Link Round Up

Your Book Club’s New Best Friend is a article about the Subtext app for iPads. I like the idea of this app very much, however, I've found that interacting with authors via email and Twitter is almost easier. I've been able to have lovely conversations with authors just by telling him or her I was a fan. It opens the door.

TV Characters and Their Literary Counterparts, the Ron Swanson and Ernest Hemingway comparison made me laugh.

Where Print Is Still King. Hint, it's India. I'd also be willing to bet that China is more apt to have a print newspaper rather than an electronic version.

Kurt Vonnegut Was Not A Happy Man. 'So It Goes.' One would think being locked in a meat locker while the Bombing of Dresden in World War II took place, and then surviving it would make for some heavy memories and guilt. Now condemning him to a life of unhappiness is a bit of a stretch, I'm sure he was human just like the rest of us.

Here's some great information on the NEA's Big Read project. I'm going to see if I can get involved with this on a local level.

In Fight with Amazon, Libraries Caught in the Crossfire. Libraries are angry with Amazon and Penguin over this. Some may pull elending all together.

(Image from Kiki's Delivery Service manga) 

Best of/Worst of 2011

I said I'd link to all the books in my video, so here we go.

Best Fiction I read in 2011:

Ready Player One

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

and

Kafka on the Shore

Best Young Adult Fiction I read in 2011

The Hunger Games Trilogy Boxed Set

Beauty Queens

and

Going Bovine

Best Science Fiction/Fantasy I read in 2011

The Name of the Wind

Feed

and

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms


Best Nonfiction I read in 2011

Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

and

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

The Book That Should Have Won More Awards Than It Did

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

The Best Book I Read in 2011:

The Book Thief 

Now the bad.

The Most Overrated Books of 2011

A Visit from the Goon Squad

When She Woke

and

Daughter of Smoke and Bone

The Worst Book I Read in 2011

Fallen


Miscellaneous Categories

The Classic Book You Should Most Likely Pick Up Before They Make It Ugly With a Movie Cover

The Great Gatsby

A Cute Gift For The Reader In Your Life

Magnetic bookmarks from Girl of All Work. Magnetic Origami Bookmarks

A T-Shirt from Out of Print Clothing. (Order a size up.)

A sleeve for that  e-reader from Timbuk2.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

I have absolutely no clue why this book hasn't had more buzz. I don't know why it's not at the top of every single bookish parents holiday gift list. This book has languished, it doesn't deserve it, and I hope to change that with this write up. In short, buy this book. Make it a priority. Do it now. I'll wait.

 The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is a book that deserves to be a bedtime story. It's broken into manageable chapters, each starting with a lovely illustration, that demand to be read out loud. Valente's prose is poetic in structure, but also accessible to young people. The story is beautifully constructed with just the right amount of darkness to make it scary and just the right amount of light to make it a fairy tale.

September's journey is a cross between the Phantom Tollbooth and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  She'll also going down in history as a classic heroine. September is reluctant to take on the role, but as the story unfolds her journey becomes something larger than herself. Her choices make her so memorable to me that I hope Valente makes this into a series. I want to go back to Fairyland. I need to know what happens next.

Moving on, I'm reading East of Eden. I've been slacking on my classics so it's time I got though this one. I'm going to keep a running total of how many times I get asked, "Are you reading that for a class?"

Apparently, Steinbeck can't be read for pleasure.

Oh, I'll be posting my best of video sometime tonight. Just an FYI. 

Deathless

My video review of Deathless. I'm having embedding issues. I'll try to fix them later. 

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente

Koschei

Hugo Awards

Link Round Up

The Big Read (The BBC Top 100): Time for a Facelift? Top 100 lists are always tricky, especially because this one is crowd sourced. In the past, I've used them to help guide my reading choices, but they are not the end all be all.

Book Drum has assembled multimedia profiles of 150 great books via Google Earth, so you can see where some of your favorite novels take place.

The Books They Gave Me a fantastic Tumblr about books, relationships, and where those pesky gaps get filled. The books I could contribute to this, well, that's for another blog.

Madonna's Sex most sought after out-of-print book. Just an FYI.

A Collection of Rejected Titles for Classic Books, some of these are fun.

The Grapes of Roth. On narcissism and what makes a good novel.  Look, I blog, and that is one of the most narcissistic things out there. Novel writing is inherently narcissistic. If authors don't share the way that they do we'd be reading how to manuals and cookbooks. (Hell, even cookbooks are narcissistic. Try prying the secret BBQ sauce recipe out of an old southern man. Waterboarding won't make him crack.)

Author Ann Patchett Opens Own Indie Bookstore. More popular authors need to do this. We need a vibrant indie bookstore culture.

And finally, albeit slightly off topic, why I'm a benevolent dictator on Tumblr, Blogger, and YouTube. If Your Website's Full of Assholes, It's Your Own Fault.

Another note, because of the really positive feedback I got with my Kindle Fire review I'm going to do a video review of Deathless. We'll see how this goes. I may switch over to doing half video reviews and half written reviews.

The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book I: The Mysterious Howling

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book I: The Mysterious Howling by Maryrose Wood 

Children's chapter books are always a bit of a hit or miss. In one respect, they could turn into the mega hit, mega ghost written, hundreds of books long series like The Baby-sitters Club. This, when an author lends his or her name to it, can buy a vacation home in the Hamptons. The series can also turn into something like a Babysitters Club clone, and end up collecting dust on the shelves of the bookstores. What Maryrose Wood has created is a winning series. Her characters are likable, the books read well from an adult perspective as well as a child, and it's a very accessible story.  The big question becomes, will it take off? I hope so. This series could be the introduction to a life time of reading to a child. It's worth buying and giving as a gift. The age range that would be acceptable is 3rd though 5th grade.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

Where previous book drops off the Mysterious Benedict Society picks up. Easing in right around a 6th to 9th grade reading level, and novel of this undertaking makes a young adult feel slightly more adult. The plot is not dumbed down, and makes for a good introduction to mystery and suspense. As an adult, I found it to be a lovely rip off of the plot of  They Live. I kept expecting a wink and a nod, perhaps some bubble gum, but alas the author didn't come though. However, as a child who doesn't have access to late 80s horror movies that involve aliens and baseball bats, it will be a fresh story. Also, it connects deeper than the crappy horror movie ever could. The children involved in the story humanize it and give it a better emotional weight than I was expecting. It's definitely a book that would make a great holiday gift.

The two books were a great distraction from the outside world. Best read on snowy nights snuggled under the covers. I can remember when I was a young girl loosing myself in books like this. My mind would drift and the characters would be come part of me. Approach these books with a sense of wonder and joy, not the jaded eyes of an adult. They exist to entertain, tell a story, and perhaps teach a small lesson as the words fly by.

Next up is Deathless. I've had this book on my reading list for a shot time. Looks like it's going to be interesting. Also, over Thanksgiving weekend I am going to start reading East of Eden.

When She Woke

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The heavy hand of marketing told me that it was a mix between the The Scarlet Letter and The Handmaid's Tale. What I read was more of a coming of age story set among the backdrop of a dystopian America. However intriguing that sounds, it's really not. When She Woke uses a series of stereotypes that is almost as maddening as the borrowed references. These stereotypes are up to and including the Sassy Black Friend,  forewarned is forearmed. The good news is that Jordan's writing style is zippy and quick so skipping past the frustration is quite easy. The plot, however, seems like a mishmash of  all the bad things that can happen to women if all references are taken from Lifetime movies. Also, it contains enough fundamentalist Christian bashing that it should make a nice annoyance among friends who attend that big fancy mega-church.

Now the question becomes, would I recommend this book to anyone? Yes, When She Woke is entertaining, but in a beach book kind of way. It's plot doesn't linger, the bad guys wear black hats (hand on my heart, they really do in this book), and the ending satisfies. It's not in the same league as Hawthorn or Atwood, I'm not going to kid you there, but it is in the same league as a Nicholas Sparks novel. I can see this book quickly getting optioned for a movie, so look for it on the marquee some time in 2014. It would make a great chick action film. Give it a shot, but know that it's got as much intellectual  heft as The Notebook.

Moving on, I've picked up a YA series called The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, The Mysterious Howling. I've been told that it is a lot like the Series of Unfortunate Events. I wax poetic about that series constantly. Part of the problem with it is that it came out right around the same time Harry Potter was hitting it out of the park. It flew under the radar, and a lot people missed it. At any rate, Incorrigible Children is a chapter book, so I should be done with it quickly. After that, I'm moving onto the The Mysterious Benedict Society. I'm going to do a combined post of the two.