We're an Open Book
I don’t usually read buzzy commercially successful authors–but when I do I read them at least 2-5 years after the buzz has died down and nobody cares. I’m looking at you Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Fifty Shades of Grey and Girl on The Train. I’ll get to you. . . eventually.
Instead of picking up Gone Girl (Which I have NOT read. No spoilers) I picked up Sharp Objects cause it was on a nifty library display.
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Since I’ve started blogging and paying attention to the adult lit world I have heard a lot about Margaret Atwood. She’s mostly known for her feminist writing and disturbing dystopic features. And while this book feature some of this, it’ just so ….bizarre. I really had to do some research to see what others were saying to make sure I understood it. The book editor of the Washington Post called it a “silly mess”… and it kind of was this for me. I have no idea how to really review this, since I don’t have much to compare it to, but here goes.
In an economic collapse in the Northeast, married couple Stan and Charmaine have lost everything. They live in their car, fearful of looters and the next day to come. When they have the opportunity to be apart of an economic experiment that requires them to move into the town of Consilience , an idyllic 50’s style town where everyone is given housing and work.. The only catch is they have to alternate a month being prisoners inside Positron prison and a month being a citizen in Consilience, leaving their home for their Alternates.
As you may suspect all is not what it seems and Stan and Charmiane get involved in a bizarre plot that include sex robots, a house of Elvis impersonators and adultery. So much adultery. The thriller-esque plot they get involved in just didn’t make sense. I’m not sure if this novel is satire or something. I feel like if I didn’t know who wrote this I’d be like, this is kind of misogynstic but because it’s Atwood it’s maybe satire. It just seemed like all these strong capable women had this plan and then they leave it to a bumbling man as their linchpin.
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Robert Langdon is back. This time the symbologist (although most of this book really just needed a Art Historian and Italian Lit professor) wakes up in a hospital in Florence, Italy with no memory of how he got there or why a shadowy organization is after him. As Langdon dashes across Italy with a beautiful blonde Girl Friday doctor, Sienna Brooks, he starts to put the pieces of his memory together. Langdon and Sienna are racing against time to save the world against a plot inspired by Dante Alighieri himself. This installment features all the twist and turns you expect in a Dan Brown novel with the addition of what I think Dan Brown considers strong female characters. I didn’t see the ending coming and Brown mixes just the right amount of facts and fiction to create a page flipping novel. A great addition to the Langdon series, this coming from someone who has read every Brown novel. We’ll just pretend The Lost Symbol never happened. Jess – ★★★
Song of Achilles is the story of Achilles from The Illiad told through the perspective of his lover, the exiled prince Patroclus. Let me stop you right there. Yes. Yes, this book is basically The Illiad fanfiction, but it’s the good kind. Although I suspect if Patrolcus was a female character in a YA book he’d be called a Mary Sue and bad role model. His character begins and ends with how awesomesauce Achilles is.
Miller’s writing is so vivid and engrossing, it works perfectly with Frazer Douglas’s audiobook narration. This book works great on audio because some of these names can be tough. Douglas’ does read a little slow and it felt like the ending of this book was dragging. I think it’s best to go in knowing as little as possible about the actual story because it follows the Greek myth so closely.
I do want to point out that there is a fair amount rape and misogyny in this book, but Miller handles female characters well. The few speaking women in this book could have easily been lamps with wombs, but Douglas brings them to life. Kat – ★★★★
SIDE NOTE:
Also, Miller does the *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* thing to keep it kind of meta. Odysseus tells a central character (who you have probably never heard of) “Who knows, I could be more famous than you one day. Welp, back to Ithaca I go now.” (Okay, that may not be paraphrased.)
- Release Date: October 2, 2012
- Pages: 336
- Genre: Fantasy
- Publisher: Tor Books
Well, it’s time for to me fill my “Reading Outside of My Usual Genre” quota for the year.
I came across this book on NPR books where Amal El-Mohtar discussed how awesome the diverse covers for this book were and how Max Gladstone became one of his favorite authors. I had a Fantasy space in my Summer Book Bingo, so when I saw this was available on Scribd I started reading.
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- Release Date: November 8th 2011
- Genre: Thriller
- Pages: 849
- Publisher: Scribner
I’ve always been intrigued by the cover of this book; one side shows a newspaper with Kennedy’s assassination as the headline and the other side has the same newspaper with a headline saying the assassination had been avoided. This book has had been sitting on my Kindle since it was on sale for 2.99 and after finishingA Thousand Pieces of You I was looking for a more complex alternate universe story and figured King could deliver.
Everything you need to know about this book can be summarized from the cover. Basically, high school teacher, Jake Epping, goes back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination. I think saying anything else would just get… complicated….
- Release Date: October 16th 2012
- Audiobook Hours: 7 hours 22 minutes
- Genre: Adult Fiction
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
I have this thing where I tend to read popular fiction waaaaay behind the curve. I read The Fault in Our Stars 3 years after I bought it, Gone Girl is still on my TBR and I bought 50 Shades two years ago and I will get past the first 50 pages at some point.
If you think back to late 2012 it was all about Silver Linings Playbook because the movie was super buzzy. So buzzy they have the actor’s names on the movie tie-in cover. When I saw this as one of the audiobooks available on Scribd’s audiobook section I figured it was time…