The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion

This book was soooooo fun!! Don Tillman is a genetics professor in Melbourne, Australia. And well, he's a bit odd. He's probably on the autism spectrum, likely Aspergers, but he doesn't know it. So he has a very calculated way of speaking and evaluating people. 

He has two friends in the whole world, Gene and Claudia, a husband and wife who have an "open" marriage as Gene attempts to sleep with women from all nationalities. And somewhere in the beginning of the story, Don decides to solve his problem of being alone with "the wife project." Don creates a questionnaire to find himself the perfect wife. And in true Don fashion, as his life is ruled by a strict adherence to reason and rationality (to say nothing of the best use of time) he cannot deviate from the results his questionnaire is giving him.

Sitting in his office one day, he is approached by a woman, Rosie, who has come to see him at Gene's insistence. Thinking she is a candidate for the wife project, Don asks her out on a date. But it's quickly apparent that Rosie has completely and utterly failed the questionnaire and is therefore, not a candidate for the wife project. Despite his adherence to rules, Don begins to seek out reasons to be with Rosie.

I really enjoyed rooting for Don in this book. Although he was completely clueless and obtuse at times, I really wanted a good life for him. He was a good guy. Feel good and funny... this book was a real treat.

4.5/5 Stars.

The Art Forger - B.A. Shapiro

This book had some issues, but all in all, it was kind of a fun look at art forgery and the world of struggling artists. Claire Roth is down on her luck. She's an artist, but some (slowly revealed) drama from her past has kept her from making it big in the cutthroat art world. She now divides her time between painting for herself, teaching an art class at a boys juvenile detention center, and copying masterworks for a company called Re-Pro, who then sells the oil painted copies for thousands of dollars. 

Enter Aiden Markel, the owner of an art gallery in Boston called Markel G. He has a proposition for Claire, he wants her to copy Edgar Degas' After the Bath V (there is no After the Bath V - it was created solely for the purpose of this novel) which was stolen in the infamous art heist from the Isabella Gardner Museum in the 1990s. During the heist, thieves dressed as cops stole 13 priceless works from the Museum, including Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee. None of the paintings have ever been recovered. 

Having recently finished (and loved with every fiber of my reading body) The Goldfinch, I was prime for more art thievery. So Markel tells Claire that once the painting is copied, Aiden will sell the copy to an unsuspecting buyer who believes he's buying the real thing, and then will return the original to the museum. He also promises Claire he will give her a one-woman show at his gallery, and will pay her $50,000. Being desperately poor, Claire agrees. 

However, once she begins to study the painting, Claire begins to suspect that it's not a Degas at all - that the painting is a copy of the original. In the meantime, Claire and Aiden begin sleeping together and then... well... these two are the worst criminal masterminds every, so naturally their story begins to unravel.

I'm not sure if the audio narrator just ruined Claire for me, but there were so many things I didn't like about Claire. First of all, everything she says is so dramatic and breathy (okay could be a narrator issue). Second, she's kind of an idiot. Her big secret from the past, is that when her more famous professor/boyfriend gets artist's block, she paints something for him to get him over his hump and then he enters it into a competition, which he wins. He receives fame and fortune based on the painting and breaks up with Claire. She's so distraught because of the "fraud" (hmmm suspect), that she urges him to come clean. When he doesn't, she tells the museum curator that she painted the famous painting. She's not believed, and then she's blackballed from the art world. 

So here, she's being asked to partake in a criminal conspiracy and inevitably she what? - Yeah she thinks everything is going to be okay by coming clean. Like I said, she's kind of dumb. And you know what? She is guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud, but somehow she doesn't see it that way. She thinks she can outsmart Museum directors, FBI agents and the press. I don't think it really works that way. Also, the "love" between Claire and Aiden I wasn't really buying either. I mean, I was okay with their sleeping together and what not, but Claire mentions several times she knows nothing about Aiden. I wasn't ready to jump on the "but then I fell in love with you" bandwagon. Lastly, there are these letters from Isabella Stewart Gardner to her niece Amelia which are meant to give the reader some added insight (you'll get the punchline of the book FAR FAR before Claire - remember she's a sweet dumb dumb), but they come off overly flowery and over the top. 

Anyway, this gets three stars because I was entertained, but there were some points where I had to shut off the recording and forget how much I was annoyed by Claire before turning it back on. The best parts were the sections about historical forgers and how technically art forgery is done.

3/5 stars.

All I Did Was Ask - Terry Gross

This review is all my fault. I saw All I did was Ask was $1.99 on the Kindle store and I bought it without thinking. I love Fresh Air. I love the interviews and the questions. I love Terry Gross. So I bought the book without looking at the description. 

What I was expecting - Terry's life story, kind of like Bossy Pants, but less funny (because - Tina Fey). With probably anecdotes of interviews or favorite excerpts. 

What the book is - excerpts. All excerpts, with maybe a couple lines detailing her own thoughts on the interaction. 

So, this review is my fault. I didn't realize what I was getting myself into. And I was disappointed. Because as much as I love listening to the interviews on the show, I don't really want to read them in a book. There's a lot of the flavor that is missing in just reading the interviews - things that make the audio so compelling. 

So I had high hopes for this book that were partly my own fault for not reading the description better, and then partly because these interviews are meant for radio and they're presented here in text, and something about it just doesn't work.

2.5/5 Stars.

Bright Air Black - David Vann

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. After I opened up the book and read the first few lines, I was wondering what I'd gotten myself into. I went back and read the Goodreads description. Medea, from Jason and the Argonauts, retold in prose, from Medea's perspective. I was familiar with the story of Jason and the Argonauts, in as much as I had heard their names, and knew it involved the recovery of a golden fleece, but that was it. 

I asked my husband, "What do you know about Jason and the Argonauts?" His reply, "Is it a band?" 

So after about 15 minutes on Wikipedia, I felt backgrounded enough to start in on this story. The prose writing feels like a hat tip to Greek epics, and indeed, Jason and his Argonauts had plenty of adventures in recovering the Golden Fleece, but Bright Air Black starts off with Medea on the bow of the Argo, hacking her brother to pieces in and tossing him into the sea in order to slow her father's pursuit. And for what? A fleece covered in gold only because it was used to sift for gold in a stream in Medea's kingdom. As the Argo speeds toward Iolcus, Jason's home, the gold dust slowly shakes out of the fleece, and the entire Jason and the Argonaut myth unravels for us, and for Medea as well.

Expected to arrive in Iolcus as a hero, and granted the throne his birthright demands, Jason instead finds his uncle Pelias enthroned as king, Jason's own father, brother and mother, all killed by Pelias in brutal fashion. Jason and Medea are enslaved. Over the course of six years they have two sons together while Medea plots revenge on Pelias that would give Jason his kingdom back. But things never go quite as Medea thinks they will. Yes, the people are afraid of her, as she wanted, but that doesn't always give her the result she expects. And she has this awareness of things, of knowing that the stories which are ultimately told will not match the truth of events. 

I can see why ancient Greeks were so intrigued by her. A princess who commits horrendous acts in the name of love, for Jason, for her sons. But who sacrifices all those things she claims to love in the name of revenge. She's a deft with a blade as with poison, as with trickery. Does she really even love Jason? Does she really have any power at all? Medea is such a rich character that of course Euripides would make an entire Greek tragedy of her later years. 

David Vann's retelling is remarkable all the more for giving us yet another view of Medea. She's altogether ancient and modern. This book was a real pleasure.

4/5 Stars.

Truly, Madly, Guilty - Liane Moriarty

I liked this book slightly less than Big Little Lies (you can read that review here), mostly due to the pacing, but Liane Moriarty really does write rich, full stories, with complex characters. This one was no exception. This particular story begins with a bit of a mystery. 

We are introduced to three couples, Erica and Oliver, a stuffy, precise couple; Clementine and Sam, a fun couple which includes a female cellist and their two adorable daughters; and Vid and Tiffany, rich neighbors of E&O who also have a daughter, Dakota. The book begins with Erica and Clementine, childhood friends who have an odd competitive, complicated history and the set-up includes mentions back to some event, a barbecue that has changed the course of these characters lives. 

As we get further and further into the book the barbecue mystery deepens, takes shape, unravels, and then becomes clear again. I felt like this portion of the book took a bit too long and it seemed the author let the characters take on a bit too much - as in she allowed too many of them to have their own POV chapters that ended up feeling a bit unnecessary. So the first half of the book, first 60% really was a bit of a frustrating experience for me. While the last portion hit me on a pretty personal level, and having just finished it, is pushing me to give a 4-star rating, I have to recall again that the first part was so frustrating. 

But again, Moriarty gives us such rich characters who are complex, and rather than become caricatures of themselves, she allows their past and their parenting and their influences to shape wonderfully flawed and human portraits. It's a pleasure to think about the characters and what they are going through and have them react to situations like real people, rather than two-dimensional figures pushing forward a plot point.

3.5/5 Stars.. 

V is for Vengeance - Sue Grafton

Back in April of 2012, I read the first of Sue Grafton's Alphabet series in about six days. The books have become a bit more sophisticated since then, and longer, so this one took a bit longer to read. Every year for the past four years, I've thought that maybe I'd get to the end of the series or at least catch up to Grafton, who continues to write these books as if the 80s never died. This actually may be the year. X came out last year and it's patiently waiting in my kindle to be read. So there is only W standing between me and the current end of the series. 

V finds us hopping around in narrative view point between Kinsey, a quasi gangster named Lorenzo Dante, and a bored socialite, Nora Vogelsang and it all begins with Kinsey shopping for underwear. While at the store, Kinsey spots Audrey Vance slip a couple pairs of very expensive pajamas into a bag. Because she has an overly developed sense of justice, Kinsey turns the woman into the store clerk and an eventual arrest is made. When Audrey Vance turns up dead after taking a spill off a local bridge and into a ravine, Kinsey is hired by the woman's former fiancee to unravel what happened. 

This leads Kinsey into a very organized retail theft ring headed by Lorenzo Dante. Because we have Lorenzo's point of view, we know early on that Audrey was helped in her trip over the bridge by Lorenzo's bumbling but violent brother Cappi. Most of Dante's portions of the book are meant to humanize him. He's a gangster with heart. He never orders any of the violence Cappi performs, he's sorry for those things. He had a close relationship with his mother, who left the family when Dante was young. His father was violent and beat Dante as a child, and now Dante has fallen in love with Nora. The sections from Nora's point of view, in hindsight, seem the most irrelevant and unnecessary in the book, but because the book is set up like a mystery novel, you're not sure of this until the very end. The thing that didn't work for me, was that as judgmental as Kinsey was about the harm that retail theft does, she seemed awful quick to want to forgive Dante for his hand in the entire thing, which was to actually be the head of it all. 

Thrown in is a side drama involving Pinky Ford, who gave Kinsey her set of key picks which come up about once a book, and his wife Dodie. Why Kinsey feels so inclined to stick her neck out for Pinky in this book is a mystery in and of itself and seemed more like a stretch to make a plot point work. 

This was definitely not my favorite of the alphabet mysteries. Most of them get a solid 3 stars, but since this one had so many off elements, it's only getting two.

2/5 stars.

The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah

This poor book was one that I received from the library in the middle of listening to something else, then tried to rush through in a few days, then realized it wouldn't happen, then waited three weeks for it to come back around so I could finish it. But I'm so glad I finished it - so very glad.

This is a story of two French sisters during World War 2 who make their own contributions to the resistance effort. Vienne is the older sister, with a daughter of her own and a husband at the front. Isobelle is the younger, more impulsive and impetuous sister. After the death of their mother at a young age, the two girls are estranged from each other and their alcoholic father. Isobelle grows up angry and desperate for love and notoriety. At the start of the war she is impatient to make her mark. She becomes "The Nightingale" ushering downed Allied pilots across the Pyrenees and into Spain to freedom.

Vienne is fearful for her child and her home. A German officer is billeted at her home during the occupation and Vienne must be careful of everything she says and does. Through the heartbreaking moments - and there are many many heartbreaking moments - the sisters' courage, shown in two decidedly different manners, is what carries the story. The ending was a bit too predictable and saccharine in comparison with the rest of the novel, but it didn't take away too much enjoyment from the reading.

I cried. Yeah yeah, I'm a softy. But the emotional moments were bought and paid for by the characters so they earned it. I really enjoyed this book and how it highlights the efforts of women during WWII. I can't wait to visit Paris again.

4/5 Stars.

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt

This is a book for readers. Correction, this is a gift for readers. For those who love escaping in the pages, and find themselves caring deeply about the characters who are revealed within them. This is a gift. A big, heart thumping, book so real you can feel it gift. 

That The Goldfinch won a Pulitzer Prize is not a surprise to me. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. It's a finely crafted, gracefully written, surprisingly accessible piece of masterwork fiction. I have a suspicion it may just be the best book I'll read this year. 

The story follows Theo Decker, a young teen whose mother is killed in a horrible terrorist attack. In the midst of the attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Theo escapes the grisly scene with a copy of Fabritius' The Goldfinch (you can read more about the painting here). A 1654 masterpiece whose story and description were lost with time, as Fabritius himself, and much of his other works were destroyed in a fire at his studio.

As a reader, we know only what Theo knows. We are shown the world through his eyes, and Tartt does a magnificent job telling us only what we need to know. She doesn't over explain, she doesn't extrapolate. We can think outside Theo's sphere, but not because the author herself has made any attempt to add in a narrator's interpretation. So there are some details of events in the book that seem so limited, but in a way, perfectly true to the story and the world created through Theo.

Theo is a flawed character, and I loved him the better for it. I never felt he was out of opportunities to make his life better, to overcome his trauma and the short shrift he was given in the life department. And Theo himself is aware of all this as well. It's like sharing in on a good friend's shame, and loving him despite all of it. 

There are so many twists in Theo's life, but Tartt knows just when to cut ahead in time and save us some of the banal sorrow that would have drug the piece down into tedious pace.

5/5 Stars.

2016 Review

In 2016 I read 57 books, or 18,395 pages (I also recently have a string of half-finished audio books that returned to the library before they could be finished and I'm patiently waiting for them to turn back up in my account - so the page number is a little higher). This is a dramatic increase over last year when I read 39 books, or 11,683 pages. I credit the increase in books read to the fact that I discovered audio books to aid in my half marathon training runs and a couple of long car rides that necessitated entertainment. All the reviews this year on the blog were my own fresh from 2016. I'm hoping to enlist a few guest reviews this year.

Longest Book: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. The surprising thing was not how long this book was, but how short Chernow managed to make it given the source material and the endless fascination to be spurred by the details of Hamilton's life. I mean, the guy died in a duel with the Vice President of the United States. I know Dick Cheney shot someone too, but it wasn't on purpose. Chernow was the first author to uncover many of Hamilton's writings from his time living in St. Croix and other details from his early life in the Caribbean. To say this is the book that launched a thousand memes is an understatement. It's the book that launched a musical phenomenon and saved Hamilton's face on the $10 bill. Quite an accomplishment. You can read my full review here.

Shortest Book: Short Stores from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists by J.K. Rowling. I came upon this by accident, but it was very cheap from Amazon one day and I'm basically a sucker for all things J.K. Rowling touches, so I got it. It's length didn't merit a full post, but you can read additional thoughts here.

Best Book: American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I can't explain it, but this book felt very important to me when I was reading it, and it made me think of America and Gods and religion in a different way. I loved the idea of it, and how it was executed. I'm so excited this is becoming a TV show (check out a promo video here). I hope the TV show doesn't suck, because I'll probably watch it anyway and hate myself for it. I told everyone I knew this year that they should give this book a chance. You can read my full review here.

Best Character: This was the hardest one for me to decide. Shadow from American Gods was a great character. He's thoughtful and honest and being with him at the unraveling of the theocratic structure of our country was quite a ride. I also was a big fan of Newt Scamander from the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them Screenplay (you can read that review here). I'm partial to any Hufflepuff who manages to make it big, so to speak. And finally, there's A. Ham himself. I've spent part of 2015 and all of 2016 engrossed and obsessed with all things Hamilton. It kind of reminds me of my pre-teen fascination with The New Kids on the Block, only high-brow. I don't have pins or posters from Teen Beat hung up in my room, but I did actually buy a paper copy of Rolling Stone Magazine this year and I saw the musical twice - once in New York (you can read about that experience here) and once in Chicago. Oh I also read both the biography and the story behind the musical.So in the end, I think I have to go with Mr. Hamilton. Ambitious, tragic, flawed, could have been President of the United States had he managed to get out of his own way at the time. He's fascinating and since he inspired the best piece of pop culture in my lifetime, I think he wins hands down.

Worst Book: Deliver Us From Evil by David Baldacci. I should have known this one was bad when I realized I had read the prior book and had no memory of it whatsoever, despite having reviewed in on Goodreads. I wasn't impressed with the first book either. This book had crappy characters, a crappy plot, and unbelievable motives. Plus, I was 10 pages away from finishing it on vacation when my eldest woke my youngest up from a nap and we proceeded on a cranky four hour car trip through the Canadian Shield. We were all fed up. So then I finally finished this book and put us all out of our misery. You can read my full review here.

Biggest Disappointment: Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware. After coming off reading In a Dark Dark Wood (you can read that review here), I was pretty stoked to read Ruth Ware's follow up. The previous book had made for some good running material as I was completely engrossed and seemed to not notice I was running for hours at a time. But this was was hugely disappointing. The main character was not tolerable, not barely tolerable, she was NOT tolerable at all (see below). So I put on my big girl pants, since the main character was not going to, and finished the book. Only now I feel bad because somehow my mom started reading this on my purported recommendation, and I can't believe I screwed up so badly as to lead her down this path. You can read my full review here.

Worst Character: Lo Blacklock, The Woman in Cabin 10. Typically unreliable narrators are okay for me, but they have to be someone I at least could be in the same room with. Big no for Lo Blacklock. Big big no. See above.


Honorable Mentions:  I should say there were a few books that didn't make the above list but were so good, I wanted to throw a shout out to them. Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (review here) was excellent, as was Justin Cronin's City of Mirrors (review here) - rounding out his trilogy that began with The Passage.I'd highly recommend either of these books.

Goals for 2017: I've set my goal of 52 books for this year. I know it is doable since I blew that away in 2016. I'll be training for another half marathon soon so I'll have the time to listen. 52 books is a book a week and I know I'll get my Ploughshares love in three times this year.

Will George RR Martin get around to publishing Winds of Winter (signs are pointing to yes!- check out this update), I'm not counting on it (I was similarly disappointed last year) or I would have set the goal at 45. But if it ruins my reading goal for the year, I'd be okay with that.