A Red Herring Without Mustard (Alan Bradley)

Hardcover

This is a "Flavia de Luce Novel" -- the third in a series about an 11-year-old lover of chemistry and amateur detective. I read the first (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie) and liked it fine, though this will probably be the last time I seek her out.

Flavia, her obnoxious older sisters, her distant father, and her rapidly deteriorating genteel way of life are simply boring. Her adventures in crime-solving and delight at all things chemical just get old so fast. The book was a quick read, but I'll barely think about it again...there's just nothing much worth contemplating now that the last page has been read.

C+

The Winter of Our Disconnect (Susan Maushart)

Paperback

Such an interesting idea for an experiment: make the house a screen-free zone for 6 months. No computers, TVs, smart phones, or iPods -- if you want to talk to someone, you call them on a land line. If you want to poke someone, you have to get near enough to push your finger into their actual flesh. If you've simply got to do something on a computer, it's going to have to be at the library or a friend's house. And it gets even more interesting when three teens are (not altogether willing) participants in the experiment.

I love the idea here and would have truly enjoyed the book to be entirely in diary form -- we get 50 days or so worth of stingy entries sprinkled throughout the text. I wanted to know when and how stuff happened...not just be told that it did. And I was not interested in Mom's philosophizing (nor her incessant use of "LOL" -- even if it was meant ironically). The result of the experiment was, it seems, entirely positive. Grades went up across the board, sleep patterns were restored, family cohesiveness was rediscovered, meals became an event -- planned and enjoyed rather than grabbed and inhaled, and a musician was born. Quite a lot in such a short span of time.

For such an interesting premise, though, the book was really felt like a slog at times. The portions that breezed along were the diary bits. When the author rambled, however, I was usually just annoyed. She's a blogger, I believe, and her style of writing is much more suited to that. She seems to think it's her job to stretch a small thought into an entire page of text, usually by employing similes. Not everything has to be colorful -- sometimes a TV is simply heavy, it doesn't have to be as impossible to budge as somebody's husband during the football match.

Still, amazing story. Maybe I'll try it sometime and write an incredibly interesting diary about it.

B

Dragon Haven (Robin Hobb)

Hardcover

I purposely waited until I was a little bit "ahead" in my book-a-week schedule so that I could savor this story properly. I didn't want to rush through it -- I wanted to make it last. Since the third book of the trilogy has yet to be released, it was going to have to hold me over for a while. I complained about the last book ending in the middle of a scene and worried that this would do the same. I'm glad to report that the story got to an honest-to-goodness stopping point and I can make it to the next one's release without losing my mind.

Hobb is just so good. The wide variety of characters, each vividly realized, doesn't get as confusing as it easily could have in a lesser author's hands. The dragons, the young adults working as their "keepers", and the adults serving as guides and hunters all inhabit their own sphere and I was happy in any one of them. There could easily be a trilogy with any of these factions taking on all of the action on their own, but she juggles them nicely and brings the reader in with ease.

Can't wait for the next one. Dragon Rising? Dragon People? Oh, I'm sure she'll come up with a better title than either of those.

A

Blink (Malcolm Gladwell)

Hardcover

Gladwell tackles the subject of "snap judgments," putting forth the theory that our subconscious gut reactions, are more trustworthy than we think. He offers up lots of interesting examples and experiments and I was never bored.

The thing was, though, I didn't feel I learned all that much. There was a lot of "he just knew in a second" but there was also a fair share of "they were wrong and should've taken more time." I'm glad that terrible decisions based on snap judgments e.g. the Diallo killing (racial stereotyping) and the decision to produce New Coke (the Pepsi Challenge) weren't ignored, but it sort of took away the power of his stated intent. Yes, our subconscious often gets it right, but it also often gets it dangerously wrong...so, can we ever really trust the "power of thinking without thinking"?

I was fascinated by plenty of the experiments, though. There's enough here to make it a worthwhile read, even if it didn't totally work as support for the title.

B