The Harlequin (Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #15)

by

 

by Laurell K. Hamilton

Reading a new book in a favorite series is like visiting old friends. You get to see how they’ve changed and developed since your last visit, and hopefully come away satisfied.

Unlike the previous installment in the saga of Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, The Harlequin has more plot than monster porn. Not that there isn’t sex, because it wouldn’t be an LKH novel without that, but the sex takes a back seat this time, and instead we’re treated to the return of Edward, the only man Anita doesn’t want to draw down on.

If hired killers can mellow, than Edward has, a little, in this outing, but then, fatherhood (even step-fatherhood) will do that to a person.

That aside, this is a great novel, and seems almost a return to the “old” Anita, the one who solved crimes. This time she’s going up against a secret sect of vampire enforcers, and trying to protect the members of the vampire church, of all things. Jean Claude is there, but not prominent, and the pack has actual development, and not just handsome body parts.

Great read, great to revisit Anita’s St. Louis.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by

by Malcolm Gladwell

There books you read that are mildly entertaining, which is great, but there are also books that completely change your perception of the world. For me Blink is one of the latter.

Describing it is difficult. It’s about improv, criminology, psychology, marriage counseling, body language and human interaction…sort of. But it’s also about – more than anything – the split second judgements we make all the time. The first impression that occurs before a first impression is even registered.

And it’s fascinating.

Gladwell’s informal style and self-effacing humor helps, of course, but mostly it’s the material that intrigues.

And, unfortunately, defies description.

Sister Carrie

by

by Theodore Dreiser

Even a century ago writing about country folks moving to the big city and getting into trouble was a trend, and Sister Carrie does the genre well, in the story of a young girl who moves the city, falls into a relationship with a sleazy salesman, and then eventually leaves him and heads to New York with the bar manager (Hurstwood) she ends up marrying.

Hurstwood’s life begins to fall apart, but Carries soars in the opposite direction – she makes a name for herself as an actress, etc.

I’m almost certain this novel was assigned to me on a reading list at some point in my lift, but I’m equally certain that this was the first time I’ve ever read it.

The grittiness and depression is a bit relentless in this novel, but the characters are compelling.

The Lighthouse at the End of the World

by

by Jules Verne

Reading translations always makes me wish I was more fluent in languages other than English. Oh, my Spanish is passable for getting directions and shopping, and my French is great when it comes to dance steps and cooking terms, but I don’t read enough of either to enjoy a deep conversation or a deep novel. Thus it was that I read The Lighthouse at the End of the World in English, and I suspect it lost a bit in translation.

If you love sea stories or action stories, pirates and treachery and that sort of thing, this is the novel for you. It’s an understated piece, and the language is fairly plain. It’s about a group of three lighthouse keepers sent to a remote island lighthouse. Said island is also inhabited by pirates who kill two of the keepers. The last must hold the light until help, in the form of soldiers, arrives.

Typically for me, I felt drenched while reading it (a very wet June may have helped.)

A classic.

My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

by


by Chelsea Handler

Chelsea Handler’s tongue just might poke itself through her cheek, if the tone of this collection of anecdotes and vignettes is anything to judge by. A funny, candid, and at times tragically pathetic glimpse at single life with just a touch of neuroses, Ms. Handler’s work is incredibly readable, and compelling in the “I can’t wait to see what she does NEXT” sort of way.

It’s adult content, but that’s as it should be, because to tame it would be to ruin it.

Great beach reading.

Teach with your Heart

by

Teach with Your Heart: Lessons I Learned from the Freedom Writers by Erin Gruwell

Erin Gruwell, the teacher who inspired the Freedom Writers, wrote her own memoir, which was published in January, 2007. Much of it echoes what we learned about her in the movie – that she was a new teacher saddled with kids labeled “unteachable,” that she used her own funds to keep them interested and motivated, that her marriage suffered for it.

What the movie doesn’t show, but shines through in Gruwell’s writing, is the wonder she feels as each thing she needed clicked into place. A contact made once leads to funding for a computer lab, some of her kids getting jobs, etc., and every time something happens she’s squealing with as much – if not more – delight than the students in her classroom.

Gringos in Paradise

by

Gringos in Paradise: An American Couple Builds Their Retirement Dream House in a Seaside Village in Mexico

by Barry Golson

I found this book in the new fiction section at my local B&N, and brought it home even though it’s not fiction, because my parents also did the cash-out and move to Mexico thing. You would think I’d therefore be predisposed to like it, and while it wasn’t a bad read, the truth is that I spent more time being pissed because I feel my mother could tell her, similar story, with more humor and less of a patronizing tone.

Granted, Golson’s mission is NOT to be patronizing, and I’m sure any other reader probably wouldn’t see it as such. He relays slice-of-life stories about how difficult it really is to adjust to the Mexican culture, and provides an appendix with useful information.

It’s interesting how our own experiences color even the most innocuous books.

Freedom Writers Diary

by

by The Freedom Writers and Erin Gruwell

It is rare when a book moves me to tears. It’s not that I’m not sentimental about things that have meaning to me, but that I can generally separate myself from what I’m reading enough to retain necessary distance. So when I say that The Freedom Writers Diary, made me cry, that’s saying a lot.

If you’re one of the five people in the country who hasn’t seen the film, read the book first, then rent the DVD. The book has 150 or so diary entries, designated solely by number, by the students in Erin Gruwell’s English classes from Wilson High School in Long Beach, CA, during the late nineties. They are frank, often brutal, glimpses into the lives of real kids living in a city that MTV dubbed “the gangsta rap capital of the world,” and they will tear at your heart strings.

Bookending the kids’ diaries are journal entries from Erin herself, the young teacher who manages to turn a bunch of disenfranchised teenagers into first a class, and then a family, teaching them about tolerance by using the diaries of Anne Frank and Zlata Filipovic as well as other works she finds relevant to their lives.

It’s a moving book, made more so by the knowledge that these kids, now college graduates, have turned around and continued to teach the lessons Gruwell taught them.

The Martian Chronicles

by

by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury is one of the icons of Science Fiction, which shouldn’t be surprising since he’s published something like 500 works, so when I added The Martian Chronicles to my list for the decades challenge, I did it in honor of his contribution to the field, as well as because I vaguely remember reading part of it as a child, and not really appreciating it.

Re-reading it was sort of disappointing. I’d forgotten about the sexism and racism – products of the time – that were in the various short stories, and that colored my appreciation of Bradbury’s version of Mars. On his Mars the canals actually hold water and the atmosphere is breathable. In addition, there are actual Martians, though, as in another iconic work of science fiction War of the Worlds a mundane human disease destroys the entire population quite accidentally.

Dated notions of society aside, I enjoyed revisiting this version of the Red Planet, especially because of the last tale in the book, in which a picnicking family boats down a canal, and their son asks where the Martians are, only to be told to look over the edge. What he sees is his own reflection.

True Believer

by

by Nicholas Sparks

Jeremy Marsh is a skeptic whose had some success with the media, and when he goes to a small town in North Carolina to debunk some graveyard ghost-lights, it’s pretty clear he intends to solve the mystery and beat a hasty retreat to his home in New York. Instead he finds himself falling in love with town librarian Lexie Darnell.

As with many of Sparks’s novels, True Believer is a gentle tale with earthy three-dimensional characters that seem like people any of us might know. Character is as vital as plot with him, and that’s good, because to be honest, I found the plot of this offering to be a bit predictable. I won’t outline it here, because I don’t like to offer spoilers, I’ll just say that it’s best to read this novel because you want to visit a cozy small town and meet interesting people, and not because you’re looking for a great surprise ending or plot twist.

As a cozy novel, True Believer goes well with a rainy day and hot tea, and in that light, it’s an enjoyable read.