Slacks for Ella Funt

We spent the weekend housesitting for one of my coworkers at his place up in the Catskills. He and his wife have a converted barn with a few acres of land and they have chickens, geese, ducks, and dogs. Luckily, the farm chores were mostly making sure everyone got fed, but we did have to get up at sunrise to let the chickens out of their coop and feed them.
We spent the most time with the dogs, of course, since they followed us everywhere (which might have mostly entailed sitting next to our feet while we read). The chickens seemed pretty indifferent to us and the ducks didn’t come near us. The geese were real drama queens, squawking and honking at each other most of the time, when they weren’t pooping all over the place.
Besides for our chores and tromping around outside in the snow, we spent the rest of the time reading and watching season 4 of The Wire. I had fun cooking with the delicious fresh eggs and on their powerful commercial stove and oven. We didn’t look at internet or TV all weekend long, except to watch the Daytona 500 (Way to go Newman!).
More pictures here.

This is one of those books that annoyed me to read because the main character is frequently facing multiple options, including one option that will sort out all his problems and one that will make the situation much worse. In this book, Sam Pulsifer always chooses the option that will make his situation worse. I know that the compounded disasters make the story, but I still wanted to shake him a lot of the time. It’s also all postmodern-y and sarcastic, but I think it was supposed to be much funnier than I thought it was.

This seemed less like a book than a script for a teen movie, something in the Superbad or American Pie genre. It’s more or less a classic teen movie scenario—graduation night, nerd has just confessed his love to his longtime cheerleader crush, a long night of hijinks ensues. It would probably do ok as a movie, but it wasn’t a very good book.

Atkinson’s narrator, Ruby Lennox, is the real star here. The first line of the book is a brash declaration of her conception: “I exist!” She tells her story from conception to old age. Atkinson does a great job of matching the narrative voice and the level of knowledge consistent with Ruby’s age. As a baby and child, Ruby doesn’t completely understand what’s going on, and neither does the reader. As Ruby gets older, her understanding of past events fills in the gaps for the reader.
The history of five generations of Ruby’s family is brought in as footnotes to items in the main narrative, leading to a non-linear structure that I really enjoyed.
I didn’t like this quite as well as Atkinson’s recent literary mysteries, but it’s interesting to see what she was doing before she started with the mysteries.

I think I’ve only read one of Elizabeth George’s other books, which I don’t remember being very impressed by. So I think I picked this one up only because I thought it was a good title. It seems like she was going out on a limb here. As it pertains to her ongoing series, this book is about the murder of the detective’s wife. Instead of starting with the murder and proceeding with solving it, per usual mystery format, she starts with Joel, the young boy who shoots the victim, and tells the events that led to the murder.
Joel is a poor black kid living in the London projects with his aunt, sister, and brother. They all have issues. I’m sure the author was trying to be gritty and authentic in writing about the lives of these characters, but it doesn’t work. All of the black characters are somewhat offensive stereotypes. Even worse, the third person omniscient voice seems condescending to both the characters and the readers.

It seems like the “novel in stories” format has become more popular lately, and publishers don’t quite know how to sell them. Novels sell better than short stories, so they don’t want to label the books as stories. However, they don’t have the sustained narrative of a novel, even if characters do overlap from story to story. I don’t mind when a book is subtitled “a novel in stories” or something like that so at least you know what you’re getting. I don’t like when a publisher just calls it a novel.
For Adverbs, nothing on the cover says anything about it being stories rather than a cohesive novel. Since I’m not really a short story fan, I was disappointed as soon as I realized that it wasn’t a real novel. Handler has a lot of quirky wit, but the stories were just too short and spastic for me to really get into any of them and I usually couldn’t remember which characters were which when they came up again. Some of them did remind me a bit of Kelly Link, who does write short stories that I like, though hers tend to be longer.

This is a fairly standard Victorian mystery/thriller. Taylor equips his book with the usual cast of characters: a crazy woman in the attic, a mysterious country house, a precocious chambermaid, etc. So many characters and plotlines that it took me a while to sort out who was who, especially because I was reading it in small chunks on the train. One section, set in a cabin in Canada, I never managed to connect with anything else in the book. It’s beginning to seem like these imitation-Victorian novels that have been coming out lately are more interested in getting the form right than in being very interesting to read.

This is a charming little book about a girl who wants to be a pianist, but ends up playing the electric organ instead. The narrator’s voice is very appealing. It would probably be a great pick for a middle grade reader, but it was a little to simple for the adult reader.

Like Ian Rankin’s books set in Edinburgh, Lehane’s series is one where the city itself is the starring character. Lehane’s Boston is a place of poverty, bitterness, and desperation, where crime is rampant and no one is safe. Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro grew up in a working class area of Boston. Many of the kids they grew up with became criminals, drunks, etc. They became private detectives. There’s a lot of violence in these, and they really come up against the scum of humanity, and almost lose themselves in the process. Sometimes the violence crosses the line of being believable, particularly the number of people Kenzie and Gennaro manage to kill without any serious legal repercussions. Overall though, a good series, well written with interesting plots and characters. One of the better American series that I’ve read.