Slacks for Ella Funt

I used to really enjoy Martha Grimes. She’s American, but she writes the kind of traditional English mysteries I like best, in the vein of Christie and Sayers. But this one and the one before (The Old Silent) have really gotten off track. Both started off well enough, this one with a heavy dose of philosophy, which I always like in books. But both have sections written from the perspective of dogs, who go on to save the day. I’m annoyed that a dependable mystery writer has turned into a dog mystery writer—I think pet-themed mysteries are silly and even more so when the pets talk.

I liked this series, but I didn’t love it. I had the same problem that I have with a lot of sci-fi—the authors seem more interested in describing the intricacies of their future-worlds than in character or telling a good story. In this series, Westerfield is using his future world to make an allegorical point about image driven society, but I got a little bored with the story.

We just found out that we’re going to Austin for SXSW. E did an illustration for a magazine that’s having a venue there and they decided that they wanted him to hang around the venue and be artsy. He’s not sure exactly what he’s supposed to be doing/drawing, but they’re paying him as well as paying for his flight and hotel room. Since all I have to pay for is a plane ticket, I’m going too.

Austin is my favorite Texas city, so it will be fun to go again. Joanna and I went to SXSW one year in college and had a great time. And March is when I get tired of winter in New York and will be happy for a few days of Texas spring.

Since we’re going to Quebec in February and Austin in March, I’m afraid we’re going to get used to going on vacation every month.

We’re leaving for our trip to Quebec in a little over a week. We’re going to be in town for their Winter Carnaval, and then spend a few nights just outside of town, where we’ll dogsled and spend a night in the Ice Hotel.
We’ve been busy buying winter gear—new hats, snow boots, and lots of long underwear. We should be all prepared, though I’m not sure anyone will be able to recognize us in our photos—we’ll be so bundled up. We’ve also been soliciting recommendations from friends who have been there and the wannabe Canadians from E’s hockey league. I even made a map of all the restuarants and bars that were recommended to us.
We were a little nervous that the warm winter we’ve been having in the northeast would mean that Winter Carnaval wouldn’t be cold, but their weather lately has been pretty steady in the single digits. Still well warmed than normal (a friend told us that when she went, it was -40°F/-40°C), but plenty cold enough for snow. I think we’ll be ok with it being in the positive degrees, but we’d be very disappointed if there wasn’t snow. Also, sleeping in the Ice Hotel might be difficult if it was above freezing.

This is a pretty typical YA romance, told in the voices of the boy and the girl. The same sort of thing was done much better in Nick and Norah’s Inifnite Playlist (by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan). Besides for the romance, there’s not a whole lot going on in this book, besides for subplots about applying for college, which I didn’t find very interesting (maybe because I’m too old).

Colasanti drops in a lot of pop culture references to try to make herself and the characters look cool. Unfortunately, while some (John Cusack in Say Anything) are actually good, some aren’t (Dave Matthews Band) and the bad ones just make the characters seem lame. I think in books, it’s better to just have fictional bands, like Cohn and Levithan did in Nick and Norah and Sarah Dessen does in her books. Then the characters can seem interested in music without the author having to worry about whether the bands mentioned are cool.

This was our book club book. The book club has been an off and on affair, and in it’s current incarnation, we’re reading only books set in New York. Generally, we try to pick books 400 pages or less, and, annoyingly, a lot of the time people don’t even bother to read them. This time, we picked Winter’s Tale, which is significantly longer, and then went several months without meeting.

I had actually read Winter’s Tale over the summer, and didn’t much like it, so I decided that I had read it recently enough to not need to reread it for book group. I really need more of a plot and characters that are developped to make it through 700 pages. In Winter’s Tale, it seems like Helprin just thought of a bunch of beautiful, fantastical images of New York (leaping through the city on a big white horse, a cloud wall at the edge of the city, a beautiful consumptive heiress on a penthouse roof in the snow) and strung them together without much effort to create a coherent narrative.

As usual, the opinions in the book group were mixed between people who, like me, needed a plot and people who were swept away by the images.

This was one of the most fun books I’ve read in a long time. It’s set in 1950s London, and full of stately old manor houses, fashionable parties, giddy dresses, and rock and roll dreams. It has some of the wistfulness of I Capture the Castle, mixed with the madcap fun of P. G. Wodehouse. This is what chick-lit should be. I enjoyed every minute of it.

My Sister’s Keeper starts out as probably the most interesting novel I’ve read about the dangers of cloning. I’m sure there are lots more out there, but I found this one much more believable than Never Let Me Go (by Kazuo Ishiguro) and Cast of Shadows (by Kevin Guilfoile). It’s set in the contemporary world, in an average town, with a family that doesn’t seem that different from any other. They have a daughter with a rare form of leukemia and decide to have another daughter genetically designed to be a genetic match for the sick daughter to create umbilical cord blood for the leukemia treatments. As the donor daughter grows up, her sick sister continues to need platelets, bone marrow, and eventually a kidney. As the book begins, the donor sister has decided to declare herself medically emancipated from her parents to stop the donations.

The book is written with alternating chapters in the voices of different characters and for the most part, the only weak part is the romantic subplot between the two lawyers.

Picoult has raised some thought-provoking and not so futuristic issues, but unfortunately, she wimps out on making any decisions about the right thing to do. At the end of the book, a freak accident saves the parents and sisters from having to make a decision. I was disappointed that Picoult wrote such an issue driven book, without taking a stand.

Even though each chapter opens with the name of the character who is speaking, someone decided that it was necessary for each character should have a different typefaces. This makes for an unattractive and disjointed reading experience. In having to select that many unique typefaces, it’s unavoidable for some of them to be ugly and unpleasant to read.

In my experience, starting a friendship is not a lot different and definitely no easier than starting a romantic relationship. In Peaches, the characters circle each other, reach out tentatively, and are sometimes aceepted and sometimes rejected before they become friends. It’s not easy.

Again, the back cover copy on this book is completely off, making it sound much shallower than it is. From the back cover, you’d think this was a book about three southern belles goofing around for a summer, flirting with boys, and not thinking about much besides what to wear. Instead, the characters are worrying about their families, working hard, and trying to establish themselves in their world. Not a great YA book, but a better one than the cover makes it look.

I think that I like reading YA novels because I still feel a lot of the same uncertainty that I did as a teenager. Sometimes characters in adult novels seem so set, so established, that the YA kids seem more like me. So even though I supposedly should have been beyond these issues by now, a lot of the dilemmas in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series still ring true for me. That said, there are a lot of cheesy YA books out there, and I feel like these have characters that seem like people I would actually like (unlike those rotten cliques and A-listers and etc.) but doesn’t also doesn’t feel like the author is trying to teach some kind of lesson about history or surviving hardship.