I wasn't expecting to like The Namesake very much. I wasn't crazy about her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, and the description wasn't particularly enticing. So why did I even read it? Maybe just because Lahiri is a Barnard alumna? Or because I'd saved it in my library account to read list, and it was the only thing I didn't have to go over to Columbia to borrow? Who knows? Regardless, I'm glad I did.
A lonely girl who moves a lot and has a wacky mom meets a lonely boy with a distant dad and a missing twin. But refreshingly, this isn't a teen romance novel. There is some romantic tension and jealousy, but really this book is about the friendship between the two of them.
Girl with "raw talent" gets rescued by black-skinned blue-eyed from "primitive" Trinidad and discovers America in 1963.
I read this book when I stayed overnight with friend house in Boston. (Thanks again for the Bloody Marys Jake and Lisa!) Basically it's just photos of signs and things that have been improved with a FUCK sticker. You can get the idea from Fuck This Website.
The author quotes former ALA president Patricia Wilson Berger in her epigraph "Show me a computer expert who gives a damn, and I'll show you a librarian." I wouldn't say all librarians give a damn or that no non-librarian computer geeks don't, but I do think that sentiment is an appropriate way to launch into Johnson's 250 page mash note to librarians. What she likes about us is what I like about us—that we are dedicated to our user population and to our professional ethics. That unlike many other experts, our mission involves educating people and providing access to self-education tools without being snotty about it. At least to your face.
As it turns out, although it was the computer expertiness of librarians that made Johnson notice us, many of the librarians and library projects she profiles in this book are stronger in "give a damn."
Before I really get started, I need to contemplate for a moment that Johnson got interested in librarians, because in researching her previous book The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiff, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries she fell in love with librarians through their obituaries. She is a loving and generous writer, but we have to admit a little quirky, right?
I could probably write a 2,000 word review of this book, since it's on a topic so close to my heart, but I'll spare you. I made way too many margin notes anyway! As I said in regard to her article Why Zines Matter in American Periodicals, Piepmeier handles the zines vs. blogs argument and the materiality of zines with great finesse. She has truly changed the way I look at—and describe—zines, which is a big deal since I catalog and teach the suckers.
If you're paying much closer attention to my reviews than I think you are, you will recall that I gave a thumbs up to Anchee Min's coming of age in China during the Cultural Revolution story, Wild Ginger, back in July ought eight. Red Azalea covers similar territory, but this time it's openly autobiographical.
What if Red Riding Hood's wolf was actually a werewolf and Red Riding Hood vowed revenge against the bad doggie who ate her grandma? That's more or less the story Ms. Pearce tells, except that Red Riding Hood is actually sisters, one a fighter and one a lover.
Alzheimer's Disease is horrible and scary and horrible. It's I think a little less horrible and scary and horrible as depicted in this novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova. The narrator is an extremely intelligent and even-tempered Harvard professor with early onset Alzheimer's. While reading the page turner in about a day, I was often moved to tears. The originality of the premise—the telling of the story from the point of view of the patient—and the convincingness with which Genova depicts it are unmistakable. However, do you see a however coming?
I don't like to write bad book reviews. Normally, I don't finish books I don't like, but with young adult books, it's easier to keep going even when they suck. So this is my warning to you, should you not heed the fact that Deepak Chopra supplied one of The Seven Rays' blurbs: just because Ms. Bendinger wrote Bring It On and Stick It, the latter of which I love with all my heart, does not mean she can or should write novels.
And the weirdest thing, she thanks the cover designer in her acknowledgments.
Milo told me to read this, so I did. It's about a prom crazed high school senior who changes from Jill to Jack four days of the month, as she has since the onset of menstruation.
Excitement and Adventure is such a librarian zine! It's basically a fanzine about prohibition era gangsters, which Lacey researched with abandon at the Minnesota Historical Society.
I probably can't talk about this book without spoilering it, so proceed with caution, especially Danna, to whom I am going to mail it as soon as it's safe to go back to the post office. (i.e. after Santamas)
The first back of the book blurb likens the title character to a 21st century Lolita, but I think she's more similar to a blogging Go Ask Alice.
It's likely I never would have heard of, much less read this book if I hadn't gone to high school with one of its authors. We went to the same high school, but lived in different universes. However, it seems that even Liz Welch's closest friends didn't have much more of an idea of what was going on in her life than I did.
Searching for a long-lost (actually never known to her) family member, 15-year-old Maya eludes an icky foster care placement (Christians, with a would-be-Dad whose eyes rest at chest level) and takes to the mean streets of northwest Nevada and southeast Idaho. Ayarbe (Freeze Frame) draws a convincing sketch of teenage life on the run and also the familial bonds that develop between traveling companions. Bad things happen in this book and there is no romantic subplot.
A year or two ago I read Stephanie Grant's Map of Ireland, which I liked and admired, but don't remember all that strongly, and I didn't like and admire it enough to seek out other books by Ms. Grant. That was dumb because The Passion of Alice, her first novel is the perfect balance of cerebral and engaging. It's about a 25 year old in treatment for anorexia.
My summary of this not-too- far-in-the-future dystopia in four haiku stanzas:
The Department of
Homeland Security runs
amok post attack.
Hacker teens fight the
power and teach the reader
about crypto tech.
Teen reader primer
on history, politics
and the internet.
Plus boy meets girl.
Parents are dumb then helpful.
Ends with vote or die.
The fourth in the Gossip Girl meets the Vampire Diaries series Blue Bloods is more romance than vampire. It's as absorbing as its predecessors but is somewhat thin--like its three vampire/model narrators.
The first non paranormal fiction novel I've read finished in ages--and it's magic realism! Daughters of the Stone, by a Puerto Rican YA librarian from the Bronx (That's hot!), tells of five generations of gifted women.
I don't usually read zines by men, not because I'm biased, although I am, but because most of my zine reading is for the Zine Collection at Barnard, which is comprised mostly of zines by women, with a few by people of other genders writing about femme identity. The author of Travesty is a cisgendered male who likes to wear women's clothes.
