Running in Heels

Running in Heels
By Anna Maxted
420 pages

I never really figured out why Anna Maxted is considered such a great writer, but I also wanted to read all the time. Maybe that's it.

Natalie Miller goes through about every classic chick-lit situation imaginable in this book, spurred by her best friend's wedding. As Babs becomes less of 27-year-old Natalie's life, other people and forces begin to step in, causing Natalie to fall into a whirlwind of men and drugs as her own problems come to the surface. Running in Heels follows her through her descent and her attempt to crawl back to a better life.

Seven wonderful (and not so wonderful) books

In no particular order, here's what I've been up to since October. (I may have forgotten one in here.) I apologize if these aren't great reviews. It's been a while for some of these books. E-mail me if you want to know more.

EDIT: I did forget one. It's here now.

Bollywood Nights
By Shobhaa De
332 pages

Aasha Rani, a young Indian movie star, is a mess. Introduced into the corrupt world of Bollywood as a young teen, she learns only one way to get ahead. This book seems repetitive and far-stretched, even if a few scenes are nearly outstanding.



Giants in the Earth
By O.E. Rölvaag
531 pages

A family of Norwegian settlers moves West with friends into Dakota Territory to make a life on the land, encountering many of the prairie's perils along the way (bonus points for no memorable snake moments). It takes place in southeastern South Dakota, so the area is familiar to me, making it more interesting. It's a heavy read, but also much like an older Laura Ingalls Wilder novel.

Random note: The second thing you get when searching for this on BarnesandNoble.com is Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
By Philip Gourevitch
353 pages

I've been working on this since my sophomore year of college. It's wonderfully written, but the nature of the book makes it a hard read at times. The story of Hotel Rwanda is included, but the book captures the stories a number of individual Rwandans, while still tracing the genocide as a whole.

Alice in Wonderland
By Lewis Carroll
124 pages

Normally I enjoy children's classics, but I really had to push my way through this one. I tried going into "Through the Looking Glass" as well because I heard people talking about it's deeper implications. In the end, however, I gave up. Alice was more bratty 7-year-old than I can handle.



See Jane Write: A Girl's Guide to Writing Chick Lit
By Sarah Mylnowski and Farrin Jacobs
187 pages

What started as an impulse buy during a regular "What do I want to be when I grow up?" crisis became possibly the best book I've read on fiction. If things had been explained to me like this in high school, literature classes would have been a much happier place for me. While the book fixates on writing chick lit, it has practical writing and life advice throughout. If I ever teach English or journalism, I'll likely use selections from this book because of its down-to-earth approach.

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
By Elizabeth Gilbert
331 pages

So fantastic! The first time I went to buy this book, I got skeptical and put it back. Reading it, however, was definitely the better choice. It's clear, easy to read and thought-provoking. Although we can't all pick up and travel for a year, it's nice to think about some of the life-impacting things that such trips bring about without leaving home.

The Golden Compass
By Philip Pullman
399 pages

Another bandwagon/children's classic/on-sale book I hadn't read. I didn't find all the controversy, but it's a quick read (written for tweens to young teens) that it's worth reading. The story and characters are well developed and thick enough to keep you reading. Lyra becomes drawn from her carefree life into a moral and mortal battle amid armored bears, the Magisterium, friends and family.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

by Mark Haddon
240-ish pages
Time to read: about 5 hours, straight through

Christopher, an Autistic 15-year-old who is brilliant at math but horrible at social interaction, finds his neighbor's dog dead and sets out to solve the mystery of who killed it. Along the way, he finds out more about his parents and himself than the dog. A surprisingly funny book (even though there are definitely sad parts) and a really great read.

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

This took me about a week to read, but I started it during finals week. It's long, at about 500 pages.
The novel is fictional but based on the life of a Louisiana governor who started good but became corrupt. It’s told through the eyes of a journalist who first covered his campaign and then became a political handyman. Definitely worth a read- one of the most honest novels about American politics out there. Warren's poetic style, like Faulkner-lite, is a little rough at first but I really started to enjoy it as the book went on. So Southern ;).

Possession by A.S. Byatt

Length: 555 pages
Time to read: about two weeks- it was for a literature class

This novel is the really original story of modern-day scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Roland, a scholar of the poet R.H. Ash, discovers drafts of a passionate letter, scandalous since everyone thought Ash was happily married. He works with Maud, who studies the poet Christabel LaMotte, to establish a link between the poets. They find more letters, and the story takes off as they try to figure out what happens.
The novel, which is a combination of letters, poetry, biography and regular narrative, bills itself as a romance but it's more classical-quest than modern, and really great for it. It's long and the beginning takes awhile to get going, but the end picks up. It reminded me a tiny bit of the DaVinci Code, only it's much more intelligent and it has (gasp!) character development. If you like poetry, you'll love Possession.

Books of the Year

The Kansas City Star recently published its top 100 books of 2007.

The New York Times' list of 100 notable books will be published
Dec. 2. Online, the list links to the book reviews. Lists are available back to 1999. The Times' top 10 list will be published online Wednesday.

My Month of October

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
By Alexander McCall Smith
240 pages

I've never been much of a mystery reader, but this series' lead detective has been called the "Miss Marple of Africa." Mme. Precious Ramotswe takes her inheritance and opens a detective agency in Botswana, becoming the country's only female private detective. The book is almost a collection of short stories, but a few larger cases tie the novel together. I didn't rush out to buy the next book in the series, but I would consider reading more in the future because of the vivid scenery and characters the author uses.

The Cry of the Dove
By Fadia Faqir
304 pages

I was loving this book until I realized I was still reading exposition 200 pages in. The rising action starts late, and what is hyped as the main action of the book is even later. The ending left a bad taste in my mouth. This book, just published this month, may succeed from a literary standpoint, but for the casual reader, it was a bit too long.




The Ivy Chronicles
By Karen Quinn
342 pages

Classic chick lit at its finest. Quinn uses many traditional chick lit themes — starting over, self discovery, love and men — but an older and more composed character in Ivy Ames, a former corporate office queen who begins her own business advising desperate parents on the strenuous admissions process to New York's finest kindergarten programs. This was a quick read (less than a week, and I worked overtime) that has more to it than most formulaic chick lit.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Eats, Shoots & Leaves
By Lynne Truss
204 pages
Time to read: Too long (About 2 weeks)

Like any great book about grammar, Eats, Shoots & Leaves has a good deal of bite. Truss rags on everyone — especially Americans — for relaxing standards of punctuation while exploring usage and anomalies of commas, semicolons, periods (or full stops, as they say in Britain), etc. It's an informative book, especially because Truss discusses the differences in American and British usage, but a lot of the grammatical knowledge is basic if you've taken a good copy-editing course. Luckily, Truss makes up for that with her intelligent writing that made me turn to the dictionary at times. (Most of the words I was curious about weren't in my two paperback dictionaries, so I suggest having a computer, large dictionary or pencil and paper nearby if you care about such things.) This is one of the better modern reads about grammar-related issues.

Good Omens

Author: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Length: 369 pages
Time to read: Approximately two weeks but I work two jobs

I loved this book. It moves quickly and it's very funny. Basically, it is about the Apocalypse and how an angel and a demon try to stop it from occurring. There are lots of little threads that run through the book and the authors very neatly refer back to them and tie everything together at the end. It's a very enjoyable read and I would recommend it if you are looking for some nice light fiction with a bit more substance that chick lit.

How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls

How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls
By Zoey Dean
293 pages
Time to read: Less than a week, while moving

I wanted an easy read for my first week of work. It was.

How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls follows Megan Smith, a highly indebted Yale graduate, as she struggles to stay on her feet by tutoring (and while tutoring) the infamous Baker twins, billed as the new Paris Hilton and friends. Their partying ways begin to catch up to them, however, and Duke officials tell them they would have to actually earn their way into the freshman class. Their grandmother hires Megan to help them get there.

Megan spends most of the book in Palm Beach — a distance from her East Coast life — and begins to feel pulled between her two lives ... and the two sides of the twins. The plot is fair, but Dean falls short of the characters' full potential. The twins are hard to follow (something Megan could agree with) and not nearly as nasty as one would expect from filthy rich girls.

A good read, but nothing remarkable.