Dead in the Family = 55 down, 45 to go

Recommendation
Dead in the Family
Charlaine Harris
320 pages


I was turned onto this clever series by my friend Robin. I read the first nine books and Harris' book of short stories all within about 10 days. They were fun and addicting. So I was excited that the tenth book in the series was being released within the month of finishing the first nine.


As with the others, I thoroughly enjoyed Dead in the Family. This is the one of the best series I've read in years - it's my version of addictive chick lit. There was one bad thing about this book though - it was to quick of a read. Guess I should have taken my time, and extended my time of being immersed in the life of Sookie Stackhouse.


Just another reason to go pick up the first couple of seasons of True Blood.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Blockade Billy = 54 down, 46 to go

Recommendation
Blockade Billy
Stephen King
144 pages

I haven't read a Stephen King novel in years, and I'm not quite sure what made me hit the download button on this one - especially since it is a story involving baseball, admittedly not a sport in which I'm particularly engaged.

The book took place in a time when the trappings of today's version of the sport were absent - big-money contracts, admittance of steroid usage, high-profile romances. Stephen King adds his signature dark spin to a period when baseball was more about the game than the drama.

Billy Blakely is called up from the farm system to serve a stint as a temporary pitcher with the New Jersey Titans. His teammates overlook his eccentricities in favor of his ability to aggressively guard the plate and hit the ball. Of course, it turns out that he's not actually Billy Blakely, but a guy who wanted to play baseball so desperately that he killed the actual Blakely family to make his dream come true.

The story is told through the eyes of the third-base coach, and on the day team management learns the truth, he shares the final game in detail, including: "By the time night fell, we knew were fucked for the season, because our first twenty-two games were almost surely going to be erased from our record books, along with any official acknowledgment of Blockade Billy Blakely."

King is known for his passionate love of baseball. That is evident in the exquisite detail in this book...even if some of it was lost on this non-baseball fan.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Fence My Father Built = 52 down, 48 to go

Recommendation

The Fence My Father Built

Linda Clare

294 pages

We all go through that period in our life where we're not sure where exactly we fit in, where we belong. Muri Pond's marriage has just ended, and she has packed up her two children and moves them to a dilapitted trailer on an Indian reservation with her aunt and uncle. Muri's father, who was part Native American, has recently passed away and left his legacy to Muri.

After not haing seen her father since her parents separated when she was a young child, Muri finds that her father's legacy is a mixed bag. For years, he had battled alcoholism, but never lost sight of his connection to his daughter, his heritage, his people and the land.

Muri encounters challenges from her rebelious teenage daughter, being a newly minted single mother, her faith and trying to figure out who she is and where she fits in. She also encounters resistance from a local rancher who controls nearly the entire town and who wants to buy her land supposedly to obtain access to water rights for his cattle. After being blacklisted by most of the locals, Muri vehementhly fights and uncovers the rancher's true intentions - the illegal selling of priceless Native American artifacts originally uncovered by Muri's father.

During the book, Muri is on a journey to discover who her father was. As she digs deeper, she relives memories from her early childhood with her father and the many things she shares in common him - "If my father loved books, he couldn't have been ordinary at all."

The book also documents Muri's exploration of her father's Christian faith: "Had it been hard for him to separate his Native spirtual leanings from his Christian ones? How had he managed to embrace his ethnic heritage and still hang onto faith that had come from the very people who had robbed Indians of their lands? Had he been like me, undecided in what - or whom - to believe?"

It was an interesting book with insight into challenges that many of us face in our lives.

Miscellaneous = 51 down, 49 to go

So I finally came to terms that the chances of me catching up with blog entries on my past read books wasn't likely, here are my reads from the last month. 

Recommendation

Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen
350 pages

Recommendation
Sleep Toward Heaven
Amanda Eyre Ward
304 pages

Recommendation
Little Children
Tom Perotta
368 pages

Short stories
Too Much Happiness
Alice Munro
320 pages

Biography/autobiography
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
288 pages

Movie
Shutter Island
Dennis Lehane
400 pages

Oprah's Book Club
The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
224 pages

Biography/autobiography
John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace
Johnathan Aitken
400 pages

Biography/autobiography
Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl
Stacey O'Brien
240 pages

Sookie Stackhouse Series = 42 down, 58 to go

I'm more than a little behind in updating this blog...like approximately 15 books behind in posting. So this post will be quick one as I need to get back on track. This entry counts as the remaining nine books in my fantasy category and one in my recommendation classification.

My friend, Robin, recommended the very excellent Sookie Stackhouse Series by Charlaine Harris.

Sookie Stackhouse is the main character and just your average barmaid...except for the fact that she's a telepath. She starts dating a vampire...you know, after vampires have come out publicly out of the proverbial closet after the invention of synthetic blood. And so begins the adventures of her life...vampires, were animals, fairies...along with her fair share of drama, violence and of course, a little romance and sex thrown in. 

Dead Until Dark
Living Dead in Dallas
Club Dead
Dead to the World
Dead as a Doornail
Definitely Dead
All Together Dead
From Dead to Worse
Dead and Gone
Dead in the Family

The bonus is that the HBO series True Blood is based on these books. Looks like it's time to rent some DVDs.

Serial = 29 down, 71 to go

Recommendation
Serial
Jack Kilborn and Black Crouch
eBook

So I may be fibbing just a bit in classifying this one as a recommendation, unless I count it as a recommendation from Amazon when I looked up "free" books. And it's probably cheating since it's such a short book, just about 8,000 words from cover to cover.

But I was incredibly intrigued by its literary concept - two authors decide on a storyline, each writes a part of the book on his own and then they write the third part in 100-word increments via email. Amazon's description of the book was way more interesting than anything I could commit to screen:

Remember the twin golden rules of hitchhiking? #1: Don't go hitchhiking, because the driver who picks you up could be certifiably crazy. #2: Don't pick up hitchhikers, because the traveler you pick up could be raving nutcase. So what if, on some dark, isolated road, Crazy #1 offered a ride to Nutcase #2? When two of the most twisted minds in the world of horror fiction face off, the result is SERIAL, a terrifying tale of hitchhiking gone terribly wrong. Like a deeply twisted version of an "After School Special," SERIAL is the single most persuasive public service announcement on the hazards of free car rides. Beyond a thrilling piece of horrifying suspense, SERIAL is also a groundbreaking experiment in literary collaboration. Kilborn wrote the first part. Crouch wrote the second. And they wrote the third together over email in 100-word exchanges, not aware of each other's opening section. All bets were off, and may the best psycho win. 

After reading into the first part of the book, I almost put it down. It was very violent and very graphic. This story is definitely not for the faint of heart.. But the approach to its creation was novel to me and worth a read if the concept intrigues you. 

Chasing Harry Winston = 28 down, 72 to go

Recommendation

Chasing Harry Winston

Lauren Weisberger

278 pages

So I never jumped on the very popular chick lit bandwagon, but this book was recommended to me as a good route of escapism for my day-to-day life.

I'll be honest right up front. I wasn't a big fan of this book. It was a fairly difficult read for me. It was a little too superficial and choppy for me. But there were a couple of saving graces - for me, this was primarily the friendship between three main characters.

No matter how many years passed or how much responsibility each assumed, they still managed to bicker like bitchy teenagers on a regular basis. In some way, though, each found it comforting; it reminded them how close they really were: Acquaintances were always on their best behavior, but sisters loved each other enough to say anything.

Every woman wants those close confidantes to whom she can share anything, say anything without filtering or worrying about bruising a fragile ego. While reality can put a slightly different skew on this, it's easy to desire this type of relationship. Luckily, I am blessed with a sister and a couple of very dear friends with whom I can have this type of relationship...and all without the "bitchy teenager bickering." That makes it even better.

And as I started my college career as an English major, I often fantasized about being a book editor. What better profession is there for someone who loves reading, dreams about being an author but figures she doesn’t have the discipline for it. Being a book editor seems the next best option.

So I enjoyed portions of Leigh’s character. She’s a rising star at a leading publisher. She is very forthright with a bad-boy author, who though he’s won a Pulitzer, she tells him his last book was horrible. Her boss is appalled at Leigh speaking her mind, but the author is taken with her glaringly honest response and demands that she edit his current literary project. When her boss shares the news with her, he quotes the author with this line:

"That girl has zero bullshit tolerance and so do I. I want to work with her."

Who can’t appreciate the term “zero bullshit tolerance?”

Driving with Dead People = 17 down, 83 to go

Recommendation
Driving with Dead People
Monica Holloway
336 pages

This book is one of the many recommended to me by friend and fellow bibliomaniac, Robin. In the realm of books (and possibly life), she's never steered me wrong.

Monica Holloway led anything but a typical childhood. In a small Ohio town, she lived with a tyrannical father and a mother seemingly absent in all things mother. Monica's childhood and adolescence were filled with adventures that would make the basis a fun, lighthearted movie. Her best friend's father owns a mortuary, so they spend much of their free time running around the funeral home, laying in coffins in the showroom and similar mischief. When they acquire their driver's licenses, he throws the the keys to the hearse, and they get to cruise down to the Cincinnati airport to retrieve dead bodies.

The theme of death in her life continues as her father carries a movie camera in his car so that at a moment's notice, he can capture grizzly accidents or an extreme tornado. When Monica is around 6 or 7, she also reads about a girl her age that lives in her town (but attends the local Catholic school) that is run over by a motorist and killed. She becomes obsessed with this girl, and she pops up on a fairly regular basis in Monica's life.

Though not the typical childhood, you throw in a little death, and as its base, you have a very unique and differentiating childhood. However, she shares her fear, as well as her Mother's and siblings' fears, of her father, who is well respected in the community and owns the local hardware store, but extremely verbally abusive. Monica throws herself into school activities in high school and college, trains to become an actor and dates a long line of losers, including one that holds her at gun point when she tries to end their relationship and one that thinks she's attempting to entrap him when she becomes pregnant.

She's often keeping extreme depression at bay, just out of arm's reach, and after college, she learns what the primary catalyst from where her erratic and often self-destructive behavior originates. The catalyst is that her father sexually abused her older sister, for which the memories come flooding back to her sister as an adult. This discovery comes after Monica had actually made some peace with her father starting in late high school after her mother abandoned her for a college education and a new boyfriend.

This knowledge changes everything -- it puts many things from her childhood in perspective, challenges her on how to deal with/interact with each member of her family (from a brother medicating himself with alcohol and pot, to a middle sister who denies everything, to her mother who also denies everything and says she had no idea the abuse was occurring).

Through tenacity, and sometimes luck and a sense of humor that serves as a most excellent defense mechanism, Monica pulls through and eventually begins to build a normal life with an adoring husband and little boy.

In reading this book though, while you are often incensed by what has happened to her and her siblings, the storytelling is engaging and often uplifting. Towards the end of the book, she shares these poignant words that remind you that happiness is an action verb:

I'll always be damaged in a way. I had hoped that I could completely heal those cracks, but I'm starting to think the real trick is learning to live a full life in spite of them. Cracked people are everywhere, and so I can forgive myself for being overly anxious or easily frightened. But I will no longer allow myself to be swallowed by my past. I insist on having the happiest life I can muster, and I am in control of that now.

Into the Wild + Into Thin Air = 12 down, 88 to go

A couple of years ago I read Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, which opens with the murder of a wife and infant daughter committed by the husband's two brothers. The book tracks the back story of the murder and its ties to Mormon fundamentalism, of which the brothers were practitioners and claimed they received direct orders from God to commit the heinous murders. The book also told the detailed history of Mormonism and the break off of the fundamental sects. The book was well written and researched, compelling and engaging. After I put it down, I didn't give a second thought to the author.

A couple of months ago while enjoying a bottle of wine with friends, Jon Krakauer's name came up while volleying book recommendations to one another across the table. His book, Where Men Find Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, was strongly suggested, as were a number of his other books. Once I realized it was the same author, I knew that I would read at least one book by him during my yearlong book challenge.

As I read two Jon Krakauer books back to back (because yes, they were that good!), I've joined them into this shared entry.

Recommendation
Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer
207 pages

After graduating from college, Christopher McCandless made a conscience decision to drop out of society, and he had one ultimate goal in mind -- living off the land in the wilds of Alaska, where his adventure eventually turned deadly.

The book details his journey across the United States, the people's whose lives he touched along the way and then his trip north to Alaska where he ultimately starved to death in an abandoned bus in the backcountry.

Krakauer does a brilliant job of not just telling McCandless' story, but also juxtaposing him against others who over the decades have checked out of mainstream society and taken extreme risks in a man v. nature approach.

To help the reader better understand McCandless' psyche, he tells his own story of an extreme mountaineering trip he took in his early 20s to scale Devil's Thumb:

The closest thing I'd had to human contact since the airdrop, the distant lights triggered a flood of emotion that caught me off guard. I imagined people watching baseball on television, eating fried chicken in brightly lit kitchens, drinking beer, making love. When I lay down to sleep, I was overcome by a wrenching loneliness. I'd never felt so alone, ever.

Other Nonfiction
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
Jon Krakauer
332 pages

Jon Krakauer was on assignment from Outside magazine in May 1996. He had been tasked with ascending Mt. Everest and writing about his experiences, as well as the commercialization over the years of Everest.

That climbing season though took a horrible turn for the worst when a sudden storm enveloped the world's tallest peak, leaving five hikers dead. This book was a very personal story for Krakauer:

Until I visited the Himalaya, however, I'd never actually seen death at closer range. Hell, before I went to Everest, I'd never even been to a funeral. Mortality had remained a conveniently hypothetical concept, an idea to ponder in the abstract. Sooner or later the divestiture of such a privileged innocence was inevitable, but when it finally happened, the shock was magnified b the sheer superfluity of the carnage; all told, Everest killed twelve men and women in the spring of of 1996, the worst single-season death toll since climbers first set foot on the peak seventy-five years ago.

Of the six climbers on [Rob] Hall's expedition who reached the summit, only Mike Groom and I made it back down; four teammates with whom I'd laughed and vomited and held long, intimate conversations lost their lives. My actions -- or failure to act -- played a direct role in the death of Andy Harris. And while Yasuko Namba lay dying on the South Col, I was a mere 350 yards away, huddled inside a tent, oblivious to her struggle, concerned only for my own safety. The stain this has left on my psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a few months of grief and guilt-ridden self-reproach.

Jon Krakauer is a powerful storyteller. These are two of most insightful books that I've read in a long time.