Completely Useless Book Reports

Title: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Author: Jennifer Egan

Setting: New York City mostly, but also California, Italy, and Africa, across many years.

Characters: So many characters that are intertwined, but also isolated by chapter. Time is a character. So is Music. The temporary fleeting aspect of life and living are the biggest character of them all!

Main Problem/Conflict:  When he was 20 years old, Pete Townshend wrote the lyrics: “I hope I die before I get old.” 46 years later, Mr. Townshend still tours with Roger Daltrey. Does he consider himself old? Does he wish he was dead? Music and culture have changed significantly in the nearly half-a-century since he wrote those words. Where does The Who fit into the world today?

That’s kind of what’s happening in this book.

Spoilers ahoy!

Two years ago, two ladies, inspired by something similar on Library Thing,  set a challenge to themselves:  Read 10 books in 10 genres by October 10th, 2010. The genres were self created with the hope that they would expand their reading to outside their literary comfort zones.

Of course, I found out about this November 2010, but that’s besides the point. It’s a really awesome idea and there’s no reason not to do it.

A lot of what I read has been written in the last 100 years. And it tends to be dystopian future fiction. That or I reread what I know I like (Harry Potter ad infinitum). I really need to branch out.

So, I am setting a goal for myself:  In 2012, I will read 12 books in 12 different categories, before December 12th.

And I will post book reports for every single one.

Maybe I’ll make a spreadsheet!

On to the categories!

1. tl;dr (400 pages or more)
2. Autobiography/memoir
3. Biography/non-fiction
4. Collections (poetry, short story, plays)
5. Non-American, Canadian, or Western European authors
6. Popular: Books from NY Time Bestseller List or Oprah’s Book Club
7. Female Authors
8. The Dark Ages:  1600-1900 (aka: The books I spent my academic career avoiding)
9. Sold by Mysterious Press
10. Sci-Fi/Fantasy
11. Recommendations
12. WILD CARD! 

Some rules:

• Books in progress don’t count towards the total (Sorry Anna Karenina and The Marriage Plot).
• Rereads don’t count.
• Books can count towards multiple categories (so Mark Twain’s 760 page autobiography would count towards categories 1 and 2, but not 8 because it was written in 1904).

So this is my wild and crazy plan. Will I succeed? Only time will tell!

Also, if anyone else wants to do this (with their own silly categories), let me know! It’ll be fun!

On that note, any recommendations?

Title: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Author: Ray Bradbury

Setting: A small town in the midwest sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, late October. (Actually, starts on October 23rd so like, 60 years ago yesterday)

Characters: Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, best friends on the cusp of their fourteenth birthdays; Charles Halloway, Will’s dad, and Mr. Dark and Mr. Cooger, carnival owners.

Main Problem/Conflict: SOMETHING WICKED THAT WAY CAME!

Spoilers and whatnot below!

Title:  The Gunslinger

Author:  Stephen King

Setting:  A post apocalyptic limbo-ish parallel world type place with a desert, a mine/railway station, and a town on the edge of the previously mentioned desert.

Characters: Roland, the Gunslinger; The Man in Black, but not Titus Welliver (sadly); Alice, a barmaid in the town, and Jake, a young boy.

Sorry Smokey, maybe you’ll be in the next book.

WHY ISN’T THE READ MORE FUNCTION WORKING!?!?! SORRY EVERYONE. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILER

Main Problem/Conflict: The Gunslinger is pursuing the Man in Black through the desert, but is quite a ways behind him. Along the way, he stops over in a run-down town where the Man in Black had been a few days prior. While there, the Man in Black reanimated a dead man whose name is not John Locke. Weird! The Gunslinger has a bunch of sex with a barmaid named Alice. But the townspeople turn on Roland! Oh nos! Fortunately, because Roland is a Gunslinger, he is capable of killing everyone! Yay! He continues into the desert, meets a kid who remembers being alive in New York City. Together they continue walking through the desert until they reach a mountain with an abandoned mine inside. They ride a cart through it but then! Slow Mutants! Who, despite being slow are still a formidable enemy. Will they make it through the mines of not-Moria? Will they escape the not-Orcs? Will Roland ever find the Man in Black?

Put away that bow and arrow! You’re the Gunslinger, silly! 

Conclusion: Kind of, yes, and yes. And when he does catch up to the Man in Black, they have an extended pow-wow. The Man in Black does a tarot reading, tries to dissuade Roland from finding the Dark Tower, and Stephen King write about the first time he got high and realized how HUGE the universe is and how SMALL we all are in the grand scheme of things. I mean, think about it, there could be, like, an entire universe in the atoms in our fingernails! Weird!

Did you like this book/Would you recommend it to a friend: I feel bad. I feel like there must be something broken inside of me. Because, despite my love for fantasy, despite hearing for years how awesome this series is, despite countless recommendations, I really just did not like this book. I found it… dull. Uninspired. I was relieved when it was finished because it meant I could finally read something else. And considering I read the book in roughly 24 hours, that’s pretty terrible.

I don’t get the following this book has garnered. I don’t get the enthusiasm people have for it. I just don’t get it.

Sorry for the lack of posting. I have been reading. I just haven’t felt motivated to do a report on each book. So here’s a roundup:

Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice: If you watch the movie, you don’t need to read the book)

Lost Boy, by Brent Jeffs: FLDS is scary. Very interesting read.

The Hobbit, by J.R. Tolkien: Dragons! Adventure! Magic rings! Oh my!

The Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin: I feel ashamed to admit it, but I enjoyed this quite a bit! Quick and maddening with an air of distopia. Right up my alley.

Harry Potter 1-7, by J.K. Rowling: Dragons! Adventure! Magic rings! Oh, wait, didn’t I say that already?

Radioactive, by Lauren Redniss: A graphic novel depicting the life story of Marie Curie. Very interesting, though I found some of the page layouts annoying.

Currently I am more than halfway through Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), a hundred pages into Fast Food Nation (Schlosser), and going back and forth, story by story, between What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and it’s manuscript, Beginners, by Carver.

So I apologize for not providing regular updates.

Title: The Jungle

Author: Upton Sinclair

Setting: Chicago’s “Packingtown” at the turn of the 20th Century

Characters: Jurgis, a Lithuanian immigrant seeking the American Dream; Ona, his wife; 50-some-odd relatives, most with difficult names; Packingtown, the slaughterhouse and factory district, and Socialism, a political ideology.

Main Problem/Conflict: THE AMERICAN DREAM IS JUST THAT - A DREAM!

Yeah, I read this a while ago. It was pretty ok, I guess.

Sookie’s vampire cousin is dead and she has to go clean out her apartment in New Orleans. She discovers (with the witch landlord) that there is a werewolf/vampire living in Sookie’s dead cousin’s closet. Also, Sookie’s cousin was totally scissoring the Queen of Louisiana. Oh and Sookie is dating (like not sleeping-with but actually going on dates with) a were-tiger. Yeah. He’s a guy who turns into a tiger.

Uhh, I feel like I’ve written a lot of silly words about a very silly book series, and honestly I don’t know if I have any more book reports for this series in me.

That’s not to say that I’m going to stop reading the “True Blood” books. Oh no, I shall keep going.

I just don’t know if you lovely readers will get a nice detailed book report for them.

I do promise that once Mr. Lemon and I have moved, and all my books are released from the boxes they are currently confined in, I will start to read a more varied selection of book. Like, things that aren’t about telepathic fairies (oh yeah, Sookie is part fairy. That’s why all the supernatural folks love her) and vampire wars. Things like Pride and Prejudice (no zombies).

So yeah, Definitely Dead is good if you’ve read the other books in the series. Which is a sentence I’ve said at least four other times.

Title: Dead as a Doornail

Author: Charlaine Harris

Title: Dead to the World

Author: Charlaine Harris

Setting: Bon Temps and Shreveport, Lousiana

Characters: Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress with an affinity for the undead; Eric, a sharp, sexy vampire from Scandinavia who is the sheriff of Shreveport; Pam, his sidekick; Jason, Sookie’s brother; Sam, Sookie’s shape-shifter boss; Alcide, a werewolf; Debra, Alcide’s bitch of a girlfriend; Hallow, a Vampire-blood-drinking were-witch; Mark, her brother; and about a million other people including vampire Bill, Sookie’s ex-boyfriend.

Main Problem/Conflict: Sookie and Bill have broken up, not because he almost killed her and raped her, but because he ran off with his maker-lady. Just remember, when trying to determine if you should end a relationship, infidelity trumps domestic abuse. Anywho, Bill goes to Peru, which is great because the guy is a bit of a wet blanket anyway.

Right, so it’s New Year’s Eve and Sookie’s resolution is to not get beaten up this year. Which is an odd one, but there ya go. On her way back from a long night of work at Merlotte’s, she sees a vampire skulking around the road. It’s Eric! But he’s not wearing a shirt or shoes! Which mean’s he can’t get into any good bars or restaurants! Oh, also his memory has been erased. He has no idea who he is, where he is, who Sookie is… He does know that he’s a vampire though, so that’s a good start.

Sookie takes Eric to her house for safe keeping, calls Pam, his equally sexy sidekick, and tries to figure out why Eric is now calling her “woman”.

Well, it turns out that a witch named Hallow and her  brother are trying to cut into the vampire businesses in Shreveport and that Hallow had the major hots for Eric. When her advances were spurned, Eric poof disappeared and ended up clueless in the middle of a Bon Temps.

In the meantime, the witches have put up “Missing Vampire” signs, and are offering a $50,000 reward for Eric’s safe return to them. Oh, and Jason, Sookie’s brother, walks in on all this at some point and decides that Sookie should be paid $35,000 for Eric’s safe keeping while Pam and the rest try to figure out what’s going on.

Then Jason gets kidnapped. And there’s a bunch of witches and wiccans causing and/or attempting to avoid trouble. Sookie goes to tell werewolf-from-the-last-book Alcide what’s been going on and they discover a dead werewolf. Oh, and Sookie goes to visit Hotshot, which is heavily inbreed were-community on the outskirts of Bon Temps because one of the girls was sleeping with Jason before he went missing. Sookie doesn’t learn much, but the community leader offers to let one of the men impregnate her so they can have new blood in the community. So, um, that’s pretty sweet I guess?

I dunno. Basically, there are a lot of plot lines. “Eric being brainwashed by super-witches” is the most important, followed by “Jason has gone missing”, and it all culminates with a war between the V-drinking, business-infringing-upon, were-witches and the vampire, were-animal, and Wiccan communities of Bon Temps and Shreveport.

Oh, also, Debra (Werewolf Alcide’s ex-lady friend-who-is-also-a-shifter) wants to kill Sookie. Cause she totally hates her. Cause she’s super pretty or something.

Conclusion: EVERYBODY DIES! Including the undead!

Did you like this book/Would you recommend it to a friend?: I liked this book better than the last one - I was far more invested in what Sookie was fighting for in this one. I mean, you have Eric who is a shadow of himself and Jason just up and disappears. But, the whole “Witches did it!” conceit feels a little bleh. You don’t learn a lot about them and they seem a bit like poseurs, especially compared to inherently magically beings like vampires and shifters. But, the story between Sookie and Eric is strong, and I cared about getting him back to normal. The “missing Jason” story was on the back burner, and when the mystery was solved I kinda shrugged and said “If you say so.” But it does give a great base to build on in later novels (of which there are many).

Would I recommend this? Sure. If someone had read the first three books, I would say “Keep going, this one is better than the last.” As a book unto itself? No one should just dive into this series at book four.

On a MAJOR plus: There were absolutely ZERO ridiculous Sookie outfits. All her outfits were totally normal and something an average human being would wear.

By the way, if this reads like it was written by someone who just came back from a booze-filled wedding, it was. Rock!