are things complicated yet?

I don't know how I find the time read this much either

It's true - I am one voracious reader.   Here are some recent reviews since I've been racking up the titles.

Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

Wow - is this a stupid book.  It's trite and sappy and emotionally shallow.  There is a daughter with a disease so the parents decide to conceive another daughter- a genetic match that they get bone marrow and other things from to save the sick daughter.  But one day the "spare" daughter decides she's tired of this and sues her parents for medical emancipation. 

I know, it sounds terribly dramatic and emotionally charged but instead the author is so focused on the many narratives she has crammed in (7!) that there's no time to feel the pain and flesh it out.   I stayed up until 3 am to finish this the day I started it because so many people had told me it was so good.  I kept waiting for it to get good and it just kept getting more stupid.

SKIP.  Not even worth a library check-out.

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

It's a bestseller for a reason kiddos.  In any other time it would be a typical "woman's life turned out wrong" story but it's set in Afghanistan amid Taliban rule over the past twenty years.  More than anything it is the relevancy that grabs your attention.  It starts out in the seventies and progresses through about 2003.  Mariam is married at 15 to a 40 year-old-man, she wears a burqa and he beats her.  A lot.  And she can't do anything about it.  Of course there is more but that ought to be enough to get your attention.

You can see the oppression through first-hand accounts and them imagine what you were doing at the time in free-wheeling crazy America while untold numbers of women were oppressed, abused and tormented by a fundamentalist regime.

The story is compelling, the narrative excellent.  Worthy of purchase.

Tina Brown, Diana - The Chronicles

I have loved Diana for many years and I've read a lot of Diana books.  This one is definitely the most salacious.  (Even more than Kitty Kelley's.) Like anything concerning Diana, take it with a grain of salt.  Who knows if it's all true?  But it makes for fascinating reading.  I loved it and devoured it in a road trip.  Borrow it if you can.  Surely someone you know bought it.

Lisa See, Peony in Love

I really like Lisa See novels.  I loved "On Gold Mountain" as well as "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan."  I had high expectations.  The cover art was also gorgeous which, I admit, was a strong factor when considering its purchase.

Imagine my disappointment when the story wasn't quite as compelling as I'd hoped.  It's thick in Chinese mysticism and light on love and content.  Don't buy it - try to find a library or just ask me for my copy.

Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert

Don't be scared because Oprah endorsed it!  This is a FANTASTIC book!   It's colorful and alive and rich with intangible life lessons.  It's a total girl book but you will love it.  There is a whole portion devoted to eating and drinking in Rome and YES the author talks about how it made her fat.  So you know the rest of the book must be true and honest.

Buy, buy, buy.  It's in paperback and a delight to read.  Ive read it like 4 times already.

Antonia Frasier, Marie Antionette

I bought this book because occasionally I feel guilty about reading so much fiction.  I reason that if I'm reading I might as well be reading true stories so that I can learn from other people's experiences, rather than filling my brain with fake, unreal crap.  But the fake stuff is always so tasty, like french fries, so it's hard for me to stick to my own advice.

However, this book though is fabulous.  Marie Antoinette's life was the kind of stuff you just can't make up.  Int his case, the truth is much better than any fiction.  Plus, her life was surrounded by a lot of fictitious stories so it sort of meets both categories. 

Life at Versailles is intriguing, beautiful and deliciously complicated.  Frasier writes about it with such simplicity that you can easily float over the paragraphs and imagine yourself there.  I've read this book about 5 times now.  It is a favorite.  Buy it.

Is this a spoiler?

As seen at the Farmer's Market on Saturday in Austin:

Harry Potter! Harry Potter! Harry Potter!

Yay - just what the blogosphere needs, another post about Harry Potter.

I ordered my copy months ago and I stupidly decided that I would like to save $5 and have it shipped for free via UPS Ground.  What was I thinking???  This is not the time to be thrifty!  This is very time-sensitive!

Ugh.  Now it won't get here until the middle of next week, at which point I am sure that the plot will have been pasted onto every media outlet, dissected and discussed ad nauseam. 

Many fellow bloggers are planning on putting themselves into a media blackout and I think this is a fabulous idea.  TV and internet will spoil everything if given the opportunity.  However, that isn't possible for me at this point.  There's no way I can go into media blackout between tomorrow and next Tuesday.  NO WAY!  It's too long and I'm too much of an information junkie.  Just. Can't. Do. It.

I have accepted that someone, probably my friend Dr. Google, will accidentally let it slip and I'll know all the details before that precious book even gets thomped onto my doorstep by Kevin - the nicest UPS man ever.

(Seriously, he is so great.  Sometimes, when we are not home, he COMES BACK at like 7 pm to bring us our stuff instead of making us wait another day and he always acts like it's not a big deal and he's very happy to bring me all of my lip glosses and things from Crate and Barrel.)

So, what to do between now and when Kevin shows up?  And yes, this is really my biggest problem today.

This book is about a hermaphrodite

Now that I have your attention, YES this book really is about a hermaphrodite and it is actually a good book.   It was not just a catchy title to get you to read this post.  (Although, that would have been quite clever of me.)

It is called Middlesex and it's written by the same guy that wrote The Virgin Suicides which they made into a movie with Kirsten Dunst about ten years ago.  But enough about movie stars, you want to hear about the hermaphrodite, don't you?!

In case you need a refresher, a hermaphrodite is an organism that possesses both male and female sex organs during its life.  See, I told you this was going to be a good book review.

Anyway, the story is about a kid who is raised as a girl and one day when she (he?) is 14 it's like "Uh-oh, he's a boy with a mutated chromosome called 5-Alpha Reductase Deficiency that makes him look like a girl but really, on the inside, he's a boy.  Oops, we should have figured that out when he was born."

Don't think about that too much.  Just take it at face value and move on.

The book is really interesting - it's told from the perspective of how the recessive mutated gene appeared in his family and how it was passed down over generations but never made an appearance until he was born...and at the same time you get an interesting history of this family that is totally screwed up and immigrates to the US from Greece and tries to make it in 1950's Detroit.

It's a great read full of unique characters and in the middle of all of it - a hermaphrodite to give it that certain summer beachy reading flair.   

A final note though: there is nothing like reading a book in public that is about a hermaphrodite to make you feel really naughty.      

Not your same old love story

This was a good book.  A very good book.

It's a love story about Clare and Henry but Henry has a unique personal problem.

Henry involuntarily time travels.

He sort of goes POP! and disappears without warning and goes either forward or backward to different parts of his life or the lives of people he knows.  He's always running into his future and past self and people that he loves.

It's such a totally different plot twist - I admit that I was fascinated by it through the whole thing and polished this book off in 3 hours on an airplane.

This one rates a "Highly Recommend" and since I bought it at the airport it's available for immediate loaning-out to friends.

DNR: Do Not Read

I usually love this sort of book.  It's got history, explorers, bouts of scurvy (it makes your gums get squishy!), dog sleds, a big ship, Winston Churchill and all sorts of other stuff that ought to make for good non-fiction.

Unfortunately it is a sucky book.  I didn't even read all of it and I at least page through most books till the ending.

No, this was all about cold and sled dogs dying and ill-prepared explorers and cold arctic winds and a leader who is an idiot and it's a shame they didn't have Gore-Tex back in the day because they could have used some.  Probably a snowmobile too. 

I just wrote a paragraph further explaining the plot but I was bored writing it so there is not way you'd want to read it!

DNR!  Do Not Read!

Just in time for Mother's Day: A book to make you REALLY appreciate how great she is.

The Glass Castle is a memoir.  Jeanette Walls grew up with crazy parents who, today, would have had their children taken away from them faster than Starbucks can make you a latte.

At age 3 she brutally burned her body when she was making hot dogs by boiling them in water by herself.  She was THREE. 

Her parents took her to the hospital, but stole her away from it after a few days because she was "tough and could recover on her own" and also, they didn't want to pay the bill.

She had extensive skin grafts and was highly prone to infection.  She had no business being out of that hospital.

They moved a lot because her father was being chased by the FBI, hunted by the mafia, hounded by bill collectors.  Her mother was an artist and never worked, even though she also had a teaching certificate and the family needed money. 

Her father was a raging alcoholic who spent all of the money for food, electricity and a place to live on booze.  He stole from his family to drink and never admitted it was a problem or that it was a detriment to his children.  He crazily enough thought he was a good dad.

There was often no food.  Once, she ate margarine because it's all there was and she hadn't eaten in days.  She scavenged for food at school by taking leftovers that other kids threw away.  They often did not have heat, electricity, indoor plumbing or really, anything at all.  Her thrift store dresses were threadbare.  She slept in a cardboard box for many years.

They celebrated Christmas a week late because they could take a tree from the street for free and use leftover wrapping paper.  They told her there was no Santa as soon as she could understand the words, so she wouldn't expect any gifts.  They often forgot birthdays.

It's a fascinating book where you can't believe her parents are so dumb, so outrageously ignorant and misinformed and misguided and selfish about EVERYTHING POSSIBLE.  They claimed to love their children but they showed them no more love than you would an unwanted dog.   

It's a sort of gruesome train wreck; you can't stop turning pages because what could be more awful than page 245 where her mother tells her it's ok to eat a ham with maggots in it?  Oh, page 246 where her father tries to pimp her for beer money.

And it's a miracle she turned out smart.  Really smart!  She's a good writer.

Check this one out from the library.  And then, tell your parents they did a really good job.  Mine certainly did. 

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Estimated dollars saved by continuing to use Library: $180. 

Taxes paid to city whose library I am using: $0

Feels good.