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Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Books for March
I don't know what happened. March is usually a good reading month for me, but this time I only have two books to discuss. I think the main reason is school, with a side of general busyness. I did have an ongoing transcribing job this month, too, and late-night typing tends to interfere with my late-night reading. I have a good-sized stack of books from the library, but I'm not getting anywhere with them.
ANyway. On with the books. At least I'm posting about them.
- Songs Without Words -- Ann Packer -- 3.5
- A surface description of this book -- it's about a teenaged girl's attempted suicide and its impact on her family and on her mother's best friend, whose mother committed suicide when the friend was a teen -- sounds rather dramatic and overdone and trashy, but this is a very well-written book, whose issues (not just suicide) are deftly handled. I especially liked the way the author wrote the girl's character; having been a teen (and, let's face it, a thirtysomething) who's been known to go around muttering under my breath to myself about how socially inept and ugly I am, I found Packer's treatment of adolescent-girl mountains-from-molehills angst to be pretty much spot-on. (Excuse me while I go hug my daughter and tell her how beautiful she is.) At times Packer's descriptions of the details of the inner and outer lives of every -- single -- character get a bit old, but this was worth a read all the same.
- Alas, Babylon -- Pat Frank -- 4
- I read this at my husband's request. He doesn't read many novels, but he does go for the occasional end-of-the-world-as-we-know it apocalypse story, and he thought I might like this one. I did. It's not Lucifer's Hammer (READ THIS NOW THIS MEANS YOU), which was also one of his recommendations for me a decade or so ago, but it's really pretty good. In this 1959 what-if, Frank deals well with the practical issues that would be faced by the survivors of a nuclear holocaust; my favorite aspect of the book, though, is the way it (sometimes quite subtly) contrasts the attitudes and priorities of a life of ease against those where every decision has to be made with survival in mind.
And that's it. How pitiful is that?
Posted by Rachel on April 2, 2008 08:16 AM in nose in a book
