Books I'm Reading 2008

 

Little Kids (especially notable books)

 

Brannen   Uncle Bobby's Wedding

Bobby is guinea pig Chloe's favorite uncle.  She doesn't want him to get married - until she becomes friends with his intended, Jamie, and decides that two uncles will be even better - especially if she gets to be flower girl.

 

Horowitz, Dave    Twenty-six Princesses

Princess Dot.  A lady she's not.  Princess Elle.  Starting to yell.  Princess Lori.  Not in this story.  Princess Mandy.  Ate too much candy...  The pictures add twists to the text and the whole thing is very fun.  All together they make "A royal pain in the alphabet!"

 

Rex, Adam    Pssst!

"The animals at the zoo have some unusual requests for a little girl who goes to visit."

 

Kids' Books

 

Hoopmann, Kathy     All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome

Photos of cats aptly illustrate a simple NF book describing the affect and behavior of someone with Asperger Syndrome.

 

Myers, Christopher     Jabberwocky: the classic poem from Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There

A fascinating re-imagination of the poem's story, in the form of a young basketball player defeating another on a playground court.

 

Nivola, Claire      Planting the Trees of Kenya: the story of Wangari Maathai

 

 

Ryan, Pam Munoz     Esperanza Rising 

Listened to the recording read by the excellent Trini Alvarado. 

 

Schlitz, Laura Amy     Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village

Newberry winner 2007.  Really excellent performable monologues

 

Under the Spell of the Moon: art for children from the world's great illustrators

 

 

jgn Varon, Sara      Robot Dreams     

Wordless and poignant story of the starcrossed friendship between a dog and the robot s/he builds. 

 

Teen (YA) Books

y Cameron, Peter    Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

Convincingly intelligent, wry, lost voice.  18-year-old James has not found his place in the world.  He has no idea how to relate to his peers (as a footnote, he's probably gay) and has decided that rather than begin his freshman year at Brown he should probably move from NY to a nice old home in Indiana somewhere.  In conversation he gets the best of his parents, sister and therapist, but still can't save himself.  Wistful and hilarious, with spot-on analyses of human conundrums.  (Notes: p. 80 - safety, security; 84 - I cd. tell NF - great detail; 97-9 - thoughts aren't same as speech; 107 - adolescent alienation; 111 - top pgph; 119 - wants time to move backwards; 175-6 - thoughts ruined by air; 178 - thinking vs. emotions; 192 - 1st direct self-assessment; 198 - randomness & abandoning people; 200 - the  net of myself.  BBYA Top Ten 2008: http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/booklistsawards/bestbooksya/08bbya.cfm

 

Clarke, Judith   One Whole and Perfect Day

 

Fletcher, Christine      Ten Cents a Dance

Chicago, 1941 - Scrappy 15-year-old Ruby Jacinski abandons slaughterhouse work for the well-paying, morally gray work of taxi dancing: leading lonely men around a dance floor for 10 cents a dance - plus tips.  Engaging story of a badass teenager who falls in with the neighborhood bad boy.

 

Jenkins, A. M.   Repossessed

Short & sweet!  Kiriel is one of the Fallen Angels, aka "demons," who spend eternity witnessing the torment of souls in Hell.  He finds the job a bit tiresome and decides to take a vacation in the form of possessing the body of an American teen seconds before he loses his life by stepping in front of a bus.  All the messy, detailled business of mortal living fascinates Kiriel, and he tries to live as fully as he can - eating the divine catsup, befriending his body (Shaun)'s little brother, and trying to get busy with the girl who has a crush on Shaun - before the Higher Ups yank him back where he belongs.  Poignant thread of how Kiriel, who acts as his nature dictates, longs for recognition by his Creator.

 

Jinks, Catherine   Evil Genius

Read the 1st 79 pages.  Clever but overwritten for my taste.  Liked The Benedict Society better.

 

Juby, Susan    Another Kind of Cowboy

Alex is into dressage (fancy horse showmanship).  Oh, and he's gay.  Cleo is an out-of-control rich girl shipped off to a private horse academy. 

 

Kostick, Conor   Epic

"On New Earth, a world [whose real-time economy is] based on a video role-playing game, fourteen-year-old Erik pursuades his friends to aid him in some unusual gambits in order to save Erik's father from exile and safeguard the futures of each of their families."  A good idea but only an okay read - limp character development and descriptive prose.  Reads like a first novel.  

 

Lockhart, Mlynowski, Myracle          How to Be Bad

Three teens, written in three voices, go on a road trip featuring alligators, cute guys, a pirate hotel, tears, screaming, confessions, the usual.

 

McCaughrean, Geraldine    The White Darkness

A chilling (ha ha, in the Antarctic, get it?) mood piece by the intense and crazy McCaughrean.  Sym's Uncle Victor, obsessed with the Antarctic and not a little domineering and cuckoo, shanghais her off for the vacation of her dreams at the South Pole.  But all is not as it seems - Victor [spoiler alert!] has a plan to search for Symme's Hole, a legendary doorway into the Earth's supposed internal spheres.  Starts of a bit slowly for my tastes - Sym's first person narrative comes off as pathetic - but picks up speed and gets Compelling and Creepy and Chillingly Crazy!  McC. is a master with a talent for oddball tales and voices. 

 

Marr, Melissa     Wicked Lovely

"17-year-old Aislinn, who has the rare ability to see faeries, is drawn against her will into a centuries-old battle between the Summer King and the Winter Queen, and the survival of her life, her love, and summer all hang in the balance."

 

Moriarty, Jaclyn          The Spell Book of Listen Taylor

What this book is really about is relationships, most of them adult: marriages, loves, the confusion of affairs wished-for and unintended, heartbreak, repair.  The Zings have a Family Secret that requirse clandestine weekly meetings of the family adults to plan "Maintenance Intrusion" episodes and other mysteries.  We follow the struggling love lives of the two adult Zing women, Marbie and Fancy, as well as the life and love affair of Cath Murphy, 2nd grade teacher of Fancy's daughter Cassie.  Also in the stew is the titular Listen Taylor, whose dad Nathaniel is dating Marbie, and who is suffering through a tortuous first year of junior high.  All comes well in the end, though not always in the ways you expect.  Told in tiny installments from all sorts of points of view, it's like reading a puzzle whose pieces slowly cohere into a complicated whole.

 

Rosoff, Meg       Just In Case

 

Sachar, Louis    Small Steps (read by Curtis McClarin)

 

St. James, James      Freak Show

Billy Bloom, teen drag queen, faces down redneck beat-downs, heartbreak, and terrible fashion with a loud, proud, foo-foo voice unlike any other.  Sometimes hilarious, unflinchingly gritty (gay bashing in all its vicious violence), sweet in the end.  I would have edited it down a trifle, myself. 

 

ygn Stuck       Stuck in the Middle: Seventeen Comics from an Unpleasant Age

Almost unbearable tales of life in the hell that is early adolescence. 

 

***ygn Tan, Shaun    The Arrival

Supreme, amazing wordless immersion in the immigrant experience.  Quoting Jill S. on Powell's web site: "Shaun Tan, one of my favorite children's book illustrators, draws upon hundreds of years worth of immigrant stories to tell this single but universal tale: one of alienation, magic, and bravely bearing the wonderful and frightening strangeness of a new country. A rare and beautiful work."

 

Westerfield, Scott      Extras   The 4th book in the Uglies "trilogy."  Aya lives in a city who decided, after the mind-rain ended the Prettytime, to practice a reputation economy: your social rank and buying power is determined in small part by how many credits you amass through useful community work and in large part by your face rank, ie. your fame as compared to everyone else in the city.  Every citizen has her own "feed," or channel to post ("kick") stories to the city.  The more people monitor your feed, and the more times your name is uttered by others, the higher your face rank.  Aya, 15, is determined to kick an amazing story and break into the coveted Top 1000 Faces.  Then she stumbles across the Sly Girls, a secret clique of adrenalin junkies, and with them she uncovers a secret that could lead to serious fame - or to world ruin.  (Read 5/08)

 

Zarr, Sara        Sweethearts

"After losing her soul mate, Cameron, when they were nine, Jennifer, now seventeen, transformed herself from the unpopular fat girl into the beautiful and popular Jenna, but Cameron's unexpected return dredges up memories that cause both social and emotional turmoil."  When she was 9 and Cameron's family disappeared, Jennifer (now the new-and-improved Jenna) was told he had died.  But it turns out his family had gone into hiding at a shelter to escape his abusive dad, with whom Jenna and Cameron had a disquieting run-in she's never told anyone about.  

 

Adult Books

Bates, Judy Fong   Midnight at the Dragon Cafe

Extremely irritating interpersonal dynamics and family ghosts.  The view into this specific immigrant experience was interesting, but the particulars of the characters were tediously repetitive and drama-indulgent. 

 

Bennett, Alan     The Uncommon Reader

The Queen's newfound passion for reading upsets the order of things at the palace.  A light and pleasing tale.

 

Donoghue, Emma     Landing

A love story of the intersection of two places and two women, lovingly and precisely drawn.

 

Evanovich, Janet    One for the Money: the first Stephanie Plum mystery

Linda got it for me at Lahey. 

 

Guo, Xiaolu     A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Fascinating musings on the intersection of language, identity, love, and cultural norms emerge in this story told in the first person by a young Chinese student of English in London.

 

Haddon, Mark      The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (re-read)

 

GN Jansson, Tove     Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 2

 

King, Laurie R.    Locked Rooms: a Mary Russell novel

 

Lahiri Jhumpa    Interpreter of Maladies    2000 Pulitzer-prize winning short story collection.  Characters are Indian, Indian immigrants, and Indian-American.

 

Lamott, Anne     Grace (Eventually): thoughts on faith    I liked her earlier ones better, but this is still good, with moments of human brilliance.  (Esp. the "somersault that got away from her" in "Dance Class.")

 

GN Lemire, Jeff    Tales from the Farm: Essex County Vol. 1

Laconic graphic novel in which Lester, 10, lives with his uncle (since his mother recently died of cancer) on an isolated farm in SW Ontario.  The two remain isolated by their separate griefs, & Lester befriends the hulking ex-hockey-star gas station attendant, Jimmy, with whom he escapes to a fantasy world of comics & alien attacks.  Sad.  2008 Alex Award winner.  http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/booklistsawards/alexawards/alex08.cfm

 

Lewycka, Marina     A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

 

Maupin, Armistead            Tales of the City

 

Polly, Matthew    American Shaolin: flying kicks, Buddhist monks, the legend of Iron Crotch: an odyssey in the new China  (2007)

2008 Alex Award winner.

 

Spencer, Irene     Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife

I think I saw this on a New Books list.  After about 50 pages I just skimmed the rest.  I found it neither especially thoughtful nor juicy.

 

Willis, Connie    To Say Nothing of the Dog

Still a wonderful time-travel, Victorian, futuristic, mysterious, sensibly romantic, hilarious puzzle of a romp of a book.  Totally fun. 

 

Zuckerman, Andrew     Creature

Amazing, candid portrait-style photographs of all sorts of animals.  Large coffee-table sized gorgeous book.

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