Book 53: Climbing the Stairs by Margaret Powell

Another book to scratch my Downton Abbey itch. Margaret Powell's Climbing the Stairs isn't quite as engaging as her previous book, Below Stairs; it has far fewer tales of serving and more stories about how she spent her free time and married life. Still, if you're interested in the time period, this is a great little memoir. It's like having your British grandmother tell you the stories of her life; it's just so cozy and personable.

Books 50, 51 & 52: The Selection trilogy by Kiera Cass

When The One by Kiera Cass came out earlier this month, I started reading it only to realize that I really needed to go back and reread the first two books to fully enjoy the conclusion to the trilogy. It's all good, brainless fun. The worldbuilding is totally lacking, the dystopia is unbelievable, and the plot beyond the love triangle is flat, but damn if it isn't hard to put down. I'm a sucker for fairy tales. some spoilers ahead...

The conclusion to the trilogy was mostly satisfactory. I enjoyed see America grow to take more of an interest in ruling and improving the country. I hated how America was trapped in a room during the final battle; I get that she was never a warrior, but it was still disappointing to have her miss what  felt like the climax. Also the backlash from Maxon when he found out about Aspen was pretty anti-climactic. The ending seemed super rushed, so I felt a bit jilted. And Aspen and Lucy was just a little too pat. You can't have a love polygon without a few hurt feelings, Cass!

Book 49: Vlad by Carlos Fuentes

In this retelling of Dracula, lawyer Yves Navarro is assigned to handle his employer's old friend's move from Romania to Mexico City. Yves is perfectly content with his middle-class life; he loves his wife and daughter, but he worries that his wife may be dissatisfied and still resents him for the death of their son.

Vlad is a short little novel, only around a hundred pages, but it really packs a punch. The descriptions of Vlad himself are chilling (this vamp is more Nosferatu than Legosi), though Fuentes retains a sense of humor through the horror, and the historical crimes of Vlad Tepes are also explored (if perhaps a bit embellished). Fuentes has distilled the vampire novel down to its purest essence, and Vlad is a macabre look at how the everyday fears and willful blindnesses of middle-class life can leave one vulnerable to unspeakable horrors.

Book 48: The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan

The premise of The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist's Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases sounded similar to several other cases of psychological oddities, particularly Oliver Sak's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which I enjoyed several years ago. This book wasn't quite as good, but it was still an enjoyable read. The author's connections between his cases and his own life were a bit clunky, but I did like reading about the procedures Dr. Small had to go through to treat his patients, and his thought process when diagnosing. So if you're craving more interesting psychiatric case studies a la Oliver Saks, this book would be worth checking out, but if you're new to the genre, start with Saks.

Book 47: Dave Barry's Guide to Guys by Dave Barry

My sweet boyfriend got me tickets to go see Dave Barry in Austin a few weeks ago, and afterward I got the urge to reread one of his books. I loved Davy Barry in high school, and the Guide to Guys was one of my favorites.This has to have been my fourth or fifth time reading this book in ten years, and I still laughed out loud several times.

Book 46: The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs by Jack Gantos

Whoooa, this book was dark. I was expecting some slightly spooky middle grade story (I think it was the length and paperback cover that led me to this conclusion), but The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs was full-on, Psycho-level freaky.

The titular love curse refers to loving one's mother to an obsessive degree. No incest here, but it's still pretty disturbing. Lots of creepy imagery involving taxidermy. Definitely good, and nothing overtly horror, just a spooky little fable about mother-love, taxidermy, eugenics, and twins. Maybe not one to read on Mother's Day, unless you're of a gothic bent.

Top Ten Tuesday: Five Books I Almost Put Down But Didn't

 Top Ten Tuesday topic is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

This week's topic is Top Ten Books I Almost Put Down but Didn't. This is a tough topic for me, because I almost never intentionally stop reading a book. Whenever I put a book down, it's always with the intent, however misguided, of picking it back up again. And I will finish them someday! So the books left unfinished have been seared into my brain, whereas the ones I slogged through regardless have just sort of faded into the back of mind. Lately when I come across a book that's giving me trouble, I think of this quote from Doris Lessing:

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag—and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. ” 

Sometimes it's best to just put a book down and pick it back up when the time is right, but, for better or worse, I have trouble following Lessing's advice. What if it's just about to get good? So here are five books for which I refused to admit defeat. There are one or two I worry I may have read out of their right time, some that I grew to enjoy once I "settled in," and a few that I suspect will never have a right time for me.

1. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta: I was tempted to abandon this one because the novel seems like such a jumble of different ideas at the beginning, the protagonist herself is so closed off, and there are lots of allusions to events that aren't fully explained until much later  in the book. I'm so glad I stuck with it, though, because part of the beauty of Jellicoe Road is slowly watching the pieces come together.

2. The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon: The aphasic nonsense words just kept giving me headaches! And the pacing was a little too irregular to keep me genuinely hooked, but I'm glad I persevered.

3. A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins: We had to read this for high school, and for some reason I was just a total brat about it. I didn't just put it down and walk away; I would throw it across the room. I really just made it more difficult than it had to be, probably because it was school-assigned. I did actually finish it, and although the writing was a little spotty, I came to really enjoy the memoir of a man's walk (part of the way) across America.And I'm always a sucker for an awesome dog.

4. Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr: I got an ARC of this from a former coworker, and the description sounded awesome, but the book just fell flat for me. I finished it begrudgingly, and I probably remember about as much of it as I would if I had stopped reading it less than halfway through.

5. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes: I read this when I was fourteen, and I was too young! I'm a little torn on this. On one hand, I was proud that I'd stuck with it and finished it, but on the other hand I wonder if it would've been better to have put it down and come back to it a few years later. I should reread this...

Book 45: Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Jellicoe Road is about Taylor, a girl boarding at Jelllicoe School in Australia, the territory wars between the students, the military kids, and the townies, and Taylor's search for her family history and her guardian, Hannah. Interspersed between all this are excerpts from Hannah's manuscript, about a group of friends living on Jellicoe Road.

I was fairly confused at the beginning of the book; I was unsure about the italicized sections, where they came from, who the characters were supposed to be, and how they related to the rest of the story. I didn't totally understand the hierarchy of the school or the rules of the territory wars. And Taylor herself is rather abrasive and hard to like at the beginning. Everything gradually comes together, and it's really beautiful how it's all choreographed. A

Book 44: A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire #4)

I adore this series (and the Game of Thrones tv show), so I'm trying to read these books as slowly as possible since it will likely be quite a while before the next book comes out. I read the third book a year ago, so I was a little hazy on exactly what was going on at the beginning.

I don't entirely agree with how Martin chose to split this and the next book; I think I would have preferred including all the characters and separating it by time rather than having each book cover a different group. But maybe I'm just disgruntled because I am sooo tempted to break my one-a-year rule to find out what happens in book five. But then there won't be any left until the new one is finished! It's quite a quandary.

Anyway, it's Game of Thrones: Characters you love die, new characters are introduced and despite your best intentions you get attached.

Book 43: Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner

I'd been hearing good things about Maggot Moon, Sally Gardner's dystopian middle-grade novel, for quite a while, and when I saw it on Diversity in YA's list of Diverse Dystopian YA Books, I decided to bite the bullet and download it to my Nook.

I can see this being required reading in middle school classrooms. It was much more confusing than I was expecting for a middle-grade book, so I think it could really benefit from discussion. I was so eager to find out what was happening in the book, I completely missed that the narrator was dyslexic! And that the story took place in an alternate-history Nazi controlled England. There's a lot here, and I should've slowed down to take it all in, and I should've enlisted a friend to read it along with me.

I liked the alternate history, and all of the space race discussion was pretty awesome. The narrator's POV was unique, and I could cry for how brave he was at the end.

Book 42: The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

I went into The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender expecting really great things, so it was probably inevitable that I came away a little disappointed. Normally I love magical realism, and this book, with its protagonist born with wings and its generations of women who turn into birds and bake their feelings, has magic in spades. That might be part of the problem. It just didn't feel entirely genuine to me; the improbable events didn't draw me further into the world of Ava Lavender and her family, instead they alienated me from it. They were just so heavyhanded. I felt like I was just skimming of the surface of the book, but every time I tried to get my hair wet something would slap me back up and out of it.

I want to try to read this book again in a few years, to see if something has shifted and I finally "get it," but I worry that the time I would have truly loved this book would have been limited to when I was sixteen and in love with sobbing over heartbreak and ill-fated love.

The writing is lovely, if a little purple at times. I was a bit surprised at first that the book went so far back into Ava Lavender's family history before getting to her story, but I actually really enjoyed hearing about her mother and grandmother.

Maybe my problem was reading this so soon after Like Water for Chocolate; I was too overloaded on magical realism to begin with. Maybe all of the excellent reviews I read beforehand gave me unrealistic expectations that this book would be one of those few that can read your soul and upend and enhance your understanding of the world. Sadly, it was not that book for me, but I can see how it might be that book for someone else.

Book 41: Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight

This book was incredibly engaging. After her daughter, Amelia, throws herself from the roof of her school, lawyer Kate Baron devotes herself to sifting through her daughter's texts, e-mails, and social media posts to reconstruct the events leading up to her daughter's death. The book is told through the dual perspectives of Kate in the present and Amelia before her death, and it's absolutely gripping to watch the  story unfold through the twinning stories. It reminded me quite a bit of Gillian Flynn, though not as gritty. I wasn't a huge fan of the ending, but that's a small complaint. A

Book 40: The Body in the Woods by April Henry

This was a nifty little book about teen members of a search and rescue group stumbling across a dead body and then teaming up to find the murderer. Each of the three teenagers has his or her own issues to deal with, and through their alternating viewpoints the author can explore issues like mental illness, homelessness, Asperger's, the war in Iraq, and simply connecting to other people. It's a fast-paced story, and the mystery kept up my interest. Ruby in particular was a great character, and I really enjoyed her story arc. It may be a little scary for younger kids (we also get a few chapters from the murderer's perspective), but the diversity of the main trio could make it a valuable addition to a middle school/high school library.