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Monday, February 28, 2005
Books read in February
They didn't all get reviewed this month, but at least I'm keeping my resolution and writing them all down...
- 2/3: finished Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (read aloud) -- Robert C. O'Brien -- 4.5 -- 233 pages
- I first encountered this book in the third grade, after I had already become rather obsessed with reading the books on which movies were based to find all the things I missed in the movie. The mid-80's cartoon made from this story is a pale, overdrawn shadow of the original, which is understated, humorous, serious, fascinating, and altogether wonderful. Every time I read it (and that's a lot of times), I fall into the world of the mice and rats and live in it until I am done. The pages of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH contain adventure, pathos, energy, and completely knowable characters -- including a certain VERY crush-worthy rat. The "moral lessons are couched in this very real fantasy story without even a breath of overbearing preachiness or condescension. This is truly a book for adults and children to cherish.
- 2/5: finished Anne of Green Gables -- L.M. Montgomery -- 5 -- 301 pages
- 2/6: Go Ahead, Secret Seven -- Enid Blyton -- 4.5 -- (book on tape)
- 2/8: What To Keep -- Rachel Cline -- 3 -- 304 pages
- I'm the first person to admit that I read a lot of "chick books", in among the other genres I enjoy. And this seemed like standard chick-book fare -- divorce, hints at borderline sexual abuse, a problematic relationship between a girl/woman and her mother, the death of a substitute mother, the adoption of her teenaged son -- with a few twists, but it was told in such a cumbersome way that at times I had a hard time getting through it. The prose simply didn't flow well for me. However, for what it is, it was worth reading once, and I did enjoy some aspects of it.
- 2/11: Life of Pi -- Yann Martel -- 4.5 -- 319 pages
- This novel has earned so much international attention that it seems like anything I could say about it would be laughably miniature in scope. I will say that the final section of the story transformed it, for me, from an enjoyable, quirky, sometimes very violent adventure story, into an absolute masterpiece of a novel, one that leaves the reader thinking, chewing the plot, savoring the taste, studying all the levels and parallels and saying, "but what..." and "oh, of course." I finished reading this before falling asleep, and every time I woke in the night my mind was filled with thoughts of Pi. If that's not the mark of a good book, I don't know what is. (Philosophically speaking, this is definitely a book to be read with discernment, and it has some very disturbing (gory) moments. For thinking adults, though, even with that caveat, I still see it as a really worthwhile read.)
- 2/13: Firefly Summer -- Maeve Binchy -- 5 -- 601 pages
- I think every time I read a Maeve Binchy book I have a new favorite. Well, not quite. But this definitely ranks high on my list of favorites of her books. The cast of characters is miles long and by the fourth chapter you feel like you've known them all your life; the story is just complicated enough and with enough twists to keep it interesting without feeling too contrived. The driving strength in most of Binchy's books is, for me, the dialogue. Nobody writes it like she does, so naturally and with just enough of an Irish sound to it to make it seem quirky to my American ears, without being overdone. The interactions between her characters, and her characters themselves, are so real that the strange circumstances in which they will always find themselves as long as she is writing about them seem as familiar to me as my own life does.
- Fahrenheit 451 -- Ray Bradbury -- 4.5
- I think of this book as the third in a trilogy of mid-20th-century futuristic morality tales. Whereas 1984 was a study of totalitarian government, and Brave New World was a warning about taking science and technology too far, Fahrenheit 451 delves more into the social dangers Bradbury saw as he looked into a future dominated by television and political correctness, where reading became less and less popular until finally nobody cared when the government banned it. This is a stirring book, one that will make you think. Of course Bradbury didn't get everything right in his horrifying vision of the not-too-distant future. But that doesn't make it any less chilling.
That list goes up through about the fifteenth. Then I started Les Misérables. Hey, I'm halfway through...
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Posted by Rachel on February 28, 2005 01:43 PM in nose in a book
