92. Some Fun by Antonya Nelson

Rating: ⋆⋆/5

Comments: I didn’t enjoy this as much as I expected I would. Aside from the cover (essentially a collage featuring all the prestigious awards and recognitions Nelson’s been given) and the fact that Nelson is a big-name author, Some Fun, a collection of short stories and a novella, is a book that I tagged some time ago and had on my reading list for a while.

I’ll admit that every story had parts that I enjoyed, but overall, I wasn’t really impressed. (Helped by this collection and others, I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that maybe I don’t actually like stories–I just like reading them. (It makes sense to me.))

“Eminent Domain” was okay, and–even though I didn’t particularly like the ending–”Flesh Tone” was my favorite.

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Details: Hardcover, pub. Scribner, 2006. 236 p.

91. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

Rating: ⋆⋆⋆⋆/5

Comments: Okay. I could have done without the Emma story, and I must admit, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet got a little wild–out of control, almost–toward the end, but by then, it didn’t matter. I already loved it. It’s a great story on its own, and the frequent diagrams and sidebars make it even better; usually I don’t set much stock in a book’s layout or appearance, but this book really is beautiful.

Here is proof of the quality of this book: it made me laugh, out loud, on the bus–something which has never, ever happened. This, from a sidebar (on Oregon Trail, the very bad computer game) on page 84, is terrific: “Thus, you could finish the game in two days, by traveling what I figured out to be approximately 960 MPH. Naked, hungry, and unarmed, you still blasted across this continent before the cholera could catch up to you.” Since the initial reading, I have revisited this passage at least six times, each time with the same reaction. Yes.

But The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, narrated by a precocious twelve-year-old cartographer (with an excellent voice, by the way) is not only funny. It is contemplative, sentimental, satirical, and any number of other things. And, even though it’s only minimally depressing, I enjoyed it immensely.

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Details: Hardcover, pub. The Penguin Press, 2009. 375 p.

90. Forest Gate by Peter Akinti

Rating: ⋆/5

Comments: I had a hard time with this one. I think Akinti had a good idea with this novel, he just didn’t do a good job of executing it. I liked the story overall, but the writing, and the details…

Here is what happened. The beginning was promising; I liked the first pages, but – after those opening few, the first three chapters were so terribly written I could hardly go on. Really. There’s nothing technically wrong with them – in fact, I’m sure some readers will find this section (as well as, probably, the rest of the book) quite good – but honestly, the opening of Forest Gate is some of the worst published writing I’ve read in recent years, if ever.

Granted, there were some moving scenes and poignant portrayals, but those pieces were few and far between, and they did little to combat the glaring omissions and glossed-over emotions, the flat, unsympathetic characters, or the overwrought, archetypal events. To summarize, one could say that, figuratively speaking, I read the entire novel with my eyebrows raised. Not in shock. In ‘Oh. Really?’ I think that does it.

I didn’t want to dislike this book. But I did. I thought it was awful. At least it was short.

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Details: Paperback, pub. Free Press (Simon & Schuster), 2010. 192 p.
Forest Gate will be available for purchase February 2, 2010.

89. Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

Rating: ⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆/5

Comments: This was gorgeous, original, and one of the most affecting things I’ve read in recent years. Even during the parts I didn’t quite like, I adored it.

Unfortunately, books of this sort, when they’re good – and Last Night in Montreal is definitely good – are very bad for me. I now want both to learn a bunch more useless languages and to abandon everything but a small duffel bag and, telling no one, buy a ticket for the next train out, simply because it’s the next train out. I hadn’t realized these two desires were connected until just now, a week later, writing this review…

This is a wonderful book, and the embodiment of modern emptiness for sure. That’s all I can say.

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Details: Hardcover, pub. Unbridled Books, 2009. 247 p.

89. The Boyfriend List (and The Boy Book) by E. Lockhart

Rating: ⋆/5

Comments: Dear God,

Please tell me I didn’t actually read this. (And its sequel.)

Okay. Here’s the deal. Sometimes – especially when it’s cloudy; even more when it rains – I have bad days. On bad days, I have the tendency to want to read bad books. I think that I try to use drivel to distract myself. Sometimes it works.

So that’s my excuse: what began as a beautiful, sunny day had turned into gray skies and rain by the time I made it to the library. The Boyfriend List was sitting up on a display shelf, and I saw it and thought, ‘I want that.’ I’d heard of the books before – they’re fairly popular, I gather, among the YA set – and had even read one of E. Lockhart’s short stories in some anthology. I knew what the book was going to be like. I knew that I would regret reading it later, and try to hide it between other, less embarrassing, books when I returned it to the library. But at the time, it was what I needed.

I should talk about the book. If you haven’t already gathered (from my brief disclaimer, and even more from the title), it’s teenage girl drama-fluff. Supposed to be funny, but mostly not. The Boyfriend List and The Boy Book reminded me a bit of Louise Rennison’s Georgia series, except that they’re nowhere near as good. Instead of being a funny and empathy-inducing heroine, Ruby, the main character, came across as yet another (pseudo-)alternative girl (in the world of YA lit, this means she wears clothes from vintage shops, feels slightly out of place at school, and may or may not be a vegetarian and/or a cigarette smoker) created by an author who probably was kind of rad as a high school kid, but now… it just doesn’t quite work.

Maybe I’ve just become cynical. I know that in high school, I probably would have liked this – at least a bit more than I like it now. On the other hand, The Boyfriend List feels really incomplete. Even after I finished the sequel, I felt like there was a whole bunch of story that I’d somehow missed, or that had been kept from me. There’s a small part of my brain that wants to continue reading through the series in the hope of gaining a bit more insight, but the greater part of me is saying, girl, DO NOT EVEN GO THERE. I won’t.

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Details: The Boyfriend List, hardcover, pub. Delacorte Press, 2005. 229 p.
The Boy Book, hardcover, pub. Delacorte Press, 2006, 193 p.

88. The Boy With the Lampshade on His Head by Bruce Wetter

Rating: ⋆⋆⋆⋆/5 (for beginning/middle readers)

Comments: This one I chose because of the title – how can you go wrong with a book called The Boy With the Lampshade on his Head? A couple pages in, I realized I must have had that thought before. I had read the book before. But there was a problem: while I remembered reading the book (though I have no idea when or where I could have done it) and was able to recognize each event as it was laid out, I had absolutely no recollection of what actually happened. Not so good.

As it turned out, The Boy With the Lampshade on His Head was a solid book with a fairly climactic ending, and I loved the narrator’s voice. However, I also felt that it was a bit uneven. Far too much time was spent on things that I didn’t care much about (and at least some of which I think were supposed to be funny) or consider necessary, while some of the more important issues seemed really glossed over.

That said, this book was written for an audience of preteen boys (not depressed, difficult-to-please college grads such as myself), and for that demographic, the book’s handling of shall we say substance versus stupidity is probably right on the money. The Boy With the Lampshade on His Head might be a bit of a hard sell for the mini Casanovas, but for the shier, slightly awkwarder eleven-year-old boys we all know, it’s probably great.

So – two out of five stars for me; four out of five for the agoraphobic paper boy.

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Details: Hardcover, pub. Athenum Books for Young Readers, 2004. 300 p.

87. The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt

Rating: ⋆⋆⋆⋆/5

Comments: A picked this up because of an anecdote remembered from long ago, in which Nicola Tesla was purported to be in love with a pigeon. The Invention of Everything Else (a fictionalized account of the last days of Tesla’s life) features both Tesla and his pigeon, but neither are what the book is really about. Actually, even now, a few weeks after finishing it, I’m still not sure what the book was about – or at least, what it was saying. I really liked it, though. A wonderful read.

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Details: Hardcover, pub. Houghton Mifflin, 2008. 257 p.

86. A Bit on the Side by William Trevor

Rating: ⋆⋆/5

Comments: I’d read Trevor before A Bit on the Side, and while I appreciated that his writing was very good, I’d never really enjoyed it. That said, I don’t know why I chose to read this – aside from the fact that Trevor is commonly considered to be one of the greatest living short story writers; perhaps, I thought, this collection would be the one. Alas, no…

There were bits in all the stories that I liked, but overall, none of them quite came through. Often I didn’t like the characters (or characterizations), and the stories were a bit too vague and obtuse, or else too detailed (or, as in “On the Streets,” both). Most offensively, to me, was the preponderance of weak endings. Lately I’ve noticed – in both full-length books and short stories – that I often quite enjoy a story until the very end, when it just completely falls off, and the entire thing is ruined for me. I’m thinking particularly of “Traditions,” which is one of those that suddenly stops, in this case – although, to be honest, even if the ending had been brilliant, I probably still wouldn’t remember it as a favorite.

Anyway, I guess what’s important is that I tried – and I read the whole book. My favorite was the title story, “A Bit on the Side”; I also liked “Solitude” (which I read first) and “An Evening Out.” Even those, though, I could take or leave. Maybe it’s finally time to just admit, in a way, defeat: Trevor’s not the writer for me.

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Details: Hardcover, pub. Viking, 2004. 245 p.

85. The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd

Rating: ⋆/5

Comments: This was okay, but I expected more from a name like Ackroyd. The book began well, but was very predictable, even without my knowledge of the historical facts (which Ackroyd does an awful lot of messing with). And it was decent throughout, if rather lacking in detail. However, the end – by which I mean the last forty or so pages – was just… very bad: rushed, improbable and unresolved, and full of holes. I didn’t like it at all.

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Details: Hardcover, pub. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2006. 213 p.

84. Spud by John van de Ruit

Rating: ⋆⋆⋆/5

Comments: This was not bad. It’s definitely YA (appropriate, too, for most middle readers) and I could probably even call it historical fiction, because it takes place in the early 90s in South Africa, with the beginning of the end of apartheid, but I’m reluctant to call anything within my lifetime ‘historical,’ so…

Because of the timing, there is, out of necessity, a bit of politics mixed in here, but overall, Spud is really not a political novel. Instead, it’s a funny book about a fourteen-year-old choir boy with a crazy family, spending his first year at boarding school and trying to deal with a number of issues (some comic, some upsetting, and some a mixture of both). The newly-freed Nelson Mandela and the changing political climate are just mentions in the background. I suspect such things may come to play more in van de Ruit’s sequel, but I don’t find myself quite interested enough to read it.

Not that this was a bad book – it just wasn’t my thing. I can read most YA without feeling like I’ve gone way below my maturity and comprehension levels, but Spud was obviously younger than me. Another weird thing about it (not that this made me like the book any less) was that, while the narrator and most of the main characters are male, this seemed more like something that would appeal to females. Well, maybe that’s not true – but I can’t really imagine fourteen-year-old boys reading this, so I’m not sure what to make of it.

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Details: Hardcover, pub. Razorbill, 2007. 331 p.