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.