Man of my Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

After Prep, I had high hopes for this next book by Sittenfeld. Unfortunately, this one was not as enjoyable or hearbreaking as her former novel. The plot was about a young woman from a divorced home who struggled with finding love and “the man of [her] dreams.” However, the story ended up being more whiny than anything and devoid of any of the social commentary or true feelings that made Prep such a great book.

Before you Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian

I always find Bohjalian’s books to have great settings and surprisingly complex characters in complex situations. This was no exception. This is the story of a family with typical internal struggles whose younger generation makes a mistake with a gun that has loud repercussions. Also addressing issues of animal rights and media-related ethics, this book met my expectations, although not as good as some of his real classics like Midwives or Trans-sister Radio.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer

If you liked Everything is Illuminated, then you can stop reading this blog and go get Foster’s second book. If you did not like EiI (yes, I know many of you did not like this as one of last year’s top picks), then this book is a second chance to try Foer without the linguistic challenge of a Russian narrator. This book is set right after 9/11 and follows a 9-year-old’s quest to figure out some things he finds in his deceased father’s effects. In the same style of Foer’s earlier work, this book uses multiple narrators, answering machine messages, unlikely friends, and letters to tell an unusual story. Recommended to me by Jenne. Reccommended to you by me.

Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind

Having entered Brown the same year as the subject of this book, I must admit to having an affinity for the depictions of freshman year experiences. Even trying to take an objective eye to this book I couldn’t help but like this story of an inner city student succeeding at an Ivy League school. While it seemed at times that Cedric was treated unfairly easily by professors, my liberal sensitivities were awakened by the difference in privilege that I arrived at Brown with compared to Cedric. At the least, the book definitely profiled an individual’s success over his background and raises some good questions about affirmative action.

Until I Find You by John Irving

John Irving needs a therapist, and fast. This book rehashed many of the same issues he has addressed in other books, focusing on gender identity with a significant dose of unabashed child molestation. I found this book to be a couple hundred pages too long as well as unsatisfying. The main character was too detached to be sympathetic and the weird characters and their weird pastimes just too plain weird.

Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

I liked this book; I have a strong stomach. This book is about how cadavers are used, including gross anatomy labs, organ transplant, scientific testing, grave robbing, and 2000 years of history on this. Only one or two parts of the book made me gag, and overall I learned a lot and enjoyed the author's witty prose and human responses to her research.

Joy Comes in the Morning by Jonathan Rosen

Recommended by Mer A. This was not a great book. It was about an alternative female rabbi who becomes romantically entangled with the son of someone she is helping in the hospital. I didn't find the narrator's voice to be authentic, and I didn't think the situations she found herself in were realistic.

Freakanomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

I finished this book feeling like I was either too smart or too dumb to have read it. The authors acknowledge that the book is a collection of not-very-related topics. The central theme is the use of statistics in media, although I think the book is really about teaching skepticism. Unfortunately for the authors, my skepticism is sky-high to begin with, so the alternate ways in which statistics were interpreted in the book were nothing that I could not have dreamt up myself. (Thanks, Dad.)

Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett

This is a book for real bibliophiles like myself. Ann Patchett, author of (among other things) Bel Canto, tells of the friendship between herself and Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face. I was surprised at the depth of the passion, mental illness, and obsession that inhabited the relationship between these women. I was lulled into a bit of depression by some of the interactions. And I swalled the book in just one or two night gulps. Hard to put down. I was reminded of the distress that so many artists suffer from; I always think of artists as happy because they are doing what they are passionate about. This book reminded me that often their passions entrap them rather than freeing them.

Villages by John Updike

Boo on me for reading this as my first Updike novel and not choosing one of the Rabbit novels. Boo because this book was basically a three-hundred page orgy with some mid-life crisis thrown in. To my reading, the protagonist did not reach any sort of maturity or awakening over time. It felt pulpy.

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Rosenthal

I read a review of this book when it first came out and kept it in the back of my mind for a while. It's an unusual format, where the author has taken about 200 random facts or memories about herself and given each one a heading, then alphabetized them. The facts and memories were half wonderful and half boring. I found myself smiling at certain ones with familiarity and wondering why she included other ones. There was a bit of an egocentric feel to parts of the book, but it was autobiographical, so I suppose it's to be expected. I think a good English class in high school could read this book then ask students to write their own 10-page Encyclopedia of their life.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

I decided to read this book because Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King) said it was his favorite mystery of 2005. I thought it would be cool to see what he thought was a good mystery. The book follows three different murder mysteries through the detective trying to solve them. I found the characters both tragic and fun, and the storylines interesting enough to hold my attention. But I can't say that I loved the book. I thought that it was a little lost between being a great character novel and a good detective novel and was therefore neither one at all.

Busting Vegas by Ben Mezrich

Ben Mezrich may have done well to stop writing after Bringing Down the House; neither this book nor the Ugly Americans one in between was as good. This book follows a second set of MIT students through Vegas and other casino-havens as they use non-card-counting methods to beat the house. As in Ugly Americans, too much of the book follows Mezrich's travels to write the book rather than the subjects. The romance in the book seems contrived and too convenient, the characters too stereotypical. The tactics the team use in the casinos are intersting, and it's fun to think about how they got good at these skills. But I didn't find myself excited to pick the book up each night and see what happened.

Seven Kinds of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman

There were aspects of this book that I really liked. Telling an interesting storyline through seven characters' points of view in sequence is not an entirely unique idea, but Perlman puts some interesting spins on it. In some cases, he writes in second person, and in other he uses conversation to explore a character's retelling of the story. That's what's most interesting in the book: the relaying of the different truths each character believes about the events occurring. These differences go far beyond charaters' interpretations of the truth being different; they encompass vast deceits. What I did not like about the book and what arguably (although I'd probably recommend it just for its uniqueness) ruined it for me was that the characters' personalities were not well-differentiated. Certainly their speech patterns were differentiated and they had different socio-economic spaces in life, but they seem to have the strangely similar voices. The other criticism is the final choice of narrator. There were a few obvious choices for who this could be and I think Perlman "jumped the shark" in his off-the-beaten-path choice.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland

This was a sweet book, really a collection of novellas. The stories travel farther and farther back in time, following a painting that may or may not be a Vermeer. This painting has changed hands several times and under many unusual circumstances. The writing was good and Vreeland did a masterful job of switching venues and ages easily.