Slacks for Ella Funt

I reread this in preparation for seeing the movie. It’s even better than I remembered, which makes me even more nervous that they’ll capture the book with any success in movie form. Pullman is telling a pretty sophisticated story about the human souls and original sin. But he also tells an exciting story. And best of all is his concept of daemons. Each person has an animal that is with them all the time, shares their thoughts, and cannot separate from them by more than a few feet. For children, the daemons change shape constantly. When children become adults, the daemons settle into a permanent form that represents the personality of their person. More than that, though, in Pullman’s world the daemons are people’s souls, externalized in the animals. So the daemons are fun animal companions, but they’re also a lot more than that.
In The Golden Compass, Lyra must stop experiments that the Magisterium (the church) are doing to separate children from their daemons. Essentially, the adults are separating children from their souls. In doing this, they hope to preserve the children in their sinless, childlike state.

Lovely. Ann Patchett somehow manages to write books that could easily be described as heartwarming, but don’t turn me off with sappiness. It helps that she writes beautifully. Her scenes of wintry Boston and the Doyles’ drafty old mansion really come alive. There are no villains in Patchett’s books—everyone is eventually revealed to be well intentioned in some way. Her characters do seem a bit unreal in their unwavering good intentions. but they also feel fully fleshed out, and their good intentions don’t always lead to good results.

Yes, another YA vampire book. I picked this one up because it’s set in Austin. The author apparantly decided that Austin was a good vampire setting because bats like under the Congress Ave. bridge. Which doesn’t connect to her story at all. This one had a few elements that seemed fun—a vampire themed restaurant, her half-werewolf friend. But then lots of characters, including the narrator, turn into vampires, and the story ends up more or less incoherent.

Yes, I read a lot of YA vampire books. Unfortunately, most of them are not nearly as good as an average episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This one’s a bit different because the narrator is a teenage boy who’s turning into a vampire rather than a girl who is involved with vampires. Sort of a vampire’s perspective on the whole thing, I guess. Otherwise, not terribly exciting.

I occasionally pick up a chick lit book. Usually the ones about young women living in New York, working in some sort of publishing. These would seem to appeal to me given that I am a young woman living in New York working in publishing. However, these books generally annoy me because the writer is so concerned with the heroine’s love life that there’s not much about her career or New York. The heroine of this one had a few obsessions outside of her love life—her best friend’s approaching wedding, her job, the chance of a millenial apocalypse. Unfortunately, mostly she just complains about all of the above. Too much whining for me.

I’m a fan of Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series. Of the renegade detective grown old and discontent genre, his is one of the best. Rebus is a real mess, with drinking problems, a destroyed reputation in the department, and no personal life whatsoever. And Rankin’s Edinburgh is so thoroughly fleshed out that you practically feel like you’ve been there. That said, this isn’t my favorite in the series, and I’m not sure why every mystery writer now feels like they need to do a terrorism related plot.

I’ve been meaning to read The Road for a long time. I enjoyed McCarthy’s Border trilogy, but sometimes I find him to be a bit of a slog. And honestly, I just rarely find myself in the mood to read something bleak and apocalyptic. But after reading Life As We Knew It, I kind of was in an apocalypse mood.
The Road has a lot of similarities to other McCarthy books. Journeys that never seem to end. Food that is rare—just some beans and a tortilla every few days in the Border trilogy, the rare scavenged can in The Road. And carnage. Lots of carnage and brutality. I would say that The Road has more numerous and grotesque images of carnage than anything I’ve ever read.
Intense as the book is, I never felt like I got fully sucked in. McCarthy has grabbed me in the past, particularly in the long sequence with Billy and the wolf in the opening of The Crossing. But with The Road, I always felt like I was holding it at arm’s length, perhaps because it was so bleak, it felt too unreal.
I keep meaning to look online for Oprah’s interview with McCarthy when she picked The Road for her book club. I just can’t fathom the reclusive McCarthy sitting down on Oprah’s couch to describe his vision of bleak annihilation.

In this book, an asteroid hits the moon and knocks it off orbit, causing floods, volcanos, and other catastrophes all over Earth. At first, everyone thinks that things will go back to normal soon, but as food, heating oil, and electricity run out, people only hope to survive. Fifteen-year-old Miranda and her family survive a long, freezing winter in near starvation as their stockpile of food diminishes. It reminded me a bit of Hatchet, and the diary format was obviously Anne Frank inspired. This one really sucked me in given that now, unfortunately, disasters that take out whole cities and regions don’t seem as far-fetched as they used to.