I love to read and one of the things I missed so much when I moved to WordPress from Typepad was Typepad’s little book widget that displayed your ‘reads’ in a side column…then I saw this idea at Suse’s beautiful blog (which is one of my all-time favorites anyway) and thought, brilliant!
2011 reads
January: Girl Who Played with Fire & Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Steig Larsson - Loved the whole trilogy but especially the second book although why the hell did Lisbeth get breast implants? Anyway, I think I might dress up as her for Halloween some year.
January: Partners in Crime, Agatha Christie – This was a reread. I love Tommy & Tuppence.
February: The Winter Ghosts, Kate Mosse – As creepy, inexplicable, and insubstantial as the ghosts she writes about. As much as I wanted to like this, it just didn’t get there for me. I like many elements of it, but it felt like it fell flat. I never became invested. But an interesting premise and a good writer; many beautiful passages. Just not for me.
February: The Countess, Rebecca Johns - Set in 1611 Hungary, this book is about Erzsebet Bathory, the so-called Blood Countess who was convicted of murdering countless servant girls in her household and walled into a tower for punishment. This was billed as a story about the first female serial killer, and since that’s what I was expecting, it fell a little short for me. The writing is wonderful, the scenes beautifully drawn, it’s an intriguing gothic tale – but it holds back somehow. I didn’t feel pulled in or compelled by the Countess. I wanted more about why she killed, what she felt, why she did it, whether she was feared. I wanted more of everything. So not a bad book, but just not enough.
February: The Tommyknockers, Stephen King - I went through a Stephen King mania in my teens and read everything of his I could get my hands on, in no particular order, purchased with pocket money at the Printed Word in Owosso and usually based on whichever lurid cover seemed the most promising. I read Tommyknockers after a spate of his other books that were absolutely mind-blowing – and this one, at the time, fell so far short that I skipped huge swathes and threw it aside in frustration. I think it was the dog that did it. Anytime there is a dog in a book like this, you pretty much know something horrible is going to happen to it, and I have very low tolerance for that. But I reread it when I ran out of library books over the last spell of horrible wintry weather and I got really into it. Once Gard has his meltdown, and you start getting into the weird behavior of the townspeople…wow. Not the best Stephen King, but by far not the worst! Especially now that I am older and more jaded and have been exposed to his Buick 8 nonsense.
March: Labyrinth, Kate Mosse - Done with Kate Mosse. Two strikes and you’re out. I don’t know how she managed to make the search for the Holy Grail boring and tedious, but she did it.
March: The Distant Hours, Kate Morton - A long-lost letter from 1941 arrives at its destination and leads the main character Edie into a mystery. During WWII, her mother, then a child, was sent to the country to escape the London blitz. She was taken in by an eccentric family living in a gothic castle, and the dysfunctional relationship between this foster family forms the baseline of the tale. I really liked the first 3/4 of this book. I liked the characters, I liked the WWII flashbacks. I thought it was interesting and well-paced and creepy. I just didn’t like the ENDING. She just slid into gibberish. It could have gone in so many different, compelling directions, and suffice it to say, it didn’t.
March: The Scarpetta Factor, Patricia Cornwell - Another in Cornwell’s famous Scarpetta series and probably the best one in a long while. I am a huge fan of early Scarpetta and the last few novels have really confounded me – strange storylines, told from weird perspectives. Maybe some people like the narrative experimentation Cornwell has been engaging in, but to me it just seems like she’s trying to keep herself interested in churning out another one. That said, I really liked this one, because I felt it went back to what I feel she does best – a Big Bad villain, compelling but not harrowing sub-plots, fast-paced action, and enough transpiring in the characters’ lives to keep them moving forward.
March: Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff - I thought this was going to be a novel. I was expecting a novel. Instead, I got a biography. I would have been disappointed, but I was too busy reading. It was surprisingly fast reading, light and absorbing, a very non-tedious work of historical research. Reminded me of the way Alison Weir writes a biography. You feel kind of guilty, as though it might not be fast food history, but I learned a lot about Cleopatra, Rome, and her times – enough to know that one of my favorite shows, ‘Rome’, got a lot wrong.
March: Ice Run, Steve Hamilton - My mom is a librarian so always has the inside track on good new releases as well as good Michigan-related literature. Steve Hamilton may live in New York now, but he’s a Michigander at heart, and can write about the state of my heart in a way that a lot of others can’t. He can also write a good, breezy, fast-paced whodunnit. Not too challenging, but very palatable. Interesting characters faced with a good mix of personal pathos that draws you in, and external pressure that keeps you intrigued.
April: Freedom, Jonathon Franzen – I’m counting audiobooks. In progress currently.
April: Faithful Place, Tana French – Irish detective Frank Mackey grew up in a rough neighborhood, in a rough family. He was a tough teenager in 1985 when his girlfriend, the love of his life, jilted him. He never heard from her again. Years later, Frank is called back to his childhood home by his sister, and the story of what happened to Rosie unfolds. This was a really impressive mystery, and reminded me of a Kate Atkinson – the extremely likeable male lead, a thorny dilemma, a cast of fascinating supporting characters. I’m going to the library to find more Tana French – I recommend it to mystery lovers.
April: Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King – After I finished it, I understood the title. In the afterword, he addresses the fact that these were hard stories to read and hard stories to write. He was right – this is full dark, no stars. These aren’t creepy, darkly humorous stories…these are harsh, dark, violent stories. I think he has lost his sense of humor. The monsters in these stories are humans, and what they inflict on each other is sad and disturbing. The argument can be made that many of his other monsters were people, too – Jack Torrance, for example, or Max Devore, but he pulled a lot of punches. And at the end of the day, at the heart of it, those were ghost stories, love stories, funny stories, the white and the dark. Maybe I’m weak, maybe I’m one of those annoying fans who just want him to keep doing what he did in “Salem’s Lot” – but if this is what he’s going to be doing from now on, I’m not sure I can keep up with him.
May: Fly Away Home, Jennifer Weiner - A light and non-challenging read about a trio of women in family – a mother and her two daughters – and their issues with the men in their lives and their conflicting personalities, different stories, and how they come together as a family to help one another (and themselves) deal with them. Here we have the cheating husband, counterbalanced by one of the women’s infidelity; recovering addiction issues, a political scandal, a move to a summer house where of course the healing takes place via cooking and female bonding and a shift to comfortable clothes. I sound snarky but I enjoyed this book in a lighthearted way, it was engaging and well-paced even if the old chestnuts are all there.
May: Witches on the Road Tonight, Sheri Holman - During the Depression, a photographer and a writer touring the Appalachians hit a child with their car. They take the child back to his home, and we meet the first of the Alley women, Cora, who reveals herself to be a witch. The story bounces back and forth between the Appalachians, following her consumption of these hapless travelers, and current day New York, where the child who was her son, now grown, has made a bit of a kerfuffle of his own life and his daughter as well, and the suburban 1960′s, where some, but not all, of the bad decisions have unfolded and borne fruit. I really expected to like this book more, but, typically, found myself only really engaged in one time period with one set of characters. The others, even if they were the same characters at a different age, I just didn’t care about. The imagery, beautiful, the story, clever and interesting, though. I will read more of her books.
