Sapphire/PUSH

Has anyone else read PUSH? I started it last night and finished it today--reading the whole thing only took about 4 hours (and I'm a slow reader, promise).

That said, there's a lot in it to think about in it, and I kinda don't want to read anything else for awhile so I can mull.

I had it on my list because I remember hearing Sapphire on NPR when I was like 13 or 14, I think--maybe on Terry Gross--talking very vividly about one particular scene. It stuck with me and I've been meaning to read it for a long time, but I doubt I would have been ready for it when I was any younger.

Has anyone else read it?

Jen's little update

I've finished one more book on my list! I've spent the summer buying a house/fixing up said house/moving into same, so reading has unfortunately fallen down my list of priorities...also now I can't find the books I want to read, since they're all in boxes. Soon I'll have organization again, and I'll post more often.

This past week I finished Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It's a slow-burn thriller--took me a while to get into it, but once I did, I really wanted to know what happened. There are some parts to this book that are not for the squeamish: there's some sexual abuse, gory details about murders, and some truly ugly (personalities, not looks) characters. The first part of the book is *not* about the girl with the dragon tattoo, so at first you wonder where the title came from. But Larsson ties the plot threads together very nicely, so it all makes sense in the end.

Since this is a translation of a book originally published in Swedish and I'm not Swedish myself, I missed some of the references, and had to actually look up what the nickname of one of the main characters meant. And I had no idea where most of the places were--obviously I didn't learn my Swedish geography! I noticed that this book had an ending a la "Return of the King"--just when you thought everything was wrapped up, there are still fifty pages left! But it works, somehow. Larsson answers questions you forgot you had from the beginning of the book and leaves you wanting more. Luckily, he turned in two other manuscripts before he died, so your cravings can be satisfied.

If you like murder mysteries, give this one a try. Of course, you're not even sure if there *has* been a murder at the beginning, which is part of the fun.

The Dark is Rising

I decided to listen to this one instead of read it, but it's one more off my list.

Books like this are what make me think that I don't like fantasy. I know I'm going to get a lot of flack for this, but ugh. I did not like this book. AT ALL.

I had two big complaints:

1. Will. I never understood him, or identified with him, or really cared about him. My friend Mary says that this is because I'm an oldest child and Will is very much the youngest child of a huge family. (My friend Mary is too, she also really likes this book.) She says youngest kids just kinda roll with everything and don't question much. I don't know if it's true. Will did. He turns 11 and has to start battling evil and keeps jumping around in time and NEVER BATS AN EYELASH. Let alone think it was awesome that he has super-powers. I just didn't get it!

2. Also how are these signs supposed to help defeat the dark? I mean really? Give me some explanation about what they are and why they're awesome once joined.

3. The magic at play, and Will's powers aren't well explained, and that's fine. I don't need things overly, or even completely, explained. BUT they aren't well defined! Will seems to be able to do anything and everything, but occasionally he can't. And he learned it all by reading a book. Not studying it, but once he read the words he'd remember them forever and then have all the power of the gift of grammery. LAME.

Anyway, this was just so not my cup of tea. But, it's off the list! Yay!

SHERRIE'S UPDATE

I have finished 3 books on my list since I posted last.



With Malice Toward None - Stephen B. Oates
Everything you ever wanted to know about Abraham Lincoln. Review Here



The Promise of Lumby - Gail Fraser
Living in a small town with some strange people and things happening. Review Here



Garden Spells - Sarah Addison Allen
About a garden, 2 women and the magic of their garden. Review Here

Steven's Update

I've finished three more books from my list since my last update:

Atonement by Ian McEwan - a powerful and multi-faceted novel about love, war, class, guilt, and the literary imagination. Full review.

Neuromancer by William Gibson - an interesting vision of the future (already realized in part) where human and cybernetic intelligence begin to merge. Full review.

them by Joyce Carol Oates - a gritty novel about the lives of the urban poor, set in Detroit from the 1930s to the riots of 1967. Full review.

With nine books down in four months I suppose I'm on pace to finish my list in five years, but there are some 1000+ page monsters still lurking on the list!

Dana, Book Review, *The Bridges of Madison County, *Robert James Waller

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I will preface all of this by saying that I don't generally read romance, so please don't be offended. And, everyone likes different things, so don't let my review taint you if you want to read this novel.

I hated this book. In fact, I think I would give it zero stars if that didn't seem too mean. I thought it was absolutely terrible.

Very basically the novel is about a photographer who goes to Iowa to photograph some covered bridges for National Geographic. He gets lost, meets a farm wife whose family is away at the fair and they have a torrid affair for a week, exciting all of the passion that she has never felt and all of the commitment that he has never felt. At the end of the week they part and return to their normal lives but never forget their one true love.

There are a wide variety of things that I disliked about the book, so I think I'll just list them. 1. I hate (HATE!) the writing technique where the "writer" has been approached to tell some story and then proceeds to tell it and wraps the whole book up with "well, that's their story." I don't care whether you were actually approached and commissioned or something to write this book. Don't tell me.

2. The actual story is so contrite. It's played and there wasn't enough plot to it. Really? Boy meets girl, boy can't have girl, boy and girl always wonder what would have been.

3. There is no depth to the characters. I hated the descriptions. If I had to read the female character describing her love as "hard" one more time, I might have thrown up. I didn't care about them. I couldn't relate to them.

4. Waller switches between points of view like a forth grader. I had a really hard time following whose head I was in. The reader is bounced around so much, I started to feel dizzy. The transitions aren't smooth. It wasn't well balanced between POVs either.

5. Waller also gets preachy at points. He had his characters spout off some long monologue that you can tell is just the author expressing his own viewpoint. It wasn't good and didn't feel natural.

6. The ending was awful. It ends with an interview of some random guy that knew one of the characters. No, just no.

Now, one might ask, if I thought this book was so terrible, why did I finish it? Because I thought it would get better. It was a bestseller. I honestly thought that something good had to happen in it. Nope, wrong. I really don't know how so many people purchased this book. My only guess is that there are a lot of desperate housewives out there.

As an aside, I got this book from my husband's bookshelf. It apparently was a gift or something. I knew he had read it and when I finished I tentatively asked him if he had liked it. Thank God he said it was awful too. If he loved this book, that might have been grounds for a divorce.

View all my reviews >>

Matthew, Book Review, *Dante Alighieri, *Purgatorio, *Paradiso

I first read Dante's Inferno back in high school when it was assigned to me by an English teacher who decided I needed a challenge, and in the years since then I've read it a few more times (once for a college class, and a couple more times for various research projects of my own devising). But like most people, I never seemed to be able to talk myself into checking out the other two-thirds of the Divine Comedy (1308 - 1321), Purgatorio and Paradiso. I guess reading poetic medieval theology loses its appeal when it doesn't involve demons, grotesque torments, and an infernal hierarchy stuffed to overflowing with Dante's political rivals.

By the end of Inferno, Dante and his guide Virgil (as in the Roman author of the Aeneid) have traveled down through the rings of Hell, passed by Satan in his icy prison at the center of the Earth (yes, the center of Dante's hell is frozen--keep that in mind the next time someone whips out that tired old "when hell freezes over" line), and come out on the other side of the planet to find themselves at the base of Mount Purgatory. Purgatorio takes up the story there, following Dante and Virgil as they ascend the cornices of Mount Purgatory and finishes with them arriving at the Earthly Paradise located between purgatory and heaven. Paradiso then follows Dante and his new guide Beatrice as they ascend through the spheres of the Ptolemaic universe, each of which serves to introduce Dante to a different subgroup of saved souls, and ends with him being allowed to look upon God himself.

I have to admit, it was hard to motivate myself to finish Purgatorio. In many respects, it is the mirror opposite of Inferno. Hell's rings are arranged from the least serious sinners (the lustful) to the greatest (traitors) in Inferno, while purgatory's cornices in Purgatorio are arranged from greatest sin to least; while the damned in hell are trapped against their will for all eternity, the souls in purgatory stay at each cornice of their own free will until they feel they have been purged of that particular sin; and so on. In short, Purgatorio was pretty much everything I feared it would be: a dull, tedious imitation of Inferno, lightened only by sporadic bursts of cattiness directed at various people who had earned Dante's ire.

Imagine my surprise when Paradiso turned out to be deft, innovative, and eminently readable. Granted, it still includes many of the same opaque discourses on the finer points of medieval theology and astronomy, but the rest of the work is fascinating enough to make these digressions bearable. To Dante, heaven exists in an abstract form that is beyond the ability of the mortal mind to comprehend, so what he is shown by Beatrice is an artificial framework used to put a concrete face on a purely ethereal realm. The balance Dante strikes in his poetry between the apparent reality visible to him and the actual reality that lurks behind it gives Paradiso a vitality that helps it to match -- and in some places surpass -- what he was able to accomplish in Inferno.