Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

I added Slaughterhouse Five to my Fill In The Gaps list because I felt it was one of those books I should have read. I'm glad I read it but I wasn't crazy about it.
The one aspect of Slaughterhouse Five I did enjoy was the time travel. Billy gets unstuck from time and travels through different parts of his life. I felt it was a unique way to experience the characters. I enjoyed the non-linear path the book took. I found it easy to read and amusing at times. Overall a good read but I didn't find it earth-shattering.

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I became an Annie Dillard fan after reading PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK several years ago. I figure Annie Dillard must be a wonderful writer if she can make me interested in the eating patterns of dragonfly larvae. THE MAYTREES is one of her fictional works. The only other piece of fiction I've read by Ms. Dillard is her historical novel THE LIVING.

THE MAYTREES is centered around its characters and, perhaps almost equally, its setting. The words are beautiful. I'm not smart enough to make sense of them all, but sometimes when reading literary fiction I find I have to step back, ignore the meaning of the words and let them impress me with feelings instead. That's the only way to keep my head above water. But overall, I came away knowing these characters--Maytree, Lou, Deary, and even Reevadare--very well. I won't soon forget them. They almost feel like old--though slightly insane, perhaps--friends. Maytree, especially, was such a well-rounded character. He makes horrible mistakes, but you forgive him just as Lou does. You don't have a choice. You must like the man.

Good book. I'd recommend it if you enjoy literary fiction. If you need tightly-paced plotting to finish a book, however, don't pick it up.



View all my reviews

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

I choose to read I, Robot because it's a science fiction classic and I'd seen the Will Smith movie. The movie and the book have nothing in common but the name. There's a brief similarity to one story in the book and some of the names are the same.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I tend to shy away from heavy science fiction. Sometimes it's too abstract for me. I, Robot isn't too abstract or too heavy. Instead it focuses on the human elements of the story. How people interacted with robots, how the robots themselves displayed their own humanity.
The premise of the book is a reporter doing a story on Susan Calvin, a roboosychologist, as she approaches retirement. Susan remembers a world without robots and she's been working with robots since the beginning.  It's through these stories about different robot types that show robots developing a consciousness time and time again. Some of the stories were funny and some were sad.
Overall I enjoyed I, Robot and would read more of Asimov's books.

Review: Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

I finished Anna Karenina yesterday.

I'm glad I read it (so I can say that I have) and I'm glad it's over. I think Russian authors desire to make their readers suffer as much as the characters in their books. :)

The fact is, it's an interesting story (mostly about Anna's infidelity - although there are many other social issues hinted at) but there's just too much of it for me. Tolstoy (in my opinion) tends to belabor the point of many things, and I wish he would have done this a little less.

Anna Karenina is really two stories in one, Anna's story and her brother Levin's story... Tolstoy could have written two (or maybe even three) novels instead of shoving all the stories of these relations (and others) into one. Although, each of their stories is tied into the theme of each of them searching for happiness in life. I'm not quite certain that anyone finds it, according to Tolstoy.

** Spoiler **
I did feel cheated by Anna's suicide at the end of Book 7. I couldn't help wondering why Tolstoy continued writing after his main character offed herself. And I was disappointed that I had to plod through Book 8 to get to the end. Levin's religious soul-searching in B8 (and his own thoughts of suicide) seemed off-theme to me, and I just wanted it to be over.

I couldn't help but feel that Anna's eventual suicide was her own fault, due in part to her decision not to accept a divorce from her husband. When her feelings changed and she desired the divorce, he refused to give it. That, with her increasing insecurities about Vronksy's feelings for her seemed to put her into a downward spiral that she couldn't escape from.

I was quite annoyed with her dithering,"He loves me, he doesn't love me; he's going to leave me, he's going to stay," litanies. Tolstoy spent a lot of time inside Anna's mind with these back-and-forth thoughts. In many ways, she seemed to be going mad before she finally did herself in. The fact that her reason for doing so was to hurt Vronksy's feelings, rather than to release herself from the pain of the relationship, struck me as rather childish.

** Spoiler Over

Do I recommend it? Hard to say. My answer would depend on what your reasons are for reading it. Is it an enjoyable read? I don't believe it is. Nor is it easy. But it's interesting to read about Russian society at the time. From that perspective, or if you feel like you need to experience a bit of Russian Literature, I say, read on.

~ Kelly

REVIEW

"Back Roads" by Tawni O' Dell
Product Description(Amazon.com)
Meet Harley Altmyer. His mother's in prison for his father's murder. At nineteen, he's raising his three younger sisters-and he's just developed an obsessive crush on the sexy, melancholic mother of two, living just down the road...
Paperback: 343 pages
Publisher: Unknown (May 31, 2004)
ISBN-10: 1615540849
ISBN-13: 978-1615540846

MY THOUGHTS: I really liked reading this book. But it ended totally different than what I was expecting. Actually the ending was a shocker. But I can't tell about that, it would ruin the surprise. You can read my full review at my book blog, Just Books.

Michelle H's 100 List

My family just started a book review blog last week and I found this site while looking at another book review blog this week. I decided to go ahead and join the challenge. Since these are supposed to be books that I feel I should read, but haven't gotten around to it yet, I took a lot of my list off AP English reading lists because I feel a lot of those books are important. I like the classics, but just haven't gotten around to many of them. Anyway, our blog is Bookworm Family if anyone wants to check it out.

Here's my list - in alphabetical order by the author's last name. (Goal Date: 07/01/2016)

Author	Title
Albee, Edward	The Zoo Story
Ambrose	To America: Personal Reflections of a Historian
Atwood, Margaret	The Handmaid's Tale
Austen, Jane	Emma
Baldwin, James	Go Tell It on the Mountain
Ball, Edward	Slaves in the Family
Barrie, J. M.	Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
Baum, L. Frank	The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Beckett, Samuel	Waiting for Godot
Berg, Scott	Lindberg
Blume, Judy	Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Bonham, Frank	Durango Street
Bronte, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily	Wuthering Heights
Brown, Dee Alexander	Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Capote, Truman	Breakfast at Tiffany's
Chaucer	The Canterbury Tales
Chopin, Kate	The Awakening
Clark, Ronald	Einstein: The Life and Times
Conrad, Joseph	Heart of Darkness
Crane, Stephen	The Red Badge of Courage
Dante	Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel	Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe
Dinesen, Isaak	Out of Africa
Donald, David Herbert	Lincoln
Dostoevsky, Fyodor	Crime and Punishment
Edwards, Kim	The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Faulkner, William	Light in August
Fielding, Henry	Tom Jones
Filipovic, Zlata	Zlata's Diary
Flaubert, Gustave	Madame Bovary
Forster, E. M.	A Passage to India
Franklin, Ben	The Autobiography of Ben Franklin
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah	Hitler's Willing Executioners
Gordeeva, Ekaterina	My Sergei
Graham, Katherine	A Personal History
Greene, Graham	The Heart of the Matter
Guterson, David	Snow Falling on Cedars
Hardy, Thomas	Far from the Madding Crowd
Hardy, Thomas	Return of the Native
Hardy, Thomas	The Mayor of Casterbridge
Heller, Joseph	Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest	A Farewell to Arms
Hersey, John	Hiroshima
Hosseini, Khaled	The Kite Runner
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki	Farewell to Manzanar
Hughes, Langston	The Best of Simple
Hurston, Zora Neale	Dust Tracks on a Road
Huxley, Aldous	Brave New World
Jones, Edward P.	The Known World
Joyce, James	Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz	The Trial
Keller, Helen	The Story of My Life
Keneally, Thomas	Schindler's List
Kennedy, Caroline	Profiles in Courage for Our Time
Kinder, Garry	Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
Kingston, Maxine Hong	Woman Warrior
Kogawa, Joy	Obasan
Kotlowitz, Alex	There Are No Children Here
Lessing, Doris	the Golden Notebook
Lewis, C. S.	The Chronicles of Narnia
Lowenstein, Roger	When Genius Failed
Maclean, Norman	A River Runs Through It
McCullers, Carson	The Member of the Wedding
Melville, Herman	Billy Budd
Milton, John	Paradise Lost
Mitchell, Margaret	Gone With the Wind
Morrison, Toni	Song of Solomon
Naylor, Gloria	The Women of Brewster Place
Nichols, Linda	Handyman
Oher, Michael	I Beat the Odds
Orwell, George	1984
Perry, Marta	Leah's Choice
Perry, Marta	Rachel's Garden
Perry, Marta	Anna's Return
Perry, Marta	Sarah's Gift
Powers, Ron	Flags of our Fathers
Reed, John	Ten Days That Shook the World
Rose, Reginald	Twelve Angry Men
Shirer, William	the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Simpson, Joe	Touching the Void
Sinclair, Upton	The Jungle
Sobel, Dava	Longitude
Solomon, Maynard	Mozart
Sparks, Nicholas	Three Weeks with My Brother
Steinbeck, John	Of Mice and Men
Stoppard, Tom	Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Stowe, Harriet Beecher	Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan	Gulliver's Travels
Tolkien, J. R. R.	The Hobbit
Tolkien, J. R. R.	The Lord of the Rings
Tolstoy, Leo	Anna Karenina
Walker, Alice	The Color Purple
Warren, Robert Penn	All the King's Men
Wells, H. G.	The Time Machine
Wharton, Edith	The Agee of Innocence
White, T. H.	The Once and Future King
Wolf, Virginia	Mrs. Dalloway