Posted by barb on Oct 18, 2003 in
Books by Ann Brashares
This is the sequel to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants , which I enjoyed. In the first book, Carmen, Lena, Bridget, and Tibby found a pair of “magic” jeans that flattered each of their diverse figures. They passed it around during their first summer spent apart during their 15 years of friendship (i.e. their whole lives). Each experienced profound and life-changing events in the jeans.
This book chronicles their second summer. Lena and Carmen stay home in Bethesda — Lena working in a clothing store full of beige clothes her mother loves, and Carmen babysitting. Tibby heads off to a summer film program at a University a few hours’ drive away. At the last minute, Bridget decides to run off to Alabama to try to reconnect with her grandmother, and her summers as a child (before her mother died). At first, the pants seem to be failing the girls, but then their magic starts to kick in.
As with the first book, the girls face real-world problems, and in the end start to pull the pieces of their lives together — mending broken relationships, healing broken hearts and finding their old selves again. Brashares handles these real-world situations with sensitivity and a bit of humor. Once again, she has produced a compelling, sincere book for and about teenaged girls and their friendships.
Posted by barb on Oct 13, 2003 in
Books by Caleb Carr
In the year 2023, information comes at a fast and furious rate. In order to process it all, people can’t afford to scrutinize all the information with the care that it might require. This is the perfect environment for false information to be diseminated.
While investigating the murder of a friend, Dr. Gideon Wolfe finds evidence of faked information — information pertaining to the assassination of the United States president. His subsequent investigations put him in the middle of a jailbreak, and right into the group perpetuating the deceptions.
I could not get into this book as much as Carr’s other novel that I’ve read, The Alienist . For one thing, I could tell that it had been serialized, because every single chapter had to end with some kind of leading or shocking sentence. That got a bit old. Also, like a few other books that I’ve read lately by other authors (e.g. James P. Hogan), this one was a bit too preachy on the state of the world today.
All in all, not bad, but not great.
Posted by barb on Sep 25, 2003 in
Books by Tim O’Brien
According to O’Brien:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor sugest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie….As a rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscentiy and evil.
These felt like true war stories.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a great book. But it was hard to read. At the same time, it was hard to put down…no matter how much I wanted to stop. The stories were too — compelling? weird? frightening? Real.
I have a themed release in mind for this book, but first my boyfriend wants to read it.
Posted by barb on Sep 23, 2003 in
Books by R. L. Stine
I had picked these up to release this week (Banned Books Week), and thought I ought to read them first, to make sure that they weren’t really offensive (they weren’t, of course).
The Haunted Mask (#11) Carly Beth has always been easy to scare, so naturally the kids at school take advantage, and scare her all the time. This year, however, she decides to get back at them by wearing the scariest Halloween mask she can find. The store owner warns her that she will regret getting that mask because it’s too scary, but Carly Beth assures him that for her purposes, it can’t be too scary.
The Horror at Camp Jellyjam (#33) Wendy and Elliot are stuck on a road trip with their parents. The trip of a lifetime. But an accident separates them, and Wend and Elliot end up at a sports camp in the middle of nowhere, wondering where their parents are. The counselors seem a bit too happy to be there, and after a couple nights, Wendy notices that campers are disappearing once they receive six medals for winning sports. When Elliot is on the verge of this sixth medal, Wendy stumbles on to the truth of Jellyjam.
These books are harmless fun. The entire Goosebumps series has been challenged in several school districts and libraries by narrow-minded people who believe that ghost and monster stories can lead only to the devil. If they find it so offensive, perhaps they should just not read the books. In fact, perhaps they should just stick their heads in the sand so that they can’t open their big mouths anymore so that the rest of us can get on with our lives.
Posted by barb on Sep 20, 2003 in
Books This week is designated as Banned Books Week by the American Library Association. Every year our right to read numerous books, from classics to new releases, is challenged by various groups for various reasons. Perhaps the most prominent recent example are the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. Many ultra-conservative religious groups have deemed that the Harry Potter books promote witchcraft and devil worship in our children. Some groups have gone so far as to burn Harry Potter books .
However, we have a little thing called the First Amendment in this country — we are guaranteed the right to free speech, which includes the right to read books that some people might find offensive. My advice to these groups who would stifle my right to read a Harry Potter book: don’t read the book. That way you aren’t offended, and I retain my right to read the book. Nazis burned books — I would hope that we were more civilized than that.
In honor of Banned Books Week, I collected several books on the 100 most challenged books list (from 1990-2000) that I have read, and will be making Bookcrossing releases of them all week. In addition, I am putting bookmarks in these books acknowledging banned books week and explaining that the book was one of the most frequently challenged books in the 1990s. Feel free to grab the bookmarks and print your own.
Posted by barb on Sep 20, 2003 in
Books by Robert Cormier
While the annual fundraising chocolate sale at Trinity prep school is voluntary, no boy has ever refused to sell the chocolates. Until this year. Jerry is a freshman whose mother died the previous spring. He has gotten a spot on the football team, but his school spirit does not extend to the annual chocolate sale.
Behind the scenes at Trinity, the secret school society, the Vigils, are at work. They give assignments to various boys throughout the year as a stepping stone into the society. This year, they have been pressured into assuring that the chocolate sale is a success. However, with Jerry’s refusal to sell, other boys see that they, too, don’t have to participate. Chocolate sales fall.
As Jerry continues to defy the Vigils, he finds that his life starts to spiral down into hell. He gets pummeled at football practice. The phone at his apartment rings at all hours, with only a chuckle on the other end of the receiver. Still he refuses.
While the book is a bit dated in places (it was written in the 1970s), the themes hold up well over time. The ending is also much more realistic than the novels that end with all the villains getting their due. Of course, this also makes the ending quite unsettling.
Posted by barb on Sep 14, 2003 in
Books by Merill Markoe
This novel is told as letters written by a woman to herself on her birthday for seven consecutive years. She struggles into her forties while trying to determine ways to not repeat mistakes made with her parents and in her love life. While Markoe interjects many humorous anecdotes, I found the book to be a bit depressing overall. Though the back of the book asserts that the woman ultimately succeeds in finding happiness, I could only see that she ended up in much the same place as she began.
Fun but forgettable.
Posted by barb on Sep 7, 2003 in
Books by Peter David
While I’d found David’s style fun in his Star Trek novels, I had trouble getting into his non-ST book, Sir Apropos of Nothing. I wanted to give him another chance, but going in I wasn’t expecting much from Knight Life.
Though Knight Life was still fluffy, it was much more enjoyable than Sir Apropos. I got suck in right away and had a fun ride until the last page. King Arthur has returned, and is running for mayor of New York City. The whole gang is present — Merlin, looking like an 11-year-old boy since he’s been aging backwards all these years, Morgan Le Fey, nasty as ever, and Modred. There is even a Guinevere of sorts — she is a reincarnation of the original Guinevere and goes buy the name Gwen DeVere Queen.
Fun read. I’ll have to look up the sequel: One Knight Only
Posted by barb on Aug 30, 2003 in
Books by Sheri S. Tepper
After picking mushrooms near her New Mexico home, Benita is confronted by two strange-looking aliens. They hand her a cube and $100,000, and ask her to see that the cube gets into the hands of someone in authority. For Benita, an abused wife who has worked at a bookstore for the past 16 years with two kids in college, the job looked frightening and exhilarating at the same time.
Her role did not end, though, with the cube safely in the hands of her congressman in Washington, D. C. Instead, she is called on to be a liaison between the Pistach (the aliens who gave her the cube) and the US government. The Pistach’s mission is to help Earth achieve “neighborliness”, to learn how to live in a way that will not disturb or harm nearby neighbors. And things start to get better. But the Pistach are not the only aliens on Earth…
Tepper’s style remains top notch. However, this novel does give Tepper a platform to express her feelings about the current state of our world — disappointment/outrage at poverty, overpopulation, religious strife, political shenanigans, and the state of the environment. At times the novel sounds a bit preachy, but that’s fairly easy to get past.
Another great read from Tepper!
Posted by barb on Aug 20, 2003 in
Books by Roald Dahl
This is one of a series of children’s books that I’ve bought over the past several weeks. A few of them I’ve read before, and just wanted to see how they stood up over time. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, however, I’ve never read.
This was the basis for Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory staring Gene Wilder. The elements of the movie were all there, but in some places the book elaborated more, and in others the movie did. Overall, a very fun read, even for an adult like me.