Ok -- so the summer (my summer) is officially over. And so I should get back to this blogging gig. And before I do let me just say how incredibly impressed I am by all of the book bloggers who manage to blog daily! The reading part I have down, the blogging, not so much.
So for this post I will try and get caught up on my summer reads. I am only linking to the two I really liked.
Alice Bliss, by Laura Harrington -- sobbing on metronorth. A really great book about an adolescent girl in....Rochester NY!....and her life after her father is deployed to Iraq. Excellent mother/daughter depiction. Excellent young adult protagonist who is by no means perfect -- but she is trying to do what she thinks that she should, for her family and herself. Harrington gets the weather -- the grey grey cold winter days and the slush totally right (even though I-95 does not lead into downtown Rochester). This book was excellent.
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones -- Finally made it through -- again assigned this semester. Hopefully my students won;t have the same problem falling asleep that I did (and it is good!)
The Fall of the Towers. Samuel Delaney -- pretty good, not great. Perfectly enjoyable, but I am not sure I cared that much about what happened. I thought I would like it better.
The Color of the Sea, by John Hamamura -- Loved, loved, loved this. Bought for a quarter at the Beaver Island library sale. Thought one of my people would like it, but not appropriate, yet. Starts with a 9 year old boy in the 1930s going from Japan to Hawaii with his father, who works on a sugar plantation. Samurai training (that is why I thought my person would like it), sugar plantation work, whites and native Hawaiians and Japanese, ill advised teenage sex, moving to California, better advised teenage sex, WWII and on.....It is both sweeping, but also detailed enough in the right parts to feel as if you have a handle on the main character. Definitely I would recommend this.
Eden Close, by Anita Shreve -- eh, Anita Shreve -- maybe I had read it before, hard to know.
The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson -- finally made it to my reread of this -- really loved it, even though it took a solid 10 days (and vacation days). I still feel as if I need the Companion to Years of Rice and Salt to fully enjoy -- has anyone written that?
The Selected, by Patrick Cave -- the sequel to Sharp North. Really good, but hmmmm has a televised game to the death and seems to have been published prior to Hunger Games.
Eutopia, by David Nickle -- so incredibly terrible. This is why books should tell you very clearly "I made be called eutopia and I may claim to be set in a 'utopian mill town' but I also include disgusting horror book creatures crawling out of the dark and so if you don;t like horror don't even bother."
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak -- my mom bought me this when I admitted I had not read it. Actually way better than I expected. Death is a surprisingly sympathetic narrator.
Learning to Swim, by Sara Henry -- this came up on someone's blog..Bookslut??...It was fine for the first half and then so incredibly far fetched for the second that it was absurd.
Kindred, by Octavia Butler -- a reread, and my least favorite of Butler's books. But I am teaching it and it is pretty good, as long as you don't think about her (much better) books.
Currently reading Weird Sisters. They need to get way weirder pretty quickly.
