Lu (Regular Rumination) had this great idea to do a “Great Review Catch Up” post to quickly sum up the books she read this year but never wrote reviews for. I liked the idea so much that I decided to “borrow” the idea myself and do a quick post about the books I read this year but never reviewed on the blog.
It’s a rather mixed bag of books, but there were definitely some good ones that I passed over because I just didn’t have anything (or, in one case, too many things) to say about them.
Review: In 2007, Misha Angrist agreed to make his innermost secrets public for the world to see. As participant number four in the Personal Genome Project, Angrist agreed to let his entire genome be sequenced and then made available to researchers looking for samples to test in genetics research. While most medical research tries to work with anonymous samples, the Personal Genome Project required participants to be public because research into our genes works best when researchers can compare whats in our DNA to how that blueprint is expressed. In a very real way, Angrist and the other participants agreed to bare it all in the name of science.
Review: Set in French Hill, Nova Scotia, Mercury by Hope Larson is a story about family and history with a healthy dose of magic thrown in. Back in 1859, a mysterious stranger arrives on a family farm. The daughter, Josey, is enamored with the stranger and with the promise of gold he brings to her struggling family. But not is all as it appears. In the present, Tara, Josey’s descendant, is dealing with her own problems as she begins to discover what happened to her family years ago.
Review: The Magician King was a fucking awesome book.
Honestly, that’s all I really want to say about it… but of course that’s not a real review. But that is the gushing, giddy, and inarticulate assessment that I gave to the boyfriend when he asked what I thought of the book the moment after I finished reading it on our Thanksgiving road trip.
Review: A marriage plot is a particular kind of English novel , written by the likes of Jane Austen and George Eliot, where the central conflict of the book centers around whether or not the heroine will end up married. Those are the kinds of stories that fascinate Madeline, the central heroine of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, and are the topic of her senior thesis. However, during the early 1980s, those kinds of stories just aren’t en vogue anymore, instead being replaced by deconstruction and the growing field of semiotics.
The Taliban Shuffle was a book that hit on many of my book weaknesses – journalism, the Middle East, foreign politics, and the role of women in all of those fields. So in that respect, I should have been completely in love with The Taliban Shuffle. Except I wasn’t, at least not as entirely as I expected, and I cannot figure out why.
Review: Shauna James Ahern grew up in a family where boxed and processed foods were the norm. After years of feeling perpetually under the weather, always slow to recover from illness and generally feeling worn out and torn down, Ahern was diagnosed with celiac disease, an intolerance to gluten. After her diagnosis, Ahern began to explore food in a new way,
One Sentence Summary: A young pharmaceutical scientist heads into the heart of darkness that is the Amazonian rain forest to find her lost coworker and confront a scientist on the loose.
One Sentence Review: Anne Patchett’s beautiful writing alone is enough reason to read this book.
Why I Read It: I have a special place in my heart of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, so hearing this one compared to it was enough to make me want to read it.
I love Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale was the first book of her’s I’ve read, and I’ve been a ridiculous fangirl ever since. I also have a special place in my heart for The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne. I actually really love all of that early-American, semi-Puritan nutty literature, if only because I love turning those stories into soap operas in my head.
I tell you that because those to facts make me the perfect reader for Hillary Jordan’s new book When She Woke, a sort of futuristic mash-up of those two stories where people who commit crimes have their skin dyed to match their crime as a form of punishment/entertainment.
Perrotta never makes even a passing reference to September 11 in The Leftovers, and yet that event is all I could think about as I read. I think what Perrotta does is capture the feeling of what September 11 was — an inexplicable event that, in a single instant, changed the world as we knew it — and explores it without ever given that event a name. Rather than focusing so as explicitly on the facts of the event like the first pages of The Submission does, Perrotta writes about loss and our individual response to events that we cannot explain. It’s exactly the sort of book I’ve wanted to read about September 11, even if Perotta never says that.
