OH MY GOD MY BLOG IS BACK!!!

So, for the past few weeks, I've had this error message pop up every time I tried to write a new blog post. I tried to access Google "help" and they were super helpful (that's sarcasm, btw). I had all but given hope that I would never again be able to update my blog and had begun thinking of going to WordPress when BAM! I can write new posts again! Huzzah! Okay, so I'm not moving to WordPress ... yet ...

So! Here's all the books I've been reading that I haven't been able to write about. I'm going to break this up into 2 posts so it doesn't get too long.

Good Calories, Bad Calories

by Gary Taubs

This book will change everything you ever thought you knew about food and nutrition. It goes against everything we have been told about dietary fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, and even salt. While I already knew much of this going into the book, I still learned quite a lot and I will never look at my food the same way again. I will certainly never look at nutritional "studies" the same way again.

This book does not focus exclusively on what studies do and do not find (which is all you'll ever find in a newspaper). It looks at how those studies were conducted, who conducted them (who paid for them) and what they actually found. The terrifying thing is the discovery that many studies, which are used as cornerstones for certain dietary mantras, have actually been misinterpreted in order to fit the dogma of the time.

Honestly, this book scared the bejesus out of me. Like I said, I'll never look at my food the same way again.

Kushiel's Justice

by Jacqueline Carey

Carey is back! I'm so glad! As I said in my post about "Kushiel's Scion", I was really disappointed by that book. I had been expecting so much more from Carey. Here, she delivered! Although, this book still was not the fast-paced, page-turner that her first three books were, at least it kept moving. I was never left wondering why I was reading this and it contained one whole, cohesive plot.

It's also a plot that I quite enjoyed. I don't know why Carey is so good at doing tortured lovers but she is. I was totally rooting for the two love-birds throughout the book and I can't wait to see how they face their challenges in the next book. Well done, Carey!

My only complaint is the poor editing. You can always tell when an author has started to make some real money because the editors suddenly just stop caring. There were a lot of typos and stupid grammatical mistakes in this book and that's really disappointing. Come on people, how much you do your job should not be inversely proportionate to how much money you make!

The Bonesetter's Daughter

by Amy Tan

Oh my god, this book! It has officially gotten me onto the Amy Tan bandwagon. I know everyone raves about "The Joy Luck Club" but, honestly, it didn't do much for me. Maybe I just wasn't old enough to get it. Or maybe it was the fact that Tan tried to develop several characters and relationships in the space of a fairly small book. By the time I got invested in one character, she'd switch to another.

Then I read "Saving Fish From Drowning" in a fit of determination to understand the genius of Amy Tan. It was an odd book, but I liked it better than "The Joy Luck Club".

"The Bonesetter's Daughter" is about another mother-daughter relationship but it focuses on just one relationship. That's why I think, for me at least, it works better than "The Joy Luck Club". Because it was devoted to one relationship, the book had time to thoroughly explore that relationship. It delved into a huge chunk of the mother's history, enough to explain her quite damaging behavior towards her daughter. It also devoted a sufficient number of pages to the daughter's POV so we could understand her feelings and motivations. By the end of the book, the reader doesn't blame either the mother or the daughter for the terrible pain they have wreaked on each other. And the characters understand that there is no one to blame. It is sad, but there is still love and time to heal.

It's a beautiful story and I highly recommend it.

Ghost Brigades

by John Scalzi

Okay, I'll admit, I wasn't that psyched about the first book in this series. I'm not even sure why. I think my family may have inadvertently done it a disservice by raving about it so much before I read it. When I finally got around to it I thought it was pretty "meh". I think my big problem with it was that I couldn't discern a plot. They go up in space, get fancy new bodies, play around with said fancy new bodies, fight various aliens, and then, in the last 100 pages, there's actually a goal and stakes and that part was really exciting. As a whole though, the book felt pretty disjointed to me.

This book did not suffer from that at all! And actually I appreciate "Old Man's War" so much more for having set up this book. "Ghost Brigades" hit the ground running and never stopped! From the very beginning there was mystery and danger and suspense and the entire plot was extremely well-crafted.

I also have to stop and marvel again at Scalzi's knowledge of human nature. He had a character who had never been given a choice and, like many people who have been properly conditioned, never thought about it. When he's made to think about it and forced to make a choice, he gets angry, not at the people/organization suppressing him all this time, but the person (well, alien, actually, but who's keeping track?) giving him and option. It boggled my mind because I never would have considered that reaction but of course it made perfect sense. There's an ease and simplicity to life when we don't have to make any choices and so I totally believed that this character felt angry with the person imposing this change on him. It was brilliant!

I really don't have much more to say about this book. It was a lot of fun, took me all of three days to read, and I would highly recommend it. Also, I got my sic-fi in for this month.

The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

Okay, seriously, when did all the YA books get so depressing? I feel like society is sending children conflicting signals when they tell them to Play! and Enjoy being young! Have a childhood! Read about children dying of cancer! What?

That being said, it was, of course, an excellent book. I fell in love with the narrator right away. She's up front and honest her cancer and the fact that she's dying and how much that sucks. She is also very much a teenage girl. I actually had to double check that the book was written by a man because the narrator sounded so convincingly like a teenage girl.

This book was brilliant in the way it dealt with death and people dealing with death. There's humor and that's a lot of what pulled me into the book and kept me reading - just how funny it was. But it was a dark humor and it was never lost on the reader that the characters are using humor as a defense mechanism. Their situation is unbelievably difficult and unfair and sometimes the only way to deal with life when it gets like that is to laugh at it. Green made me laugh without detracting from the seriousness of his material and the talent that requires just blows my mind.

At the same time, he discusses the fact that we all deal with death in our own way. While August fears oblivion more than anything else, Hazel fears the pain she'll inflict on those left behind when she dies. The two positions are completely opposite to each other and yet it was extremely easy to understand both of them. We all look at the posts on a deceased's Facebook post and see all the messages of love and support (many, as this book points out, by people who hadn't seen the deceased for months, if not longer) and we all want that. We all want to feel that we'll be missed while we're gone.

At the same time, Hazel's point that that very desire is extremely selfish is a completely valid point. Why should we want to cause pain? She doesn't and, as August points out, that makes her a hero - among all the other "heroes" of cancer who "fought so hard" and "were an inspiration to us all".

Bleak House

by Charles Dickens

I'm going to make a confession. For the most part, I tend to think that Dickens is highly overrated. Mostly I find his stuff overly sentimental (see: A Christmas Story *gag*). I also saw someone else mention that high school teachers do Dickens a great disservice by forcing us all to read Great Expectations and I agree with that 100%. I had to read that book at least twice before getting my diploma and I still resent it.

Then I had to read Dombey and Son in college and I had to admit that I actually kind of liked it. The professor who assigned it (one of my favorite teachers ever) said he thought that Bleak House was his best work. So I grabbed it a few years ago and it was sitting on my shelf when I decided it had been awhile since I had read a good old-fashioned Victorian novel and it was time for another one.

I'll admit, this one might have changed my mind on Dickens. While some of his other novels make it obvious that he was publishing them chapter-by-chapter without a chance to go back and revise (something I could never do but hey, we all have our own systems) this one seemed like he might have actually had an outline or something. At 880 pages, it was a very well-thought out, well-planned novel. Not sure if he actually used an outline for this one (no judgment here either way, again, we all have our own systems) or if he actually had a chance to go back and revise but it was awesome. It was a very complex plot with a huge cast of characters (I frequently had to go back to refresh my memory) with a very clear beginning, middle and end.

I won't say that it kept me reading from beginning to end. That would be a lie. It starts off really slow, gradually gains momentum, and then I read the last 150 pages in two days because I couldn't put it down. It has two narrators and one of them is much more difficult to get through than the other. However, the dense narrator is also quite witty. There's a lot of commentary on the British legal system of the time (much of which can be directly related to our current legal system here in the U.S., since we used their system as the basis for our own) which is actually quite funny and often painfully accurate.

His physical descriptions are also awesome. I have mixed feelings about them because there were so many times when I felt dragged down by them. On the one hand, they slowed down my reading and didn't help to further the plot, on the other hand, they really helped bring his scenes to life and I know his physical descriptions are something he's known for - with good reason.

I have a love-hate relationship with his characters. For the most part, they are not full-fleshed characters: rather, they are two-dimensional caricatures. Sometimes this makes them insupportably dull (Esther Summons) while, at other times, it helps brings them to life when he gives them little quirks that belong to them and them alone - such as Mr. Smallweed's tendency to constantly sink into his char. I felt like I was watching a cartoon and it was extremely enjoyable. Also the fact that his name was "Mr. Smallweed". How perfect was that? (Answer: Perfect)

I just have to take this opportunity to clear up a myth before someone makes a comment about how Dickens was overly-wordy because he was paid by the word. He was not paid by the word. Most of his books were published in installments and he was paid per installment. He was overly-wordy because that's the style that most writers of his generation were writing in. In those days, when people bought the book, they wanted big, thick books that would provide hours of entertainment so they could feel that the money they were getting a good value for the money they spent on the book. You know, back when people bought physical books that you had to go to the book shop to pick up. Remember those days?

Kushiel's Scion

by Jacqueline Carey

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. We go from Phedre's head to Imriel's for the narration. I like Imriel and, although I missed Phedre, it was interesting to get to see her from a different perspective. But the story moved extremely slowly. I got half way through the book before anything really happened and, even when the action did finally get started, I think I was so resentful of the 350 pages of nothing I had read to get to that point that I didn't fully appreciate it. There was a promising moment right at the beginning when we learn that Melisande is missing but then they all decide to just let that go and that was extremely disappointing.

After that we spent four years watching Imriel grow up. While there was some important character development here and Carey actually did a pretty good job with the pacing, I was still left wondering if a plot was ever going to emerge. I'm still not sure that one did. Basically, Imriel grew up, he's still pretty angsty but learning to get over his issues from Darsanga, he makes some new friends, there's a battle, the good guys win, the end. Oh, and then it took him 50 pages to get back home.

I think, aside from the exorbitantly long exposition, I had a hard time investing in the battle because it wasn't Imriel's fight. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and trying to help out some friends. With Phedre's adventures, there was always so much at stake. I had to keep reading to find out what happened because, if she failed, her country would be invaded or her queen murdered/overthrown. She got sucked into these adventures because of the enormous historical events that were happening around her. With Imriel, I feel like he was really just a bored rich boy playing at being a poor scholar for a while and that made it a lot harder for me to root for him.

Code Name Verity

by Elizabeth Wein

Oh my God this book was awful. Not awful as in badly written. Awful as in it ripped my heart out and stomped on it. Multiple times.

This is another one of those YA books that has been getting a lot of attention lately. I saw a couple different mentions of it online which intrigued me. Everyone has been raving about it so, when the library got it in, I was all yoink!

As is typical with YA books, it was a fast read. Unlike most YA books, it did not shy away from the nitty gritty aspects of WWII. Absolutely nothing is sugar-coated here. The characters frequently make light of their work and joke about it but that's all a cover. They play down the dangerous aspect of their jobs in order to keep themselves going but the undercurrent of fear is always apparent to the reader.

I'm not sure how I feel about the way in which the book is written. The first two-thirds is written by one character while the rest is written by another. It gives us two different view-points and, as it turns out, the first view-point wasn't entirely honest. Okay, that part was awesome. As readers we tend to trust our narrator inherently but we learn pretty early on in this book that we can't do that here and that was a neat twist in Wein's writing.

In all seriousness, you should read this book. Yes, it will tear your heart into tiny little shreds, but you'll be better for it. Trust me.

Vacation Reads!

I went on vacation! It was awesome! So, of course, I needed a couple light and fluffy books downloaded onto my Kindle to get me through the plane rides and the long arduous hours spent on the beach. I actually downloaded several such books onto my Kindle but it was a pretty action-packed vacation and I'm a slow reader so I only got through two books.

Beautiful Creatures
by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

I am so excited for this movie! You may have noticed a pattern with me by now. When a movie is coming out that I am interested in, I don't have to read the book first, but I do like to, especially if it sounds like a book I would have enjoyed anyway.

I did enjoy this book. It was kind of Twilight-esque without all the passive whining. Two teenagers fall in love and strive to stay together despite certain paranormal forces getting in their way. But there's also an element of mystery and, set in a small town in the South, there is a pervading feeling of The Old South that the main character spends the entire book fighting. I really enjoyed that part of it, being fascinated with the Civil War myself and humanity's general tendency to reject what is new and unknown.

In the end, it wasn't a great read, but it was fun and served its purpose for my vacation.

The Host
by Stephenie Meyer

I was really disappointed by this book. First off, let me just say that I genuinely enjoyed the Twilight books. They were light, fun reads that were also gripping and totally suspenseful. Few books have kept me up half the night reading but these did. They were the kind of books that I devoured, enjoyed, and then forgot about. Except then there was all the Twilight mania and I wasn't allowed to forget about them.

So I was expecting the same from this book. At first I was all in, the concept is fascinating and it pulled me in. But then there was a lot of wandering around in the desert and I got bored. Even when the main character met up with people it took a long time for me to regain interest in the book and I finally figured out why. The main character (i.e. the alien who took over the girl's body) makes Bella look pro-active. Yeah. Hence my total lack of interest until, like Bella, extreme circumstances force her to finally DO something! Then the book picked up its pace and I regained interest enough to finish the book.

The Twilight books had a problem I hadn't noticed until a friend pointed them out to me. She said she was never afraid that Bella was not going to get everything she wanted. And she's right. And the same applies here. At the end, the main character gets ready to make this huge sacrifice and I was ready for it but then, in typical Meyer fashion, her friends took over and came up with a magical solution (which I didn't quite buy the logic of) and all her wishes came true. Honestly, it would have been a much better book if she had just died at the end and left it at that.