Horror Shows and.. Hiking.

AGH! This is my last chance to write a book review before I dash off into the wild blue wonder and I have SO MANY books to review. This despite the fact that wedding planning has made it incredibly difficult to concentrate on reading. I've never excitedly started and disgustedly thrown down so many books in my life. There's a huge pile of sad, discarded book carcasses on the floor next to my bed, which I think Mugi might be making a nest out of.

This is super overkill, but here are five book reviews at once. I've got to get them out now or they'll never happen because, obviously, in two weeks, I'm going to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and my brain will have turned to butter.

Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Here is the premise: Our narrator attends a mysterious school full of children growing up in an alternate Great Britain, in a mirror universe that seems easy and carefree. But here, humans are cloned for a specific and nefarious purpose. The narrator, Kathy, is one such clone, and when the time is right, she and her friends will eventually have their organs harvested while they're still alive.

Here's the problem: This is the most boring freaking book I have ever read. And I kept reading because I thought, it must get interesting at some point right? I mean, it's about CLONES? I have been wracking my brains over and over to figure out how someone took all of the exciting, intriguing elements of this story, and mashed them into a steaming pile of nothing. No one in this book cares that their organs are being harvested. They have arguments about things like, "why didn't you tell me I had mud on my shirt?" I guess not addressing the real issue is supposed to be "deep" but really, it just seems to me that the author thinks all women have the minds of infants. Please spare yourself the trouble and do not read this stupid book unless you're trying to put yourself to sleep.

We Need to Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver

...On the other hand.

Here's one to read if to don't want to be able to fall asleep. I'd been meaning to read this for ages, but I have to thank Jdarnutz for urging me to do so as soon as possible.  This is not a "pretty" book. It's listed with American Psycho on a number of "most disturbing books" lists. (Along with Geek Love [not really that disturbing] and Blindness [incredibly disturbing]). Why do I read books like this? I don't know, I actually think they make me feel better about the world than any Chicken Soup crap ever could.

Anyhoo. This book is, on the surface, about a boy who commits an utterly atrocious school shooting, and about his complete lack of remorse. But it's also about American motherhood. Shriver says things in this books that I think many women think at one point but would never in a million years admit to thinking for fear of feeling persecuted. We're supposed to want to be mothers with every fiber of our beings and we're supposed to be innately good at it. What happens if we don't and we aren't?

I couldn't stop thinking about the end of this novel for four days.

Bonus: the writing in this book is so good it makes your brain turn inside out. It takes you twenty pages to learn how to read Shiver's writing because it's so rich and intelligent.


A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
by Bill Bryson

This is the perfect book for someone who is brain-dead and having difficulty concentrating. It's a breath of fresh air. Anyone who's ever read any of Bryson's many memoirs already knows this, I'm sure, but if you haven't this is a good place to start. This is the story of an overweight, inexperienced man deciding one day that he will hike the entire appalachian trail with his idiotic, unprepared, alcoholic friend. Every time Tim and I go hiking, Tim tells an anecdote from this book like it's his own story and it makes me laugh every time. This is a testament to how funny and relatable this book is. Well, here, this pretty much speaks for itself:

"Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came in to my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out by backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children's parties--I daresay it would even give a merry toot--and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag." p.19

Me too.

Not all of the book is so...vibrant, but it's all funny. And worth a read.

Full Dark, No Stars
by Stephen King

Another good book for those with temporary ADHD and a need to be thrilled and chilled. I normally can't do short story collections. Who knows why, but this one did it for me.  Five stories in the paperback:

1. 1922
2. Big Driver
3. Fair Extension
4. A Good Marriage
5. Under the Weather

The stories are all very different from one another, though each is gruesome in its own way. King is almost more harsh in the short form than in in his long novels, like "horror concentrate." Big Driver and A Good Marriage are probably my favorites, though I don't think I have the stomach to read "Big Driver" ever again.

Bonus: I love how frequently King quotes and references The Beatles.

The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold

Ok, I'd like to distinguish here between "a good book" and "a good read."  A good book has the whole package, good writing, good characters and plot, good atmosphere, it just wraps you up.  A good read can suck you in and hold your attention, but maybe just doesn't quite have that spark that makes it exceptional.

The Lovely Bones isn't really a good book, but it's a good read for sure.  The sentence structure is all over the map and parts of it are, for lack of a better word, sort of fruity. But it moves along swiftly and it's unpredictable, which is refreshing. I had no plans to read it... until someone who told me they loved Decision Points by George Bush said that they hated it, and I was intrigued (I'm so awful).

In case you can't tell from the title, it's about someone who is murdered, but it's written from the victim's point of view. It's not really about murder, so much as what happens to everyone who is left in the wake of a tragedy. Like I said, the book is unpredictable, and that was really my favorite thing about it. It veered off in directions I never predicted (I spared myself watching the movie) which, for a book of this sort, gives it about a million bonus points.