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Friday, September 01, 2006
books for August
- Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH -- Robert C. O'Brien -- 5
- Read this one aloud onto CD for my dad. I reviewed it here, last year.
- Assorted short stories -- O. Henry -- 4
- I'd only ever read his "Gift of the Magi", which I think everyone has read and which I have always loved. I bought a compilation of his stories at Barnes and Noble and have been really enjoying them; they're great for when I want to read something quick and yet complete (duh, Rachel, that's a really new thought about short stories!).
- Island of the Blue Dolphins -- Scott O'Dell -- 3.5
- I was fascinated by this book when we read it in the fourth grade. I bought it used because I collect Newbery winners, and read it again this month as I was planning for our upcoming school year and trying to decide what books we'd read as a "class" (all three of us).
- A Wrinkle in Time -- Madeleine L'Engle -- 4.5
- I hadn't read this in YEARS and I had forgotten a lot of detail, so when the neighbor kids started discussing it with me I pulled it off the shelf and read it. It was more classically sci-fi than I remembered, and I had never noticed how overtly Christian it was. I think the last time I read this book I was in high school, to tell the truth. Brilliantly done, truly. On to the sequels, which I've never read.
- There Will Never Be Another You -- Carolyn See -- 1.5 (it would be a 1 except I save that for books I don't finish)
- Eck. This looked interesting, just reading the jacket flap -- in the very near future (set in 2007, mostly) a doctor is hand-picked to work with the government in case of biological terror attacks. Unfortunately, pretty much the entire thing fell flat, most notably the scenes where the doctor deals with the military, which were so badly done, using every stereotype about military personnel in the book as wel as some of the most heavy-handed writing I've ever seen, that I'm giving the author (and her publisher) the benefit of the doubt and assuming that she meant them as parody. And as the only bits of parody in what is otherwise apparently meant as a serious novel, they just don't work for me. The doctor's personal life is messy and unpleasant, and not a single character in the book is likeable or even memorable. It's supposed to be this angsty see-how-anxious-we-all-are post-9/11 cultural cross-section kind of thing. I am apparently (judging by the Amazon reviews, which are glowing) the only person who thinks it failed completely.
- The Abortionist's Daughter -- Elisabeth Hyde -- 3.5
- I think I just felt the earth shift on its axis when I typed that 3.5 there. Truly, though, while this book's politics, if you read deeply between the lines, don't agree with mine, Hyde is very careful not to hit anyone over the head with them. The 'issues' here go beyond the pro/anti-abortion debate; this is a taut whodunit and not a morality tale. It has characters I liked and characters I hated -- notably, it has sympathetic characters on both sides of the issue, which is rare -- and rhetoric I didn't buy (but I don't think I was supposed to) from both sides. I give the author a lot of points for not making a good novel into a Very Special Episode where everyone who was on The Wrong Side realizes their mistakes by the last page and ends up converted. However, I have to take off a point for a couple of very jarringly inappropriate metaphors (inappropriate in a literary sense, not a moral one) near the end of the book.
Posted by Rachel on September 1, 2006 09:18 AM in nose in a book
