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.

Songbird

Songbird
By: Walter Zacharius
Time to read: 1 week
Pages: 291

"Songbird" is about War World II and the story of a girl just becoming a woman during Hitler's reign. Mia Levy is a snob before the war starts, but as her surroundings change and she and her family are forced to live in degradation and despair, she realizes how lucky she once was. Somehow she makes the right friends throughout her time in Poland and makes it out of the worst areas. After making her way out and finding love briefly in America, she returns to Europe as a spy for America.

Her story is tragic, but somehow, the way it's told, you don't feel as deeply for her as you do other heroines you've read about trapped in this crazy time. The author chooses to skip over so of what could have been the most detailed and interesting scenes just to skip ahead or to save himself the trouble of writing it. As the CEO of a publishing company, you'd think he'd have better editors that would tell him to write those scenes.

All in all, it was a good read, just not as good as it could have been.

The Billboard Madonna

Title: The Billboard Madonna
Author: some crappy guy
Pages; 320
Time to read: a week

I got this book two summers ago in the boulder library when they gave away books that no one checked out anymore. That should have been my hint: THE BOOK HADN'T BEEN CHECKED OUT SINCE 1993...this was 2005.

The story seems cool: guy hit and run kills this girl, he is haunted by her....he's an ad. exec so he puts her into his highway safety campaign.

The book was not good. I had to dredge through it to finish it. A 300 page book shouldn't take me a week to read...but this one did. I wouldn't suggest it.

Ever.

The Time Traveler's Wife

The Time Traveler's Wife
By Audrey Niffenegger
535 pages
Time to read: About a week
Claim to fame: One of People's Top 10 Books of 2003

I barely believed the person who told me this was Niffenegger's first novel. It is well-written and concise, while still being an enchanting love story.

The aptly named The Time Traveler's Wife is about a time traveler, Henry, and his wife, Clare, and their romance that spans most of their lives. The book opens when the two meet in the present and continues through vignettes of their time together as Henry travels, uncontrollably, through time.

The Time Traveler's Wife was great when read in longer chunks, but also good when I snuck in individual chapters and vignettes at work or on the subway. Even so, the book is captivating enough that I rarely wanted to put it down after only a few pages. Recommended for anytime, anywhere.

Hi!

Hi, I'm Darla, the new book blog member! Jodi (or should I say Jodith ;) and I interned together in Tulsa this summer. I am going to be a senior at Mizzou, but I'm from Colorado. I 'm studing journalism, specifically design, and geography. I love the color green, road trips, and house plants. Yeah.

A friend and I were going to try the 100-Book Challenge this year, but school got in the way, so I've only read 21 thus far. Maybe I can do 50? We'll see. I want to get back to the hardcore reading days of my youth, so hopefully this blog will give me some good suggestions. My all-time favorites include Harry Potter (of course) and the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon- long and a little romance-y but so much fun to read. I post the books I read for the challenge on my Xanga (pinkflamingodar), but here are some of my favorites from this year:

Lust for Life by Irving Stone- A big biographical novel about Vincent VanGogh. It is based based on letters to his brother, Theo, so the events and what he was thinking are fairly accurate, but the diologe leaves something to be desired. My only complaint is the author added in some (obviously, and admittedly) fictitious scenes that detracted from the storyline. Overall a very good portrait of his tortured, genius life. If you love his art and have some time on your hands, it's a good read.

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel- this book is amazing. It's about an Indian (like the country) boy who is Hindu, Muslim and Christian and who gets trapped in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger after the ship carrying his family and their zoo animals to Canada sinks. As if that wasn't enough of a premise... it has a point, and it's about life and philosophy and all that good stuff.

Home to Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani- this is the fourth (I think) in a series about a pharmacist who lives in Virginia but is really Italian. The books follow her life as she discovers her heritage, has a family, etc. The characters in this are all great, I always miss them after I finish one of the books. This is the best of Trigiani's stuff, I think. Quick and easy, but fun.

Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein- This book is a compilation of transcripts about the life of Edie Sedgwick, a socialite in the 60's who inspired lots of Andy Warhol's art. It's amazing! Even though her life is pretty messed-up and sad, it explains a lot about Warhol's pop art and that whole movement, and how it all sort of fell apart in the '70s... yeah, drugs.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote- I saw the movie Capote last year, and I had to read this. It was really good, even though I know he dramatized some of the story it didn't feel like it. He's an amazing writer and I couldn't put it down. It's about two men in Kansas who murder a whole family for no apparent reason, then are on the run for awhile. Sort of journalism, sort of not, but definitely a good read.

Nice to meet y'all! (Yes, I got that in Oklahoma...)

Nineteen Minutes

Nineteen Minutes
By: Jodi Picoult
Time to read: A few days
Pages: about 350

I absolutely love Jodi Picoult. I have read every book she's written, and for the most part, loved every single one of them. Of course, this book is no different.

Josie Cormier has it all. She is beautiful, in the popular crowd, and has the boyfriend that everyone is jealous of. Peter Houghton is the complete opposite of Josie. He is bullied relentlessly and only has one friend. When the two were children they used to be the best of friends, but as Josie became more popular, she began to remove her self from Peter. Which, she may have realized on March 6, 2007, that this may have been a big mistake on her part.

On that morning, Peter walks into his high school carrying 4 guns, and shoots and kills 10 people...injuring countless others. Every single life in the small New Hampshire town of Sterling is changed forever. Josie lives through the massacre, but her boyfriend Matt is killed.

As par to all Picoult books, a long court case is involved. At first, Josie's mother, Alex, was the presiding judge, but she had to remove herself when the lawyers threatened to put Josie on the stand. Also, another trait of Picoult books, a twist at the end that isn't predicted, is included in Nineteen Minutes.

This book really makes the reader think about their actions. High school may have been a long time ago for some of Picoult's readers, but to see Peter treated the way he is in this book is heartbreaking. I wanted to call my mom, who is a high school principal, and beg her to not just let students who are bullied fall into the crowd like Peter. Nineteen Minutes came out a little bit before the Virginia Tech shootings this fall, so I think that only makes the book more powerful in this day and age.

Read this book, read Jodi's other books...just enjoy her great writing and story weaving.

The Divide

The Divide
Author: Nicholas Evans
Pages: 403
How long: 5 days

So, I'm a huge fan of Nicholas Evans for the only reason that he also wrote "The Horse Whisperer." This book comes in a close second to it. "The Divide" is the type of story that gives away the ending at the beginning and then backtracks to show you how the end came about. I see no other way for Evans to have written this book, but it still would have been that much more dramatic and that much more hard hitting if he could have saved the climax for the end.

That being said, it's still a really enjoyable, emotional, fast read. The story is about a family of four: Ben and Sarah and their two children, Abbie and Josh. The marriage has settled into that routine lifestyle where each of them play games to piss each other off because they know how to do it best. Their love life is so bleak that Ben now only focuses on his proudest asset, Abbie. The same goes for Sarah and Josh. Still, Sarah believes Ben is the love of her life and would never think otherwise. However, Ben can't stop thinking about how crappy his marriage is.

The explosions start when Ben meets a woman during his family vacation and, within a year, walks away from his family for his happiness. The revelation of this to his family is heartbreaking and powerful.

Because Abbie had that amazing relationship every daughter hopes to have with her father, Ben's actions became the catalyst to Abbie's dramatic change. Once the sweet girl everyone loved, she becomes enveloped in anger. The author's shameless portrait of her pain and how powerful it affected her was devastating to read.

What Abbie starts doing to forget her pain makes her a wanted criminal. How the family deals with her actions and how Abbie is finally stopped is played out in the rest of the book. I'd go on, but I don't want to spoil anything else in case you do read it.

But if you're curious to see how one person can so quickly become a completely different person, read this book. If you're interested in seeing how family is ripped apart and slowly, ever so slowly, makes its way back to loving each other, then read this book. And lastly, if love a great read, read this book.

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner
By: Khaled Hosseini
Time to read: 1 week
Pages: 371

Wow, this book was an amazing read – harrowing in its straight-forward truth and blatant candor. Hosseini shows Afghanistan and its character through a group of characters and how they've changed over the course of forty or so years. It also shows how much turmoil Afghanistan has been through and how long the country has suffered.

Amir tells the story of his friendship with Hassan and how their different beliefs and ancestry (one a Sunni Muslim, the other a Shi'a) effect both of them while growing up. Unforgivable acts take place, yet, somehow, the people who do these acts find redemption, and deservingly so. At times you will find it excruciating to read this tale, but it is worth it in the end. The hate you feel at points eventually subsides, and the reader too wishes for Amir to find peace.

I don't want to give too much away, so I'll leave you with this quote from Isabel Allende: "This is one of those unforgettable stories that stays with you for years. All the great themes of literature and of life are the fabric of this extraordinary novel: love, honor, guilt, fear, redemption."

Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind
By: Margaret Mitchell
Time to read: 3 weeks
Pages: 1024

This is one of my all-time favorite books. Next to Harry Potter, which this was a time filler to read before I start Deathly Hollows.

I've always been interested in the Civil War from a Southern point of view, and this book is the epitome of Southern living in the 1860s. The book opens in 1861 with a 16-year old Scarlett O'Hara flirting with twin brothers on the front porch of her large, Southern plantation, Tara. The book progresses through the war years, Reconstruction and then post-reconstruction time.

Scarlett moves from Tara, which is 25 miles south of Atlanta, to Atlanta during the war. Much to her dismay she is forced to work in hospitals and help dying soldiers. She flees Atlanta right before Sherman burns it to the ground on his infamous march to the sea.

After the war she is forced to completly rebuild her family's plantation..for the first time in her life she is forced to work along side the black people who have always done her bidding. Then she is in constant fear of Carpetbaggers or Yankees coming to kill, rape or steal everything that she has worked so hard to build up after the war.

I won't say too much about the love triangle in the book between Scarlett, Rhett and Ashley. Essentially she thinks she loves Ashley, and she realizes too late that it's really Rhett she loves.

I love this book a lot, and I hadn't read it in about two or three years. But re-reading it as a more mature reader made me able to better analyze the characters and their motives. Rhett is nothing but a cynical ass hole, who deeply loves Scarlett. If Scarlett lived today, she would be some big wig corporate exec., but since she lived in the 1860s, she was considered 'fast,' 'manly' and many other things. But, I admire her just the same.

I'm not much for the movie Gone with the Wind, but the book is great. If you like historical fiction I would definately reccommend it!

Four stars!

Middlesex

Book: Middlesex
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages: 529
Time to read: more than a month
Claim to fame: Oprah's Book Club

This book isn't exactly a page-turner, at least not until the last two or three chapters, but it is interesting in how the author writes the book. He interupts himself so many times in this story that you'd think you'd get annoyed and want to throw the book down, but you don't. You don't because each interuption gives you another look into some part history, whether it's the author's history or world history. It's a facination read in that sense.

"Middlesex" is about a person, Callie/Cal, who is born a hermaphrodite. As a child, no one knew anything was wrong, so she grew up as a girl. To be honest, most of the book, Callie is present. In order to get to the present of what is happening, the author carries the reader back to Greece, where her grandparents grew up. Eugenides slowly tells the story about how Callie/Cal came to be by explaining the details of first her grandparents' lives, then her mother's, father's, aunt's and aunt's husband's lives, and finally comes to Callie growing up. Throughout this, each chapter opens with Cal speaking about his life at the current time (age 25-35?).

To be forthcoming, this book involves love in all forms: incest, inbreeding, homosexuality, hermaphroditism, etc. One thing I will credit the author with is writing about love from all these angles and never writing about it like it's wrong. It made the family in the story seem that much more real because they were the ones living this life and if they didn't believe they're feelings were right, then the reader would have had much more difficulty reading this story.

If you're looking for a long, in-depth read, try this book out. Otherwise, it may not be your cup of tea.

Hey, guys!

Ok, to start, my name is Margaret. I just graduated from Ball State University in Muncie, IN with a degree in theatre. I'm currently living in Fort Wayne, IN. I am a waitress at Applebee's and the head marching instructor for the high school I graduated from. In November, I will be moving to Washington, D.C. No, I have no idea what I will be doing once I move there.

Books I have read recently and would recommend:

If Minds Had Toes
This book is about a teenage boy who travels to the World of Ideas and meets a bunch of old, dead philosophers. This book made me smile and really deals with whether or not the examined life is worth living.

Freakonomics
This book is so thought-provoking. In it, an economist takes everyday problems and trends, looks at the numbers, and analyzes it. One of the questions he answers is what teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common.

Elsewhere and its sequel, Nevernever by Will Shetterly
In these novels, Shetterly uses the setting of Terri Windling's Bordertown books and creates his own characters. These two books are about a boy named Ron who runs away from home to find his older brother. Throughout these books, Ron discovers what it means to live in Bordertown and who he is. It's very much science fiction but I enjoyed reading it.

Ok, that's it for now.