The Unnamed (Joshua Ferris)

Audiobook

One of my recurring complaints about audiobooks is that the reader often seems not to understand the emotional intent of the words -- I find myself often pushing pause while driving so that I can repeat the line I just heard "correctly," with the inflection I think makes more sense. So I was happy to see that this particular audiobook was read by the author himself; I thought "well, obviously, he'll get the inflections right!" Well, I learned from this that writers aren't necessarily actors -- just because they know how it should sound doesn't mean that they can pull it off convincingly. That was a pretty interesting revelation.

Now to the content of the book: uh...

It's basically the story of a guy with a chronic disease. The disease is confusing to him, his family, his employers, and dozens of doctors. It's something new -- something without a name: he has to walk. Without warning, he'll just find himself on his way, unable to slow, compelled to put one foot down in front of the other until he collapses from exhaustion. So, in short, he's got one unbelievably destructive (not to mention destructively unbelievable) ailment.

The story is beautifully written to the point that I paused several times simply to savor a description. I mean, Joshua Ferris has a gift. I'm just sad that the gift was pressed into service for such a ridiculous story. At about two-thirds of the way through, I was DONE with this guy -- frustrated with his stubbornness, his craziness, and just the whole thing. But it kept going...and going....

C+

Matched (Ally Condie)

Hardcover

We're introduced to a society where big decisions (vocation, hometown, life partner) are made for the citizens and the small decisions (leisure activities, the color of an outfit) are limited to a few, approved, options. Cassia is our heroine and she's just become "matched" or "engaged to be married because Society has determined that, genetically and emotionally, coupling with this person will be optimal" to her best friend Xander. Problem is there's this other guy...

It's all very Hunger Games, but less gritty and less real. Condie has too much happen too fast and I never knew enough about Xander to ever really care that Cassia was throwing him over for the desirably tragic Ky. This is a proposed trilogy and, because I love love -- especially young adult fiction love -- I will likely read them. But this first installment feels so much more thin than I know dystopian love triangles should.

B

The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)

Hardcover

A toddler's family is murdered and he escapes their fate only by wandering out of the house in the middle of the attacks. The cemetery down the road agrees to give him the "freedom of the graveyard" and he grows up there -- a live boy in a dead world.

There's both beauty and sadness here, but it felt a bit more "young" than "adult" and there's not much here to hold on to once the last page is read. Definitely well-written, but has the same properties as the characters in the book: insubstantial and forgettable -- though, in their cases, it was deliberate.

B

Candy Girl (Diablo Cody)

Paperback

I raced through this memoir of a fairly square woman deciding, on a whim, to try stripping. It's disarmingly written (though she could tone down her use of similes a tad -- not everything has to be compared to something else in a colorful way) and gives a peek behind a curtain few of us rarely part.

Cody describes her days as just so normal that her year in the biz doesn't read as disheartening or weird as it could have. I don't think I could have ever pulled it off -- pun intended -- but now I know that not every chick grinding a pole is as damaged or sad as I'd formerly assumed. Somehow, that gives me hope.

B+

The Luck Factor (Dr. Richard Wiseman)

Paperback

There is no reason that this needed to be a full-length book (nor, I would argue, did it need to written in any form -- but that's beside the point). The "information" contained in these pages could have easily been reduced to the length of a high school science project: 20 pages of double spacing with foot and endnotes would've been more than enough to get his "point" across. Wiseman repeats himself so often and pats himself on the back for the "results" he "uncovers" during his "research" that, by the end of the thing (OK -- I'll admit it -- by the 30th page of the thing) I thought he was a complete tool.

The summary of the book is that people might label themselves as lucky or unlucky, but good fortune is the result of perspective and effort rather than fate. Too bad Wiseman isn't brave enough (or smart enough?) to say that outright. He instead talks about changing the "luck" from bad to good -- only he does it without the quotation marks.

Another thing that drove me up the wall is that he often would describe an experiment and then draw conclusions from it that were either a questionable interpretation of the results or, in one blatant example, a complete fabrication. I won't bore you with all the particulars (it's the newspaper one on pages 44-48 of the 2003 paperback pictured above, if you want to check it out yourself), but he basically says "everyone who participated in this experiment [both lucky AND unlucky] missed the big picture; everyone failed to notice two amazing opportunities." But, when he refers to the experiment, he says that lucky people are the ones who notice the opportunities in the newspaper. He cites his experiment as proof, despite the fact that it disproved his theory.

I don't hate the idea of the book -- I agree completely that luck is made, not sprinkled about arbitrarily -- but it's so sloppy and self-congratulatory that an author with the title "Dr." should be downright ashamed of himself.

D+

Dragon Keeper (Robin Hobb)

Hardcover

I was so happy to be back in Hobbs' amazing universe of dragons and liveships! Although Assassin's Apprentice is, hands-down, my favorite novel (we've bought at least a dozen copies of the paperback and given them as gifts or lent them out, never to be seen again), it had somehow escaped my notice that the first two books of a new trilogy set in that same world were on the shelves. Fortunately, my husband noticed and put them under the Christmas tree for me.

And, boy, this does not disappoint. Hobb has an amazing ability to write fantastic things matter-of-factly. Somehow, I can lose myself in the text -- my anger rises and my heart beats faster and I mutter things like "he wouldn't dare." I am every bit as caught up in her words as I can get in a well-realized film.

My only complaint (and it is truly the ONLY thing wrong) is that we literally leave the story in the middle of a scene. A dragon is dying, our heroine (well, one of them anyway) is being threatened with ruin to so she'll quickly return to the her soul-killing "proper" life, and an antagonist may have just unwittingly become more empathetic to the dragons than will be livable for him. Luckily, I own the second book...but am worried that it will leave me similarly frustrated while I wait for the third.

A+