Crestfallen

Cress
By Marissa Meyer

Damn and blast!  I thought it was a trilogy!

Not saying it's not my own boneheaded fault.  For some reason I thought this series was a trilogy and this would be the book where the battle against evil Queen Levana was going to finish up.  Well--no spoiler here--it doesn't.  And I'm hooked for the duration.

(Maybe that was a spoiler--I'll mark it thus on Goodreads and the review will be hidden.)

Somehow Ms. Meyer manages to write action scenes that keep you on your feet and write sappy love scenes that don't make you roll your eyes and skip to the next page. And her technology is realistic enough to accept without question.  She's that good.  They should absolutely make this into a TV series.

Some serious reading

As a Driven Leaf
by Milton Steinberg

Absolutely gripping narrative of the life of Elisha ben Abuyah, a rabbi turned philosopher in the early years of the CE.  He was described in both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem, and from the slim details in those documents plus a lot of historical data, the author has fleshed out a living, breathing person.  Elisha is neither a hero nor a heretic, but a brilliant philosopher who trusted that the sure proofs in Euclidean geometry would carry over into the realm of human--and godly--existence.

Milton Steinberg does an unbelievable job of making ancient times seem real.  Of course, since he was writing in 20th century English, there were a couple of places where he used a term or description that sounded a little too modern.  But that's being picky.

I'm reminded of both Siddharta and Arrowsmith...to say any more would be spoiling.

Cheating a little...a short book is still a book

Queen of the World
Babymouse #1
by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm

I would totally have read this to my kids and you should too.  Babymouse is a fourth-grader with a wicked imagination and a keen sense of fair play.  And she's not a bad dresser, either. Only the naturally curly whiskers keep her from being a real queen...or maybe not.

Makes you want to go on a cruise

The Sea Around Us
by Rachel Carson

The classic natural history in a 1961 update, with footnotes, introduction and an afterword.  The introduction was by Ann H. Zwinger; the afterword by Jeffrey S. Levinton.  It doesn't say who wrote the footnotes so I assume it was Rachel Carson herself.

This is the kind of book that taught me to love natural history writing long, long ago.  A 2014 rewrite would be cool.  Some things never change--wind, water and waves--but our understanding of them does. It would be a different book today...but not so different as to render this one pointless.

Does my admiration for this lovely, lovely book give me a right to gripe, just a little?  It was published by Oxford University Press.  I don't know if it's their fault or the author's (when in doubt, blame the publisher), but the whole 243 page volume contains exactly one illustration.  There may have been two but I don't think so.  One measly little map!  It should have had a hundred.  No map of Pangaea--no diagram of wave motion--nary an illustration of undersea volcanoes or the moon-sun alignment that causes spring tides.  That last fact NEVER made sense to me until I saw a drawing of it.  So why not here?

Listened long--every gory detail

After the Fire

by Robin Gaby Fisher

Okay.  Here goes.

A story of a college dorm fire and its aftermath. A story of two friends,  A true story--so be prepared.  I don't want to give away even so many details as the cover blurb did, so that is all I will say.

I will suggest that you read it rather than listen to it.  Listening seemed to drag on and on and repeat itself a little too often--which is to say, a whole lot too often.  Sometimes, I just wanted to skip to the end.  But I applaud the author's attention to detail, and especially the even-handed treatment of all the players involved--victims, families, doctors, nurses, girlfriends....  It was a lot of ground to cover and she did it excellently well.  You will NOT be disappointed.

Reading is about all I can do, so I'm reading

After All
by Mary Tyler Moore

A candid autobiography from one of television's favorite straight women.  I really liked it at first but then it digressed to so-so. Too much breadth; too little depth.  I think I'm giving up on celebrity biographies.  So much of it seemed to be looking back, not living in--told, not lived. I wanted more blow-by-blow memories of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. but it only had the tiniest handful.

I do think she's a totally cool person.  If anyone deserves to write an autobiobraphy, it's she.  I wonder if she dredged up the history from letters and memories rather than having been a diary-keeper?  Maybe only diarists can do good autobiographies.

The Egg and Her

  
Everyone warned me that this book was impossibly racist; that the narrator was a stuck-up snob; that the humor was more cruel than funny. I didn't get any of that.  It was just a case of a person out of place and time trying to cope with a life she'd never have chosen for herself.  I kind of liked her.

Her neighbors The Kettles were hilarious. I wonder if they were some sort of inspiration for the classic "Ma and Pa Kettle" movies.  (Which were hilarious, by the way.)

I don't exactly recommend it, but I didn't hate it.

A classic I was lucky to miss

A Girl Of the Limberlost

by Gene Stratton-Porter

It might make me lose my reading challenge to do this, but I'm giving up on this one.  It is so dreadfully awful!  What can you do with a book that starts off the first chapter using the following declaratives, in order:
demanded
faltered
cried
jeered
replied
said    (Finally!)
In later conversation we find: panted, begged, inquired, sobbed, and suggested....  But you're used to them and hardly notice them...most of the time.

People who loved it as children will hate me for this, but to be honest, I can't imagine liking this book at any age.  There are certain books I count as childhood favorites that I might consider outdated for the modern audience.  The Pink Maple House, Little Men, The Five Little Peppers, The Horse Without a Head--I loved them to death but I wouldn't force them on a modern-day child.  (I might offer them, nonchalantly.)  But those books have plot, charm, and a writing style that doesn't grate on the nerves.  They're real novels about real people, not made-up crap about impossibly saintly people or unbelievably cruel people who have a mystical conversion and become impossibly saintly.   They're books that if I read them for the first time now, I'd at least be able to finish them.

A Girl Of the Limberlost--abandoned.

Teen book that's good enough for a grownup

The Running Dream

by Wendelin Van Draanen

Such a sweetie!  I hope it was researched as well as it seemed--I'd hate to think all of the information about track and running and prosthetics was made up, because it was absolutely fascinating.

If I were a high school English teacher I'd assign it.  Twice.

Another much needed comfort book

The Dirty Life
On Farming, Food, and Love
by Kristin Kimball

Not for the squeamish.  

No, seriously--farming isn't all about bovine contentment and clucking chickens and ripe red tomatoes eaten straight off the vine.  Food isn't all about a well-stocked grocery store with forty-one varieties of imported Balsalmic Vinegar.  And love isn't easy.

All the same you can hear the love singing through every page.  Farming is hard and rewarding and gets under your skin.  Ms. Kimball pulls no punches, spares us no gory detail...nor beautiful one, either.  Her farming live grows on her, and with it, she grows too.

To sum up: great book; I kind of want to give it five stars and I definitely want to read it again.
(As soon as I forget the scary parts.)

History at its best told

My Father's Paradise:
A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

by Ariel Sabar

 
One of those great books that is so much more than any title can describe.  It's a family history of Mr. Sabar's great-grandfather, grandfather and father, told in chronological order up until the present, when focus shifts to the author and you learn how the story came to be told.   It's also the story of the lost tribes of Israel.  And it's the story of Aramaic--the language of the mighty Assyrian empire for over seven thousand years, but known to 1900's era scholars only by a few writings and a root in the linguistic family tree.

But Aramaic was alive and flourishing at the time--it lived in the everyday speech of the dispersed Jewish populations of northern Iraq, such as the Jews of Zakho's island.  Zakho's island--the old part of the town of Zakho--held at most 2400 Jews, five percent of the total population.  But for a time they called it "the Jerusulem of Khurdistan"--a holy place--a homeland. .

Miryam and Rahamim Beh Sabagha, the grandparents of the author, were born there and  lived until they were forced to leave Iraq in 1951.  Their son Yona was the last boy bar mitzvahed in Zakho, an act his father did in a a rush just as they were preparing to emigrate.  The boy was not yet thirteen, but somehow his father sensed it was best to do it then and there--at home.

Israel, the Holy Land, was populated with European jews who didn't exactly welcome the uncouth barbarians of Iraq.  People like the Beh Sabagha family were crammed in hastily built towns remote from the main centers of business, making it nearly impossible for the newcomers to find decent jobs, go to school and pray in a synagogue.  Their great-grandfather Ephraim's search for a synagogue to pray in sent him out late one night on a walk of several miles to Bethlehem...but he turned away short of the goal, uncertain of his reception late at night in a town under Jordanian rule.  He said the great queen Rachel herself told him to stay away--and you don't argue with mother Rachel.

Back to present time and the recognition by the author that a family history was vanishing before his eyes.  Soon it would be too late to hear his father's stories and visit the land that shaped his soul.  Mr. Sabar is a great journalist and I praise his brains, guts and skill in recording and reporting the story so well.  I wish I had done the same for my parents' stories...but I know it's too late.

Nostalgia lane. Bleah.

Old Town in the Green Groves
by Cynthia Rylant

Ms. Rylant, a Newbery Medal winner, has taken on the job to recreate the lost book of Laura Ingalls Wilder's family history, the saga that begins with Little House In the Big Woods and stops with The First Four Years. She attempts to tell of the years between Plum Creek and Silver Lake, when the family moved from Walnut Grove to Burr Oak and Pa worked briefly as a hotel manager and then as a feed mill operator. I assumed she gathered material from as many sources as she could--Laura's journals, letters, historical records.

She tried--I'll say that for her--but I would have rather read the journals. I devoured the facts avidly but her attempts at making stories out of them were feeble at best. And her occasional borrowing of phrases and expressions from the other books irritated the heck out of me. If those came straight out of Laura's journals, she should have recognized them and skipped them--once is enough, no matter how poetic the language. But if those phrases were borrowed from the other books, for shame. Be original.

Maybe it's my age--maybe as a kid I would have treasured this with the others--maybe possibly very likely. But maybe is the best I can say.

Murder and mahem galore!

A Brief History of Montmaray
by Michelle Cooper

This is a tough nut to crack.  It's a YA novel about a family who are the owners, rulers, and last remaining inhabitants of the Island Kingdom of Montmaray, which appears to be off the coast somewhere between Spain, France and England.   Told as a journal of the second-oldest girl Sophie, a young girl coming of age in the time of the Spanish civil war, right before World War II.

Fascinating, huh?  But half-way through I decided it was a poor imitation of I Capture The Castle and only worth finishing because I had it on the IPod and needed something to listen to in the car.

Well, it got good.  So good, in fact, I want to read the sequel.  Sophie is a gem of a girl--when in a creepy tunnel she imagines that mice or bats are making the rustly sound--rats would be unthinkable!  Yeah, but a few minutes later, rats are the least of her worries!  Her writing is so prodigious that I'm reminded of a comment made about Samuel Richardson's Pamela--how'd the heck did they find time to do anything other than write letters all day and night?