Rating: Thumbs Down

Review: I wanted to love this book. I was desperate to love this book. And it started out so good, I was almost sure I had a winner. It starts with a woman climbing down an emergency ladder and finding herself in another world, almost like ours, but with a different history and two moons instead of one. Parallel to her life we hear about a novelist/math teacher and how he gets mixed up in an almost paranormal situation related to his ghostwriting a book. Things slowly start to get interesting. This baby is over 900 pages long, the author had it on a slow burn, but I was really liking it.

The problem is, by the time you finally slog through the finish line, you realize about 80% of the things the author fleshed out during his slow burn were totally extraneous and had zero bearing on the outcome. Characters and situations that seemed very important at the beginning of the novel, and were dwelled upon almost to the point of distraction, ended up being completely forgotten by the end. Plot lines were started and then abandoned all over the place. It had one of the more unsatisfying endings to a book that I’ve encountered.

1Q84, like The Hunger Games, came in a set of three (bound together this time), and although I enjoyed reading all of them at once, I think he may have written them with too much time in between and forgot what he was trying to emphasize at the beginning. And I am almost certain he started writing the book without knowing how it was going to end, which made for no focus.

Haruki Murakami is a good writer. He can set a scene and create a feeling very well (the feeling in 1Q84 being kind of a calm foreboding). One of the professional reviews of this book talks about how reading his writing can make you feel like you’re dreaming the novel, he gets in your head that much. It’s true. The problem this time is that he set a great scene and then didn’t seem to know what to put in it. Things just got too muddled, we got a great buildup to…. usually, nothing.

It’s really too bad, but I can’t recommend this book.

Rating: Thumbs Down

Review: This book has three main characters and I couldn’t really tell any of them apart. And I didn’t care what happened to any of them. And then the book ended.

This has got some people worried about the American cruise line industry. My opinion is – let them all fail. They pollute too much if you ask me. There is no reason people can’t take other, less environmentally harmful vacations. And don’t even get me started on the cargo ships, I just read an article in The New York Times that says unscrupulous ones will hook up special “magic” hoses to bypass cleaning equipment so they can pump oily water overboard. That’s horrifying!

I will say, though, that one paragraph of that article made me so proud. The whistle blower who turned in a polluting ship was accused not of having the environment in mind, but of wanting to make a payday. They said he watched a lot of pollution occur without trying to stop it, and just waited to get to the U.S. because he knew he’d get a reward. His response:

“Mr. Lopez, who returned to the Philippines in December, said in an Internet interview that he had known a bounty was possible, but that his main concern had been preventing dumping, which he had also witnessed on other ships. He could not have reported the crimes anywhere but in the United States, he said, and certainly not when he was at sea.”

He knew he would be safe here, and that someone would actually do something about it. God I love it when we’re the good guys.

Rating: Thumbs Up

Review: This book is narrated by the family’s pet dog. If that doesn’t affect my objectivity, I don’t know what would. It pretty much would have had to have been about the ritualistic slaughter of dolphins, elephants, and baby kittens to make me not like it. As it was, it was about a family that has a really big crisis and how everyone reacts to it. Not exactly uplifting, but a nice, quick read.

Having the dog narrate it was an ingenious way to gloss over scenes that took place where a dog couldn’t be and where the author maybe didn’t have much expertise – in this case, a courtroom. Very clever.

Oh, and there’s one scene where a main character races a car around a track, and the description of it gave me goosebumps. I don’t even like racing, in fact I make fun of it, so that’s saying something.

Rating: Thumbs Down

Review: I only read book one of a three book series, so that will affect my review. Reasons I didn’t like it:

1) it’s a kids’ book, so it was too simple. Mindy said I can’t fault it for being juvenile when it’s supposed to be for kids, but this is my blog and I say I can. Anyway, I liked Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, so why can’t books still be written that intelligently? I’m not going to stand by and say it’s ok to dumb stuff down.

2) The ending didn’t feel like an ending, and was entirely unsatisfying. Probably far in the future they’ll bind all three together in one volume. But as it was, they’re selling it as a standalone book, so it should be satisfying as a standalone book, and it’s 100% not.

3) I kept wanting someone to be a hero and do the right thing, and nobody ever does. Again, I hear they do in the other books, but this one didn’t have the clear, moral hero I was hoping for.

4) For the amount of story that’s told, it could have been about half as long.

Rating: Thumbs Down

Review: More crappy, nauseating, pointless, poorly written chick lit. No wonder everyone makes fun of this genre. Stuff that in real life would be a really big deal is downplayed, and stuff that isn’t really all that earth-shattering is treated like the fricken second coming of Christ. This writer is totally clueless. And all the unnecessary details and descriptions of stupid crap like what the babysitter carried down to the beach in the beach bag. God I just hated this book.

I don’t care how many free ones I find in the laundry room, I am done with this kind of writing for a long, long time. Yuck.

Rating: Thumbs Down

Review: Just a poorly written book. The worst kind of crap: foreshadowing things that never happen, scrambling at the end to create some kind of point to the whole mess, and no redeeming behavior out of anyone. And weirdly, I don’t think I’ve ever read that many descriptions of the picture quality of television sets. WHO CARES.

The ONLY thing it did was get me thinking about the mental problems a lot of Vietnam vets had/have and how there are going to be a lot of vets after this war with PTSD, too. And how sad it is that generation after generation keeps having to go through this, and how fighting in a war stays with you your whole life, and how we civilians can’t ever really understand. God war sucks. But I digress.

Avoid avoid avoid this piece-o-crap. Sorry Christie, but don’t quit your day job.

Rating: Thumbs Up

Review: This is chick lit, just FYI. Although I wasn’t satisfied with the ending to this book, I loved how it pulled me right in and was one of the quickest reads I’ve ever done. It started with some really good drama, but the people were so wishy washy and deceitful that it got a little unrealistic. Or maybe I’m just not very realistic about how much some people lie to their friends. At any rate, I think it was better than some other books in the chick lit genre, and easy to read without feeling dumbed down, so I give it a thumbs up.

Rating: Thumbs Up

Review: Ah, nonfiction. I’m not generally a fan because of one reason and one reason only: it’s always WAY too long. I would say about 90% of the nonfiction books I’ve read would have been much more suitable as long essays and not 300, 400, and 500 page books. How many ways can you blather on about the same thing? Academia exists to find out.

Anyway, Against Love. Well, I wasn’t familiar with the format of a polemic, but apparently polemics rail against something so aggressively as to almost come across as a personal attack. The author warns the reader at the outset that she’s taking no prisoners.

I like questioning societal norms just because I so often find myself unnecessarily unhappy with the way something is, and I know the only reason it is that way is because we stupid humans have said so. WHY DO WE DO IT TO OURSELVES. So she talks about the system of love and marriage and how first the church and then the state decided they needed an extension of their power structure to govern the home. And how you can’t predict how long love will last, so why expect it to last forever, and why make contracts with the state over affairs of the heart? And that our lives are so safe and structured and bland that of course we will seek a thrill of excitement through a new romance.

All of which I agree with. I think if you were a strenuous believer in the lifelong tenacity of a love that fulfills your mind, body, and soul, this book might offend you. As for me, I liked reading someone saying the things I often suspected. Of course, she could have said it in about 50 pages instead of 200, and she could have used the words “inchoate” and “fungible” about a quarter as often, but it was interesting and made me interested in reading other polemics in the future.