up in a Manson-esque cult as a teenager. Really remarkable, especially for how well it conveys an adolescent-girl's-eye-view of the world, tragic and dreamy and emotionally rich and unsettled.
Rated The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks 6/10
Light and breezy yet encyclopedic. Kinda like getting cornered at the party by the foodie who wants to tell you all about the appetizers. You can skip around at your leisure rather than trying to read it straight through, but it's full of fun factoids.
Rated The Age of Miracles 8/10
really liked this - i ended up reading it all in a few sittings over about a day and a half. fascinating, creepy, sad. <br/><br/>not quite as cripplingly depressing as [b:Never Let Me Go|6334|Never Let Me Go|Kazuo Ishiguro|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165592008s/6334.jpg|1499998], but has that same kind of otherworldly, calm sadness. the sci-fi concept isn't over-analyzed; really it's a slice of life of the concept as seen through a teenage girl's experiences.<br/><br/>very affecting.
Rated Life After Life 8/10
Terrific. It's no spoiler to note that the protagonist dies right away; the book could be called "There Are A Lot Of Ways To Die In The 20th Century." It's like watching somebody carry out a choose-your-own-adventure, but it rarely gets frustrating and never seems cutesy; the characters are so real and well-drawn and the world is so lived-in that it stays compelling throughout. It is, I will note, so extremely British that I had to look up the Briticisms.
Rated One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large 10/10
<div>Reading this shortly after two different trips to Missoula (during one of which I purchased the book) almost certainly colors my immense fondness for it, but so what? It's great all the same. It's got a lot of Montana nature, but said nature is not made exotic. Maybe I am just similarly-concerned, but-not-THAT-concerned-about-bears, but sometimes it's nice to read about a place you're deeply familiar with that is written by someone who is also deeply familiar, but no one is here to romanticize it. For every beautiful expanse of sky and leaves and running rivers, there are also the days where your socks keep getting wet and you're in a fight with the wind.<br><br>The bits about Missoula are also good because, yes, we do actually have civilization here, even if it's on a smaller scale. Written from the point of view of a local who lives at the edge of a small city, this snapshot of a year and a mixture of other thoughts inspire a desire to slow down, to really look at where you are, to find a good story to tell later. I'm glad I finally read it.</div>
Rated Sorcerer to the Crown 8/10
A real delight. Zen Cho manages to a bunch of things really well - build a convincing, coherent world with clever magical rules and norms, a plot with a lot of surprises and a lot of threads that lock together, some really sharp analysis of how race/gender/class operate - and also makes it a fun, quick read. Imagine the Ministry of Magic as told by Edith Wharton - adventure and wordplay and a dark creepy underside.
Wants to read Out of the Vinyl Deeps: On Rock Music
Rated Parable of the Talents 10/10
If this year's election had a different outcome, this would be a much heavier read (not that it isn't heavy, regardless). Both this book and its predecessor are excellent, and I enjoyed having the different characters' points-of-view in this one. When people say "Who would write about our current time," and they neglect to mention Octavia Butler, I see a gap in their reading history. I'm glad I filled in the gap.
Rated Drinking at the Movies 6/10
Wants to read The Thirty Years War