The Amazing Life of Birds (the twenty-day puberty journal of Duane Homer Leech)

as discovered by Gary Paulsen

How could I resist a book with the word puberty in the title?

It also has a really well-designed jacket. The inside, however, was a disappointment. Far from being "discovered by" the renowned children's/young adult author, it's all too obviously written by an old man trying — and failing — to write in the voice of a 12-year-old. At least it's short.

This book is cataloged as young adult fiction, probably because of the subject matter, but it could easily be juvenile. (Not in the sense that I'm juvenile for laughing when someone says poop.) Even though I didn't especially care for the writing, this might be a good recommendation for a boy just beginning puberty or a slightly older teen who needs a quick read.

The Story of Stone

by N.M. Browne

I had this book checked out from the library for a very long time before I finally read it. Would that I had waited forever! (OK, it wasn't terrible, just not thrilling.)

Thematically, with its archaeology/anthropology, exploration of class and gender issues, and the whole mankind vs. nature thing, it's suggestive of the work of Ursula Le Guin with hints of Princess Mononoke. The writing was decent, but the parallel storylines were uneven to the point that I considered skipping some of the "present day" sections. Other than that, I'm not sure where else the book went wrong. Maybe it's just too derivative; it's kind of a rip off of Enchantress from the Stars. But now I think about it, the flashback parts were pretty awesome — almost as awesome as Ursula — so I'll give it half a thumb up and recommend it for those who are heavily into soft-science sci-fi.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

Imagine if The Secret History were written by John Irving, and you've got a bit of an idea.

Perhaps a reflection of the book itself, the reviews were all over the place; I wasn't sold on reading it until after the third review I saw. (Plus, when confronted by a young author's first novel that is getting lots of press, there's that feeling, sort of the opposite of Schadenfreude*, best summed up by a quip attributed to Gore Vidal: "Whenever a friend of mine succeeds, a little something in me dies.")

So then the book shows up, and it's HUGE, and there's a waiting list, so I won't be able to renew it. With trepidation, I plunge in — hey, the water's fine! Despite the term-paper-like parenthetical references, which I'd expected to be annoying, it's breezy reading with a compelling story and a protagonist whose appeal somehow outshines her dad obsession and adolescent social ineptitude. (Or maybe I just like her because I'm a nerd too.)

I also had the good (mis)fortune to be a bit under the weather on a rainy weekend, which allowed me to immerse myself in the book, reading for hours at a stretch. I never lost the thread, my attention never wavered, and I managed to get in a pretty good guess at what the ending would be; still, the finale is so twisty, my prescience didn't spoil it. Either way, it was good preparation for the Final Exam, in which the reader is invited to draw conclusions and theorize about what really happened in the book.

*Some claim the opposite of Schadenfreude is mudita, a Buddhist concept of sympathetic joy or pleasure in another's success; but if Schadenfreude is joy in the misfortunes of others, its true opposite is sadness in the good fortunes or success of others, which has been translated variously as Erfolgtraurigkeit, Erfolgstraurigkeit, and Glückschmerz. Anyone else have a word for this?

Hold on Tight: an Insiders Novel

by J. Minter

So this book, the whole series, is ridiculous — and I love it. Five high school guys in Manhattan, all obscenely wealthy and painfully gorgeous, and they have problems too, just like you and me. How adorable is that?

Actually, it's just terrible. Note to the author: If your character wants to find a cause, and you decide his cause is going to be penguins, you might want to do a wee bit of research and find out that penguins do not live in Alaska.

But who cares, right? It only takes a couple of hours to read one of these books, so it's easy to overlook the fact that the author and publisher spent about the same amount of time on it. In fact, the pulp factor is a big part of the appeal. It's trashy. It's hedonistic. It's the world according to teens.

Pass It On, the second book in the series, is better than this one. I haven't read the other four.

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

by Sam Harris

This is the most important book I have ever read. This is a book I am actually going to buy. (I've bought only two or three books since I started working at the library six years ago.) I cannot say enough good things about this book — although reading it was a bit unsettling, and despite the fact that some people will be upset or offended by the book and what I have to say about it.

In a nutshell: religious faith, in addition to being entirely irrational and obviously unjustified, has been and is the source of many bad and scary things in the world (the Inquisition, suicide bombing, &c.); given the technology available today and the current strife among the world's major faiths, religious belief has the potential to destroy the world as we know it and perhaps put an end to mankind altogether. We need to stop constructing our lives around 2,000-year-old fairy tales and stop teaching our children to mimic the same absurdity. We need to agree on a reasoned basis for ethical and harmonious living with one another that does not resort to a fictitious supreme being.

And on and on — much more eloquently, of course. This is all mostly stuff I know already, but it can be an eye-opener when it's laid out in front of you all at once. The biggest lesson I took from The End of Faith is that I am not obliged to "respect" or "tolerate" anyone's ridiculous religious beliefs. (We don't "accept" alternative beliefs about algebra or traffic laws, do we?) In fact, if I have any obligation it is that of a rational person to point out the error of religious belief. (No can do at work, of course, though I wonder if I could get away with saying, "Sure, I can show you where the mythology books are.")

On a completely different topic, the author, Sam Harris, is hot. (And, no, I'm not mixing him up with the eponymous Broadway actor. Check out this photo of the author.)

Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love

by Will Roscoe

This book was stupid. I didn't read the whole thing. Jesus, schmezus. Cool cover, tho.

Book meme

I saw this on someone else's blog and thought I'd give it a try. If you have a blog, you should do it too. That is, after all, the point of a meme.

A book that changed my life:
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason made me realize that I have an ethical obligation to point out to people that their religious faith is foolish and dangerous.

A book I’ve read more than once:
The Swiss Family Robinson, when I was in middle school or thereabouts.

A book I would take with me if I were stuck on a desert island:
The Swiss Family Robinson, so I could figure out how to stay alive.

A book that made me laugh:
Real Ultimate Power: the Official Ninja Book — see my recent blog entry on this book.

A book that I wish I had written:
Lunar Park or Cloud Atlas: a Novel; both are amazingly well-written, imaginative, and deep.

A book that I wish had never been written:
The Bible and all its sources, the Koran, etc.

A book I’ve been meaning to read:
Ah, there are so many; I'll go with Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, by the author of "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint."

I’m currently reading:
Hold on Tight: an Insiders Novel, which is ridiculous teen fluff, but I swear I'm going to read something serious next.

The Wave

by Walter Mosley

At just over 200 pages, this science fiction book could pass for young adult. I'm used to sci fi being longer, and I was worried by the slimness of this volume. Having read it, though, I think this is how sci fi ought to be: vast in scope, but focused like a laser.

I haven't read any of Mosley's other work, so I wasn't sure what to expect. His style is very clean and crisp — except for a few idiosyncratic fillips and phrasings — and indicative of his beginnings as a mystery author.

Zombies and primordial ooze; homeland security goon squads and torture chambers; and a billions-of-years-old cosmic romance are woven together into a fast-paced narrative in which loyalties are tested and long-buried secrets are revealed.

Prince William, Maximilian Minsky, and Me

by Holly-Jane Rahlens

OK, first of all, I don't care how big the print is or how much blank space there is on the page, YA books are not supposed to be 300 pages long! (Unless they're really, really, really, really good.)

This book, sadly, is not. A sweet, nerdy Jewish girl with a crush on Prince William gets pre-bat mitzvah basketball lessons from a hunky 15-year-old punk rocker — should be great, right? Another great concept poorly executed: the protagonist's voice is unconvincing, and the whole things seems forced even while the overall structure is loose and sloppy.

Real Ultimate Power: the Official Ninja Book

by Robert Hamburger

Hi, this book is all about ninjas, REAL NINJAS. This book is awesome. My name is Robert and I can't stop thinking about ninjas. These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

That kind of says it all, doesn't it? Well, actually, you can go ahead and add some crazy wailing on the guitar, huge boners, hilarious illustrations, a diaper-wearing babysitter, and...hippos. These are just some of the things on the mind of our totally pumped (ADHD) 10-year-old escort into the mysterious — and sweet! — world of ninjas.

In conclusion, this book is so awesomely funny, I almost crapped my pants.

A Spot of Bother

by Mark Haddon

Anna Karenina begins with the immortal line: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Even so, not every book about an unhappy family is unique. At some point, I burned out on Oprah books. I realized that, although the details differed, they were at heart all the same: looking at someone else's pain as a way of avoiding one's own — or validating one's own — or reassuring oneself of the non-pain of one's life. (My fault, really, for expecting something other than emotional voyeurism from a talk-show host; Oprah seems rather dignified, but she's just Springer without the hair pulling and chair throwing.)

When it comes to domestic drama, I've always liked to recommend All Families Are Psychotic, which is actually a very funny book — because, after all, what's funnier than someone else's misery? A Spot of Bother is somewhat in the same vein, made even funnier by being British. All the character's lives are quietly imploding, and I sympathized, but I also laughed out loud about 20 times, including once on an otherwise very quiet bus.

These sort of books aren't for everyone, of course. I think it helps if you're familiar with the use of humor as a defense mechanism and/or if you survived your own unhappy family. (In my family, it's not a holiday until someone cries.)

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

by Georges Simenon

From the author of the Inspector Maigret mysteries (and a lot of other pulp fiction), a serious psychological drama — roman dur, or "hard novel," as the introduction calls it — that's part J.P. Sartre and part Patrick Bateman (of American Psycho), about ideas of freedom and (or, versus) control.

I have a tendency to dismiss mysteries as low-brow entertainment for people who want to seem high-brow by reading but really don't want to have to think very hard about what they're reading — beach books, if you will (which, mind you, have their place). This, on the other hand, this is freakin' literature. Of course, it's not a mystery itself, but I wouldn't have expected a mystery writer capable of this. It might be the literature-in-translation effect, or perhaps it's to do with the era in which it was written (you know, the era when grammar mattered) — whatever it is, this book oozes seriousness, not only in substance but in style as well. I don't mean to say it isn't captivating or isn't a pleasure to read, but it isn't the sort of thing you tear through con brio. Like Nabokov's writing, it's rich and deep, which, depending on your own style, could feel like slogging through mud or luxuriating in a mud bath.

The Puritan Ordeal

by Andrew Delbanco

"Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door)." --William Maxwell (1908-2000)

I didn't finish this book, and, thanks to the above quotation, I did not feel bad about it at all.

I found out about The Puritan Ordeal from a review of another book, and it's idea intrigued me: not just a social or intellectual history, but an emotional history of the white people who colonized North America, how they experienced and reacted to religion, the new landscape, etc. It turned out to be too academic for me, with too-long excerpts from historical texts and diaries, when all I really wanted was the author's conclusions. Of course, apparently unsupported conclusions would not have been quite right either, but the balance was a bit off for my taste.

Birdwing

by Rafe Martin

A year or two ago I really enjoyed the Sevenwaters trilogy by Juliet Marillier, which is based on the fairytale about the six brothers turned into swans and their sister who tries to reverse the spell by weaving shirts for them out of starwort and nettles while not speaking, laughing, or crying until she was done. So I was rather excited when I came across this book about the youngest brother, who becomes human again but still has one wing instead of an arm because his sister couldn't finish the last shirt.

As it turns out, the character in this book is not quite as tortured and mysterious as I had hoped, as I expected from the way he was in the trilogy. At least part of the problem is the loss of complexity inherent in the young-adult formula — and, omigod, is this book formulaic! Disappointing overall, amateurish and clumsy at times, a great concept poorly executed.

Winkie

by Clifford Chase

Another book that sounds really stupid if I try to explain what it's about: a teddy bear; animism; parthenogenesis; terrorism and the Patriot Act; the unbearable lightness of being; etc. (Not for nothing, that last reference; as ridiculous as it sounds, Winkie really does have the philosophical depth of a Milan Kundera novel.)

Reading this book reminded me of watching the bootleg video Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, directed by Todd Haynes, in which a remarkably nuanced examination of anorexia, and the life of a woman who literally starved to death in the spotlight of celebrity, is acted out with Barbie and Ken dolls. Rather than making light, the bizarreness actually heightens the poignancy of an already moving story.

The Ruins

by Scott Smith

Holy crap, this book is awesome!

This is the kind of book that keeps you up late at night, waaaay past your bedtime, struggling to stay awake so you can find out what horrible thing is going to happen next. Everything is fine and normal, then something bad happens, then something worse, and worse — and when you think it can't get any worse, of course it does. It makes you wonder what kind of freak could imagine this stuff, let alone write it down.

I got this book after reading a review, but I can't remember what it said that convinced me. One of the back-cover blurbs compares it to Stephen King and Thomas Harris, which would have been a turn-off. (Yes, I read tons of that stuff when I was a teenager.) The plot summary sounds stupid; there isn't much you could say without spoiling the suspense, but a longer description would probably sound even stupider. The premise is very simple (Smith's last book was A Simple Plan) and kind of stupid, yet it works. The jacket is very well-designed, but if I had started there and then read the blurbs and the inside flap copy....

It's hard to explain; you just have to trust me.

You have to trust me, OR ELSE WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!

Corydon and the Island of the Monsters

by Tobias Druitt

Aw, I hate to give a bad review, but the only reason I finished this book is that it is very short. I kind of had to force myself to read it.

It's about a deformed Greek boy who turns out to have an immortal father, gets driven out of town into the wilderness, where he hooks up with a bunch of mythological creatures, travels to the underworld, and defeats a bunch of idiotic guys who are trying to become heroes by slaying the so-called monsters, who actually show more humanity to Corydon than any of the actual humans in the book — so I thought it would appeal to the eight-grade mythology geek still trapped somewhere inside me, but somehow it didn't. It just came off as sort of dumb, excepting a few clever revisions to the familiar tales of Greek mythology and the fact that the story pits the Chthonic gods against the Olympian gods.

There will be at least two sequels; I will not read them. Maybe someone who's even more into mythology than me (and still in eighth grade) will enjoy them.

The Fly on the Wall: how one girl saw everything

by E. Lockhart

I just could not resist the premise of this book: a quirky sophomore feels the ordinary frustration girls have trying to understand boys, so she idly wishes she could be a "fly on the wall" in the boys' locker room, and her wish comes true long enough for an in-depth study of the anatomy and sociology of high school boys.

It's a short book, a very quick read, without heavy drama or lessons (well, a little divorce for seasoning), totally possible to read in one sitting. I loved the protagonist's sense of humor and her butt-rating system, but I could have done without her insistence on calling the other naughty bits "gherkins." Overall, I was a bit shocked by the book's frankness — and I ain't easy to shock — but I wasn't complaining.

Boys Be, second season

by Masahiro Itabashi

This is a great series of vignettes about the love lives of teenage boys. Do I have to say anything else? It's on DVD too.

You don't need to read them in order. Best for older teens: ranges from cute crushes to peeks at panties and all the way to actual nudity.

I've read volumes 1, 4, 8; not sure which DVD I watched.

It's Kind of a Funny Story

by Ned Vizzini

As a hypochondriac, I have very little sympathy for the symptoms of other people. I find it particularly difficult to empathize with people who suffer from depression, because their complaints sound like things we all go through, to some degree, and I tend to feel as if they're over-reacting and/or being self-indulgent. I know, of course, that's not true, and I want to understand (as much as possible), which perhaps explains the appeal of books about depression.

This book, written immediately after the twenty-something author's own brief stay in the psych ward, chronicles a teen's rapid and (to an outsider) sudden descent from mere depression to suicidal ideation (the technical term for wanting to kill yourself). At first, the descriptions of the kid's thought patterns and mental states (tentacles, cycles, etc.) made me feel as if I were getting somewhere in my quest for greater understanding; ultimately, however, they amounted to nothing more than how's when I was really looking for why's. Why does a negative experience or emotion make one person have a crappy day and make another person seriously consider jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge? For that matter, why can most of us shrug off a crappy day (or even a few) while others fall into a paralyzing depression?

Even though I didn't find what I was seeking (should I be depressed about that?)(sorry, that isn't funny, is it?), I'd say the book was pretty good overall. It's well-written, the pacing is good, the conclusion is hopeful without being sappy or too optimistic. If you don't mind books that leave you feeling a bit drained and/or melancholy, if you want an intense emotional experience, if you liked The Burn Journals, give this book a try.