Looky here: a book post!

While I continue to try and edit my pictures from Paris (this weekend, I promise), I thought I'd do a book post, which I haven't done in like, forever. Exciting, right?

Right now I'm finishing up  I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie by Pamela Des Barres. It's the story of how she became a rock groupie in the 60s and 70s. It's pretty good, but her writing style isn't my favorite. I think she wrote the book based on her diaries from the time, which is fine, but the writing is a little too odd/personal/immature at times. But it's a fun look at a world that really doesn't exist anymore. Also, I totes think I would have been a groupie had a been alive back then. Maybe.







I also  read a couple of books (and started a few more) while I was on my trip, thanks to the Kindle I got for my birthday.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak takes place in Nazi Germany during WW2 and it's about a young girl, Liesel Meminger, who steals books, her relationship with her foster parents, the neighborhood, and the Jewish boxer hiding in her home. I'm not entirely sure how to explain it, but it's narrated by Death as he observes her life, as well as the happenings of the war. So far, it's really good!








I read a couple of cheesy thriller/mystery novels as well (perfect vacation books) that were quite a lot of fun.

Stealing Faces by Michael Prescott was a good one about a serial killer who peels off women's faces when he kills them as a trophy. In this book he finds out he is being followed by a woman who might know his secrets and try to stop him. I liked the book a lot because the author only revealed things gradually, such as where people came from, pasts, jobs, etc. It was definitely one of those books I raced through to find out the ending, and I was not disappointed. Highly recommend.

The List by JA Konrath was another cheesy thriller, this time involving a conspiracy about cloning and famous historical figures. I honestly can't say too much without revealing the entire plot, but it was fun. There were some really great fight/action scenes that were a lot of fun to read as well. This book was what kept me entertained and distracted on my flight from hell home from Paris when nothing else would. Definitely a good read!

The Night Circus

A short post today, about books. Duh.

I first heard about The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern on Lainey then read this review on Salon and it sounded right up my alley: magic, love, CIRCUSES. But it's a pretty new release and I don't particularly like reading hardcovers because they are so heavy and bulky (lame, I know), not to mention expensive. But then I saw The Night Circus on a shelf and Barnes and Noble for 40% off and that baby had to be mine. So it is. After I get through at least half of the sixs book I'm reading, I will start The Night Circus and I'm excited. I mean, look at that awesome cover art, right?

In other news, I want these boots, like, soooo bad. I think their fringi-ness could save the world, don't you?

Rainy Days and Mondays...are the same (and some books)

Today was a rainy day and a Monday (Ha! See what I did right there?). To be exact, it was the first rainy day of the season, which means....drumroll please....fall has come to Marin County! And I am so happy because I love fall. First, we have Halloween, then my birthday (AKA The Most Important Day of the Year), then Thanksgiving (favorite holiday), then we roll right into winter and Christmas, then New Year's, both of which I will be spending in PARIS! Plus, lots of my absolutely awesome friends and family have birthdays this season, and I love birthdays!

But back to today. It was gloomy and rainy when I set off for work and it stayed that way, which I found delightful. For the first time, I actually had to use the fluorescent lights in my office because it was so gloomy outside. It rained and made all kinds of lovely noise on the skylights and the roof and made the whole day so much better. I drank hot herbal tea and wore boots and a comfy sweater and was just smiley-smiley all day. Ahhhh. Fall.

Now I sit all curled up under my warm covers with a sleeping, purring kitten by my side, trashy reality show on the TV and life is just very wonderful right now, in this very moment.

And now, books!

I was going to to a more detailed post, but I've decided just to day a list for today. The theme is young adult novels. People give YA a bad reputation (thanks Twilight!), but there are a lot of great YA novels out there. Give them a chance people!

Here are some goodies:

Looking for Alaska by John Green
An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
Just Listen by Sarah Dessen
Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty (first in a series)
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Identical by Ellen Hopkins

I've read all of these and they are SO GOOD. I love John Green because he writes how I would think. Sloppy Firsts was a hugely important book for me in high school, I can't even explain it. Identical is intense and so incredible. I feel like none of my descriptions will ever do the books justice, so I recommend at least reading a page or two next time you're in the bookstore. And, as always, let me know what you think or if you have any favorite YA novels.

Some fall reading perhaps?

Blog schedule: I am sticking to it. So, books. It should have been yesterday, but alas, kickboxing kicked my butt and I couldn't muster up the energy to turn on the computer. I instead passed out while watching The Bad Girls Club. I know. I know.

Gawker recently put out a list of new books coming for the fall, and I'm very interested in a couple of them, mainly these two:

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton
According to Gawker:
"Beaton's a Canadian-born web comic artist who satirizes famous people from history and popular culture and places them in absurd situations. Marcel Duchamp "pushes the boundaries" of his breakfast, Jane Austen deals with a friend who asks if the writing she's working on includes any "hunky dreamboats," and Nancy Drew talks to a skull. Surprising! Refreshing! Not your mother's "Garfield"!

I love me some historical satire and humor. I think this will be a good when I am in need of a laugh on a cold, dreary day.

 

Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label by Bill Adler, Dan Charnas, Rick Rubin, and Russell Simmons
According to Gawker
"A silver-anniversary retrospective and oral history of the hip-hop record label that brought us LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Jay-Z, Rihanna, and many other beloved American culture-product innovators. Founders Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons, label artists, and music executives share pics, flyers, ads, cover art, and anecdotes about the olden days. Annie Leibovitz pictures are in there, too."

I'm not even a big hip/hop rap person, but I find history of record labels and music history in general so fascinating. Especially one is important as Def Jam and it's contribution to the musical landscape.

Also, there are some books I've read that I always consider "fall" books. They have a darker feel, maybe a little gloomy and existentialist. I also strangely LOVE reading detective novels in the fall. So here are a few good ones I highly recommend.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
Contains three short stories: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. I love Paul Auster, he also wrote one of my favorite books,The Book of Illusions, and his stuff is just so well written and absorbing...I can't even describe how much I love his work. Anyway, the trilogy is a series of short detective stories but not quite. They're kind of like meta-detective fiction or mysteries about mysteries. They also are kind of absurd and weird and you will definitely be thinking about them when you've finished the book.

The Spellman Files by Liza Lutz
A family of private investigators in San Francisco who are very close knit, yet highly suspicious of one another and actually investigate each other most of the time. So funny, so real. I read this one last fall and really enjoyed it. It's the first in a series, so I think this fall I will have to get the next one to get my Spellman fix. Oh and I defintely laughed out loud many times while reading this one.





Are you reading anything exciting right now? Or do you have an recommendations for a good fall book?

Summer Reading Highlights

I thought I'd do a little post on the reading I've been doing this summer...and boy have I done quite a bit!

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Oh my goodness! So powerful and so beautiful, I was totally amazed. I read his first book, The Kite Runner, which depressed the hell out of me, so I was nervous to read another. Yes, this book definitely had a lot of sadness and pain as well, but it ends on a much happier note, showing the power of love and inner strength...cheesy I know. But I definitely recommend this one, especially as a summer read because I became so absorbed I finished it in about three days.

One Day by David Nicholls

The story of two friends, Emma and Dexter, as seen on the same day, July 15th, for twenty years. The story follows them as they graduate college, find jobs, success, failure, love, heartbreak...and it's wonderful. Very real in both it's happy moments and its sad ones. For the record, this is only the second book that has ever made me cry at the end. It was wonderful.






Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century by Sam Kasner and Mary Shoenberger

Chronicling the absolutely epic love story of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton...what more can I say? So romantic and informative! The authors did tons of research and were allowed access to personal letters and photographs of the couple. I have to say I loved this book, their story is so incredibly engrossing! Even though it's a nonfiction book, it read like fiction because part of me couldn't believe it was true...which is was. Amazing.





The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

This is the autobiography of Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a massive stroke that resulted in "locked in syndrome", he was completely paralyzed, except for movement in his right eye, and totally coherent. He dictated this book entirely by blinking in code! It was a incredibly beautiful and poetic look at his life, both past and present, as well as his musings on his condition. Absolutely wonderful.






I have also been re-reading the Harry Potter books, starting with number three, now I'm on Order of the Phoenix, though I forgot how much I hate Umbridge! I've also starting Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I'm loving it so far, though I'm only about 80 pages in. I also plan to finally get around to finishing the Hunger Games trilogy before the summer is over.

What are some books you have enjoyed this summer?

It All Ends

I'm alerting you now, this is a major nerd/geek post. Major. You have been warned.

Deep breath...the final Harry Potter hits theaters in just over two weeks. To quote the tag line of the film: "It All Ends." And I'm kind of a mess about it.

I know that the final book came out four years ago. I know exactly how it ends. But I'm still so not ready for the actual end. Because even though the books ended, I still had the movies to look forward to, which always added to the overall wonderful-ness of the books. And you have to admit, the Harry Potter films have be incredible adaptations. Everything is always exactly as I pictured it while I read the books. Especially Snape...sigh. How awesome is Alan Rickman as Snape? Isn't he exactly how you imagined him to be?

The Harry Potter books have been a big deal to me ever since they came out. For the last three, I actually got my books at midnight on the release night and read them straight through, without stopping. When Sirius and Dumbledore died in the fifth and sixth, respectively, I actually threw the book across the room (both times!) because I was so upset. Then I cried at the end of the seventh. I remember finishing it and actually not knowing what do with myself because it was over. 

I have always had a very vivid imagination and have always been a very, very avid reader. My favorite books when I was young were always fairy tales, and the games I played usually involved witches, fairies, magic, etc. When my mom gave the first three Harry Potters, I was completely enthralled from the beginning, because they had everything I ever wanted in a book. I devoured them. Then, every two years before the new one would come out, I would re-read all the previous books, to make sure I was all caught up.

And now its over. If you've read the seventh book, you know that the wonderful J.K. Rowling ended it in such a way that there will definitely be no more books. But the ending was incredible. And perfect. Sigh.

And now there are no more movies to supplement the end of the books. I really am sad. The Harry Potter books are definitely a defining piece of pop culture for my generation, to the point were I honestly think they helped shape the devoted fans (like myself) who read each and every one with all the excitement I did. Because they are about so much more than just wizards and magic. I wonder if any books from the past inspired this kind of frenzy and if any will in the future, but I'm so glad I got to experience them from the beginning.

I really do have so much else to say about the end, but I'll stop now, because I know that some people find Harry Potter silly or just children's literature, but please admit, they have been a big part of life for the last decade, right?

I leave you with the preview for part two, I hope you're as excited (and a little sad) as I am.

P.S. I'll have a book review of One Day up in the next few days too!

Fear of Symmetry

I finally have another book review for you! No, it's not Babel Tower, which I just cannot seem to finish for the life of me.

Instead, I got sidetracked by Her Fearful Symmetry, which is the second novel by one of my most favoritest authors, Audrey Niffenegger. She wrote what is probably my all time favorite book, The Time Traveler's Wife, and it is AMAZING. Go read it now, then read Her Fearful Symmetry.

Anyhoo, Symmetry is about twins and ghosts and love and haunting, all set in an eerie old apartment building next to Highgate Cemetery in London. A woman dies of cancer and leaves her apartment to he very odd, yet very pretty and interesting, twin nieces and the story is what unfolds after they take up residence in this strange beautiful place.

The story is very complex and at times incredibly sad and haunting, but all so beautiful. I love the Niffenegger writes; I just want to crawl into her words and live there forever. Not to mention now I really want to go check out Highgate Cemetery. It just seems so fascinating.

But I must warn readers, it's not a book that makes you feel particularly happy and the ending isn't necessarily happy either. Yet it is still one of the most interesting and gripping novels I have read in a while. Niffenegger just seems to have this gift for creating a story that you might never had thought of and then going about telling it in such a unique way.

It really was a lovely book that, even after I'd finished it, was still thinking about the story for a long time. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something a little less ordinary, but still completely wonderful.

Hey now, what's this? A book review? No way!

I finally, finally have a book review. Yes, it's been over six months, but I got one. And it is good. The book, that is.

I've been reading Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt, and so far I'm liking it much more than Possession, so that's really good. But this review is not about either of those books. I might have gotten a little sidetracked. Which tends to happen a lot with me and books, you know. See, I finally got my act together and got a Yolo County library card and I went and checked out a book I've been meaning to read for awhile now. And that book is The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy.

And it was a great book. Really, I stayed up way past my bedtime last night in order to finish it, because the ending...wow. So cray cray. I'm also a total sucker for a good murder mystery, thanks to my grandmother, who started me on mysteries at a young age and let me watch Murder She Wrote as a kid. Because don't all 8 year olds want to watch Angela Landsbury solve a small town murder? Thought so. I think this is what started my obsession with procedural crime shows. Seriously, I watch so many and I never get sick of them: Law and Order, CSI, Bones, Criminal Minds..it never ends.

Anyhoo, back to the book review portion of this post. So The Black Dahlia takes place in Los Angeles in the 1940s and centers around the infamous unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short AKA the Black Dahlia, basically one of the most famous unsolved cases is LAPD history. It's narrated by a cop, Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert, and starts of with his not to great ascent in the police department until he is partnered with Lee Blanchard and they are assigned to the Black Dahlia case in 1947. The story then chronicles the exhaustive and extensive investigation by the LAPD, with nearly 200 officers on the case and how the Black Dahlia begins to take over the lives of Bucky and Lee, eventually leading to their spectacular downfalls. Throw in a mysterious woman from a messed up wealthy family, gangsters, depraved sexual tendencies, lots of police corruption, and tragedy and you have one great neo-noir thriller.

I have to say, Ellroy really made this story come alive for me while I was reading it. He uses correct the correct lingo of the time, even when it is highly racist (this was the 1940s, after all, pre-civil rights), he gets pretty gruesome when describing the Dahlia's death, (which I will not detail here as there was some pretty gross stuff), and he clearly did research into the actual murder investigation in order to give the story some accuracy. But, it still is fiction, after all. Not to mention it has one hell of an ending. Lots of twists and turns, lots of destruction both physically and emotionally, violence, intrigue. It was awesome.

The Black Dahlia is like many other mystery novels, in that there is some portions of the book which are kind of filler feeling, like recounting what Bucky does when he gets of work. Do I really care about that? No. But does it kind of add to the story? Yes. Plus the first few chapters are kind of boring in that they just set up to show how Bucky came to be a police officer and be partnered with Lee. It's kind of interesting, but I just wanted to get to the murder, which does come as a surprise and right when you are ready for some action in the story.

This book was definitely one of the better mysteries I have read in recent years, so I highly recommend it, especially for a good summer read. This book was also the first in Ellroy's LA Quartet, books let in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s that showed Los Angeles as a hotbed of political corruption and depravity. I really like noir and neo-noir mysteries, so I plan on reading the rest of the books as well. If The Black Dahlia is any indication, I think I'm going to really like them, too.

Now, back to Babel Tower and maybe one day I'll finally write a review for that one as well!

I'm famous, so obviously I can write amazing novels

So I know I'm not the first critic of these celebrities turned writers, but I just had to say my part. Hilary Duff, Nicole Richie, Lauren Conrad, Pamela Anderson, and now SNOOKI from the Jersey Shore, are all "writers." Well, we all know what that means. They maybe say a few sentences in a meeting, then a ghost writer takes it from there. And these books end up on bestseller lists, maybe not at the top, but they are still there. Sometimes I hate people. Who is buying these books?

I can bitch and moan all I want about these people becoming writers and nothing will happen, but it still really bothers me. These are people who probably never grew up wanting to be writers, they just had the opportunity handed to them along with their "fame". I mean, SNOOKI? Seriously? She's famous for being on a shitty reality show on which all she does is get drunk and hook up with greasy guys. And she gets a book contract? NO. I could go off on tangents about every single one of these women, but I will not, at the risk of looking petty and immature.

I don't think I'm some amazing writer, but there are plenty of people out there who are and deserve a chance. Not Lauren Conrad, not Hilary Duff, not Nicole Richie, not Pamela Anderson, and not Snooki. They don't need the income from a book that they didn't write. Especially books with plots that are so cliche and writing that is barely a step up from high school or the Twilight series.

Come on people, skip these manufactured novels and read something worthwhile and interesting.

Bret Easton Ellis

I don't know why I haven't been posting...too much going on I guess. School, work, life in general. I also don't have anything to say right now...

Read Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis. So amazing. Also very graphic and kind of depressing, but I love his writing, because it's so distinctive. He describes certain horrible things so flippant and kind of detached, that it makes them seem more real...I don't know if I'm describing his writing accurately, but he definitely has a way of keeping me hooked and continually thinking about certain points in the novel.  

Imperial Bedrooms is a sequel to his 1985 novel Less Than Zero, which is one of my favorite books. It is narrated by Clay, the main character from the first novel, and and takes place twenty five years later. Ellis uses a post modern literary device, in that Less Than Zero was an actual novel written by a friend of Clay's in the eighties, but did not necessarily portray Clay in an entirely truthful light. This allows Clay in the present to be more fully developed and we learn more about his narcissism, sadistic and masochistic tendencies, as well as his exploitative personality that I didn't necessarily get from Less Than Zero. This Clay is extremely unlikeable, but at the same time utterly fascinating. It was a great book, but definitely not for everyone.

I just started reading The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and it's very, very absorbing, so I'll make sure to post about it soon as well.

Ta ta for now...I must go study some francais!

A little summer reading

Okay. Update time. It's taken me over a week to get back on my usual sleeping and eating schedule and it's been crazy. But now, onto my favorite: BOOKS!

While in China, I didn't exactly have much time to read, so despite being there a month, I only made it through two books: The Secret History by Donna Tartt and The Carrie Diaries by Candace Bushnell.

The Secret History is an extremely beautiful and complex novel centered around a group of six classics students at a small New Hampshire college. One of the six, Richard, is the narrator and he is reflecting on the events that led to the murder of another member of the group. The author uses a format in which she introduces the murder and the murderers in the prologue, then the rest of the novel recounts how the characters actually came to commit the crime, kind a murder mystery in reverse. Other than tell the story of these six characters, the book also has, thanks to lots of literary and classic references and allusions, wider reaching themes and ideas about beauty: literary beauty versus the beauty of reality, social constraints and one's desire to be free, and the relationships between people. All in all, it's an AMAZING book, one that I want to go back and read again, because even though I understood it, I feel like it is a book that I can learn something from additional readings.

The next book is The Carrie Diaries by Candace Bushnell, which is a prequel to Sex and the City, following the life of Carrie Bradshaw during her senior year of high school in a small New England town. It's a young adult novel and it was okay. I don't know, I've read a few of Candace Bushnell's books, and I really want to like them because I love Sex and the City, but I never do. Maybe it's because I didn't read it, I listened to it on my iPod, and whoever was reading it had an annoying voice and made ALL the characters sounds so, well, annoying. And the Carrie in the book did not seem like the Carrie of the show that I love. I don't recommend it.

For good young adult, John Green all the way. I already recommended Looking for Alaska, and I just read An Abundance of Katherines. So funny and real. To explain the plot is confusing: washed up child prodigy, pudgy Judge Judy loving best friend, a road trip, and 19 ex girlfriends all named Katherine. Oh and somehow they end up in Tennessee hunting feral hogs at one point. Totally off the wall yet totally real at the same time. A great read!

Now I'm attempting to read Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. One of my favorite stories on film, so I owe it to Miss Mitchell to read her epic novel.  I'm 300 pages into the 1000 page monster and I do love it. Especially the scenes between Scarlett and Rhett Butler. Utterly gripping. Also, there is sooooooooooooo much description I really honestly feel like I am in Civil War Atlanta. More updates as I work my way through.

I'm also planning on reading Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms. It's the sequel to Less Than Zero and features all the characters 25 years later. I loved Less Than Zero so much. I love Bret Easton Ellis. I want to write like him sometimes, because what he write is just....amazing His books are messed up, strange, haunting, yet always leave me wanting to read more.

 That's all for now folks! Happy reading!

Literary ADD

Since I've finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I have had literary ADD. I also had an extremely intense paper to write, so I've been distracted needless to say.

The quarter is winding down, 2 weeks of class left until finals. Until then, I have to stay focused on school so I can just get done with it all. 

I did start three new books though, because of the literary ADD and not being able to choose what I want to read. So currently I'm reading Labyrinth by Kate Mosse, Saturday by Ian McEwan, and am working my way through The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. I've had an uncorrected reader's copy of Labyrinth for about 5 years, from when I worked at Book Passage, and I am just now reading, but so far it's pretty intriguing. I always love a good historical epic. Ian McEwan is one of my favorite authors, and Saturday has been on my list for quite some time. 80 pages in and loving every minute of his elegant prose. As for William Blake, he is probably my favorite poet, but I've never read his complete works. I love his words and an enjoying with elegant, Romantic poetry.

That's all for now folks! Happy reading!

 

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Wow...been awhile. School chaos.

Like I said last time, I got sidetracked from How Soccer Explains the World by The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. OH. MY. GOD. It was amazing. I could not stop reading it; literally took me 4 days to finish between work and school. I even turned down watching Avatar in HD to read.

I have not read a book that kept me so enthralled for so long. The last one I can remember is Twilight, and that was shit writing, I just liked the vampires.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is NOT shit Stephenie Meyer writing. It's perfect crime novel writing, at least for me. Keeps you hooked, no flowery, existential shit, and witty all at once.

The plot is quite complicated, so I leave it to my fave, Wikipedia to summarize:

Mikael Blomkvist, a middle-aged investigative journalist who writes for the magazine Millennium, loses a libel case against corrupt Swedish industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström and is sentenced to three months in jail.

Before beginning his sentence, Blomkvist is hired by Henrik Vanger, the aged former CEO of a group of companies owned by a wealthy dynasty. Vanger wants him to solve the disappearance, thirty-seven years ago, of Vanger's great-niece when she was sixteen. Vanger is convinced that the girl was killed by someone in his family. Blomkvist is ultimately helped in his quest by Lisbeth Salander, a young punk who has been victimized or misunderstood by those in authority throughout her whole life, but who is also a brilliant computer hacker. The unlikely couple become a classic detective pair.

It is one of the best crime novels I have ever read. Please read it, and the other two books in the series, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked a Hornets Nest . Lisbeth Salander (the titular girl) is such a bad ass. Not evil, just follows her own rules and is not one to be fucked with. Love her and her crazy, violent tendencies. She makes up for the sometime annoying-ness of the protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist. But this book is a definite summer, really all year round, read. Do it.

The proper name is football

Finished How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer today. Got sidetracked with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson, I'll talk about that later. (SO AMAZING)

Soccer was quite interesting, I liked how each section was titled "How soccer explains..." then subdivided into five smaller sections. I like nonfiction writers who organize their work in a way that works with my obsessively organized mind. He also had firsthand experience in the stadiums of many of the clubs; he took a leave of absence from his job at the magazine New Republic and traveled the world and experiencing rabid soccer fandom up close. He went to Brazil, Bosnia, Italy, Iran, England, Scotland, Bulgaria, making one shocking discovery after another. There was the blatant anti-Catholicism in Scotland, the sex segregation in Iran, and the promoted fan violence in Serbia.

What Foer does is use soccer to examine the greater problems of the world through soccer and how many cultures use soccer as their release and as a channel for their frustrations.

I could go into lots of detail, but to be honest, while I found the book interesting while I was reading it, I find that many things, mainly the little details, left my brain after I stopped reading. I'm not saying that I didn't learn anything, because I did. I just couldn't tell you names and dates with any accuracy. At all.

What the book did inspire me to do was to educate myself about some of the issues Foer brings up, such as the Balkan Wars in Europe and power of Silvio Berlusconi. I don't know much and still don't, so I want to learn more and reading this book is what piqued my interest. Any book that actually makes me want to learn more is very okay by me. Isn't that the point of all books?

Not So Possessed

So I started reading Possession by A.S. Byatt a few weeks ago before spring break, and I'm like 200 pages in and I just don't like it. I hate that. It just has not gripped in the way a good book is supposed to. And that makes me sad because I wanted to love this boo SO much...I am usually always game for a period love story, especially one that involves investigation and intrigue. But this just didn't have it for me.


I don't want to be too critical of Byatt, because she IS a very well respected author, and I've never read her before, but I felt she spent WAY too much time describing details that I felt weren't necessary, like every room in Maude's flat. In general, I also felt that her descriptions were dry, and lacking a certain pizazz that I desperately wanted. It also didn't help that she had an extremely long chapter consisting of nothing but letters from the 19th century between the fictional historical figures the two main characters, current day scholars Maude (oh, and I HATE this name!) and Roland, are concerned with. The letters are supposed to illustrate a love affair, but they start off so BORING, and even in the end, the passion and love are still so restrained and repressed. Maybe I'm just too American for this book. I wanted more passion, intrigue, and excitement.

So now I'm switching gears, going to read some nonfiction. I just started How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer...I'm only about 40 pages in, but I'm loving it! More later as I continue to read.

Not much else planned for this weekend; I'm home in Marin with my papa, going to the Asian Art Museum tomorrow, gonna do some homework, laundry and catch up on some Lost, Bones, Chuck, and Modern Family as well. Hope all y'all enjoy your Easters!

It's favorite books time

So I'm currently reading Possession by A.S. Byatt, and it's totally awesome, but I am no where near finishing it. So I decided to do a post about a few of my favorite books. Today it will be novels.

1. The Time Traveler's Wife- Audrey Niffinegger
2. White Oleander- Janet Fitch
3. The Lovely Bones- Alice Sebold
4. Wonder When You'll Miss Me- Amanda Davis
5. Water for Elephants- Sarah Gruen
6. Stardust- Neil Gaiman
7. Case Histories- Kate Atkinson
8. The Vampire Lestat- Anne Rice
9. Atonement- Ian McEwan
10. The Reader- Bernard Schlink

These are my top 10 favorite novels. There are many more that I have read and loved, but these are the ones that will always be on my bookshelf.

I'm going to do more top 10 lists, history books, current nonfiction, biographies, poetry, etc. Hope you love it!