Below are the books I have read in July-December 2011. On the pages linked above are the books I am reading and hope to finish, and the books I hope to not have to finish, thank you. Oh, and the ones I hope to start. Most recent books on top of list.
Numbering: [book # for this year]/[book # for July-December]
Books that I read already:
37/10. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
Read in Dec. 2011
This is a book of short stories by the author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (see #33). That was published in 2010; this, in 1998. It's her first book. The stories center around fantasies, fantasies gone wrong, fantastic skills, and fantastic illnesses, a little bit. I've read a couple before in short story collections and enjoyed them because the voice contrasted with the voices of other authors: risky things happen in these stories, and characters go crazy from the events or non-events around them. Not my favorite book but I did find it readable and "fun", so do read it if you need some time out of the ordinary life.
36/9. Like Water Like Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.
Read in Dec. 2011
I picked up The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake because I heard on Amazon or somewhere, from a commenter, that this book and Like Water Like Chocolate have opposite concepts: Lemon Cake book has a girl tasting others' emotions in the food they cook, while Chocolate has a girl (later, woman) who cooks food that causes others to experience her emotions. I prefer Chocolate. In this book, a series of magical events occur as reactions to an actual plot (hurrah!!!) in which the heroine, a girl whose abusive mother insists that she take care of her until she (the mother) dies, changes her own life and the lives of her sisters while falling deeply in love, raising others' children, and especially cooking. The novel is actually written in a series of recipes, one a month, and the directions for making complex, delicious-sounding Mexican dishes (and sometimes other concoctions, like matches) flow in and out of the stories relating to them easily. I really got taken along for the ride, and realllly want to try mole sauce.
35/8. Wayside School is Falling Down and Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger by Louis Sachar
Read in Dec. 2011
From the author of Holes, the second and third books in a three-book series; masterpieces, all. Lots of chapters with a story each about a school with thirty floors with a classroom on each floor, except for the nineteenth floor, where Mrs. Zarves teaches. The nineteenth floor doesn't exist, and neither does Mrs. Zarves, though Allison does get stuck in her class for a week! And other stuff, like about not wearing socks.This book is so funny and silly and illogical and refreshing. I give up on not reading children's books!
34/7. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
Read in Dec. 2011
Good: light reading at last! I picked up a pile of library books to read over break and went somewhere for a week but only took... one of them. Which was a bad idea because I got sick and could have read SO MANY. Am still working my way through Elizabeth Bishop book. Anyways. Lemon Cake. This book is about a girl who tastes people's emotions in the foods they cook. Great concept but in my opinion the author didn't go far with it. Oops, let me label my rant correctly.
Bad: Okay. So concept is great but there's no plot other than time passing and characters not communicating with each other enough. If the only thing I am yelling at a book when I am reading it is "guys, just talk to each other already, THAT'S ALL IT TAKES TO SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM, SAY THAT LITTLE THING" then there's usually a problem. Basically this huge talent of being able to taste emotions is turned into a little phenomenon that affected the protagonist about as much as my ability to write backwards has affected me (i.e. not much, though it did attract a bit of attention in middle/high school). Really? Let's please not make this ONLY about character development... AAAAA ALL CAPS!!!
However, I still have hopes for Bender's other books, one of which I have borrowed at the moment. Report pending.
33/6. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.
Read in Fall 2011.
I like most of Kingsolver's work, adore The Poisonwood Bible and the essays especially, she's a woman who has good thoughts about good subjects and a role model for me. Novel is about a chap who grows up in Mexico, gets sent to America, lives his life going back and forth between the two countries and meets famous people (Kahlo, Trotsky) and has a mother who is a flapper, which is amusing (though too much dialect sounds trite here and there?). I enjoyed it and read it during slow work nights. I forgot to put it up here though until 2012, so... not much memory of it left except it felt like this book was trying to teach me something, Mexican and American history and tolerance and possibly other things, while telling its story. This is done not in a bad way but I don't want to feel like I'm in fourth grade, sometimes.
32/5. A bunch of school textbook chapters, don't tell me this doesn't count! I don't feel like putting these in the "Won't Read" section would be wrong because each of these chapters is almost complete in itself.
Read in Fall 2011.
-Soil Science and Management, by Edward Plaster
-Wretched unnamed botany excerpt "textbook" composed of select chapters from a complete textbook. So there are two sets of page numbers, and NO INDEX. Awful... (to be fair, the writing and pictures are all right, and I think that the book in its entirety would be fine, but this textbook and the notes and the lab notes/worksheets don't all coincide very well, and it makes the class confusing... okay rant over.)
-Notes on greenhouses! Printouts with pictures!
-Ditto everything about apples! So many new facts! Not all from one source though, just lots of copies of things.
-Something about citizenship and speaking publicly which includes tidbits of famous speeches. Those are the best part.
-Oh and maybe forty-something mostly Russian songs with doodles all over the pages (by yours truly). We sang them!
31/4. Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom
Read in October.
Mitch Albom, author of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, wrote this nonfiction book about getting to know his childhood rabbi during the years before he died, for the sake of writing his eulogy. So stories and wisdom from the meetings of Albom and the reb alternate chapters with the story of a formerly incarcerated black man in Detroit who starts up a Christian church and a shelter. Somewhat cheesy/soapy/melodramatic at times but this is the book I was needing at the time, and it's another one suggested to me by a friend (new school friend, this one). That was the week I needed a boost in happy faith thoughts and this book did it for me, I know to come back to it if I need another lift.
30/3. The Blue Book by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Read in... September? Unless October?
This is a book of philosophy that Wittgenstein dictated to his students, and that they passed around and finally got published at some point, maybe after his death. It's about words and their meanings and I like it because it tears apart Plato's method of analysis here and there but in a respectful way that makes sense. I read this to prepare/introduce myself to Wittgenstein before getting too deep in Mr. John Verdi's book Fat Wednesday, in which he discusses aspects of things, starting off from some ideas of Mr. W. I think fondly of these things because Mr. Verdi was the tutor of one of my favorite classes at St. John's College, and because I like language and philosophy and it's good to think about them every once in a while, now that I'm studying farm things.
29/2. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
Read July-August.
It's pessimistic, it's sarcastic, it's funnier if you come into it sympathizing with protagonist who doesn't want to die at war, while also not expecting humor. World War II. Very clever stories within stories. Sharp. SPOILER ALERT-ISH: man, the end, it's cumulative. Gotta read the whole thing. Now I gotta read it over to make sense of it all...
28/1. Saving Grandma, by Frank Schaeffer.
Read in August.
Novel, sequel of Portofino which I found years ago in the Jordanville monastery/seminary bookstore and bought, among other things like: prayer book and the like. Neither book belongs in that bookstore in my opinion but it may have been in there because it has to do with missionaries? [Update: a Jordanville-based friend says that Mr. Schaeffer has also written (edited? translated?) some super churchy stuff, so that explains that.] A dysfunctional family of them? The narrator is Calvin, the youngest member of the stalwart Protestant group. In Portofino we meet the family while they are on vacation in Italy: now, they are back home in Switzerland (they live there, though they are Americans), where personalities clash and things go badly wrong. All this causes Calvin to fantasize endlessly about returning to Italy and meeting the girl he loves there, all while the next summer's vacation begins to seem less and less possible in reality... so this is a good vacation book, but perhaps not for a pilgrimage. Caution.
I DID NOT READ IN JULY?! Nope, or at least I didn't finish anything. :'(
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