In reverse chronological order (or first read to most recent), rated from 1-5 stars:
I think everyone has read this book by now - an enthralling mystery novel set in Sweden. A controversial magazine journalist is hired to solve a decades-old family disappearance, perhaps a murder. Through a series of events he is assisted by an unlikely young woman (with the dragon tattoo) who excels at solving problems and hacking computers, but is less apt at real-world relations. I couldn't put it down. ****1/2
The sequel to the above (and second of the "The Millennium" trilogy), this books focuses more on the girl with the journalist playing a bit of a lesser role. Her storied and troubled history emerges throughout the tale, and is accompanied by gangsters, mental hospitals, more computer hacking and sex trafficking. Again, couldn't put it down although the first was slightly better, and have been tres anticipating the third installment (all of these published posthumously) of the series. ****
Kind of a let down. I expected something more captivating - combining math and sociology! Yes, please! But it was more a series of somewhat interesting statistics that didn't often resolve into any grand epiphany. Perhaps I came too late to the Freakonomics party because none of the stories seemed like news to me - they may have already pervaded culture (read: NPR). **
An entirely fantastic literary novel. The author took a real life event (Phillipe Petit's high wire traverse of the Twin Towers in 1974) and built up an entire scurrying, feeling, living, breathing, aching city of stories around it. The major event takes a back seat to the characters living their everyday lives, but knowing what is about to occur way up in the sky gives the plot an immediacy, an extra dose of poignance to the characters' narratives. I also found it to be something of a love story to New York, a gentle commentary on 9/11 - the power of an event that occurs in a very small geographic footprint of space to affect on a humongously wide scale. *****
Years after this came out, and even after the film (which I haven't seen), I decided to see what all the kerfuffle was about. It was a pretty good read - violence tempered by hindsight, and fantastical and colorful descriptions of heaven. It's one of those tricks of literature where you know the perpetrator from the beginning, and no one else (except the dead narrator) knows, so it adds some wink-wink insight into every one's actions, pulling in the reader as sort of a co-conspirator in the unfolding plot. I can see how that literary device would serve to produce a best seller - who doesn't like being in on the action? ***1/2
I'd seen the film trailers and they spooked me a bit, but the plot really interested me - a troubled US Marshall and his newbie assistant attempting to solve a missing persons case on an island housing a hospital for the criminally violent insane? Sign me up! All I can say about this novel was: yes, it was spooky; yes, I solved the mystery before the author even came close to dropping the final clues; and yes, it was really well written even despite those things. It read like it was written to be adapted into a screenplay, which made it a visual page-turner. ***1/2
A true-story of a directionless, over-educated East Coastie who finds himself living in Kiribati after his girlfriend gets assigned an ambassadorship position there. Seriously washed up in the middle of the ocean, he learns to adapt to the punishing heat, the lack of sanitation, eating fish everyday, the thieving, but also kind, locals, and being way way out of the Washington DC loop. I found the book laugh-out-loud funny at times, and also seriously examining our relations with these tiny "economically insignificant" island nations in the Pacific that are at risk of disappearing over time because of global warming. Having spent a summer in Vanuatu myself, I found his tales particularly familiar and nostalgic. ****
This is a collection of essays by London's Sunday Times travel columnist (who I understand is very much of the love him/hate him division). They read like any story would read if written by an overpaid, full of himself, spoiled middle-aged white man who (OMG!) visited an outdoor summer musical festival, or (Bloody hell!) found himself in Texas, America! When he wasn't totally succumbing to his own personal horror about being somewhere so far below his station in life, he wrote long snore-inducing essays about art and Scotland. I'd always wanted to visit Scotland - it seemed cheeky albeit regal, verdant and proud - but after reading this, not so enticed. However, his essay on the French photographer Cartier-Bresson was downright smashing, probably because he made himself a lesser component of the story and focused on this revolutionary artist instead. He's a great writer, yes, just not as fascinating as he thinks merits being the center of a tale. **
See the first half of sentence two above. I read the whole thing though, trying really hard to empathize with this star athlete who was kind of a self-centered brat, taking his employees away from their own families to form his own and making really self-destructive decisions when he was on top of the world. Of course, that's what sells autobiographies - previously unrevealed indiscretions - but I found the scandalous parts very minor, and the looooooooong court-top details very tedious - I finally began skimming over all the tournament recaps until it got back to something more interesting - like pursuing Steffi Graf - which was still pretty unremarkable. (I'm really so very over celebrity testimonials - shilling everything from charity to acne medications - why are people who are good at sports or at acting worth taking advice from? But that's for another time...) **1/2
Pretty engaging novel this self-deprecating tale of a suburban white-man's American dream gone to shit. He loses his real job, his house, his second entrepreneurial job, his wife, his third sorta job as a drug dealer, his kids, his dignity, and it's all pretty funny. It's meant to be funny. Honest and brutal, but eking out hope in the very end. I found myself shaking the bed with laughter as I read at night, reading aloud the next day those parts where he engages with the witless gang bangers in his family sedan. ***
A family saga told in such a way that none of the characters were sympathetic. As I read, I often thought - "man, all of these characters are assholes!" The author is a really good writer, certain turns of phrase and particular metaphors I remember being downright moving, causing me to ponder how deep was her sync with humanity. But this version of humanity was so dismal that I couldn't totally get on board. When it ended I was like - meh, where's the bathtub and the wine - because after that I needed to either get clean or drunk. ***
I started this one with great enthusiasm - a misfit, overweight Dominican-American kid in New Jersey into sci-fi, gaming and writing poetry who possesses an enormous imagination and you know (from the title) that he's going to meet an early demise, sounds intriguing! I was totally hooked in the first third of the book, and somehow when it started tracing back his family's history in the DR and all the name-specific political detailings of that, I lost interest. I wanted to know what happened to Oscar at college - did he finally get laid, did his writing get published? I'm sure that comes later, it has to, I just got distracted and was bummed that it wasn't pulling me back in to keep reading. I hate when that happens. ***(so far...)
This novel really irritated me - a great premise (an orphan raised by multiple "practice" mothers at a university home economics department in the 40's) was slogged down by the main character's (the orphan baby growing up) unexplained despising of the woman who raised him. It was not clear why he detested her so much, which was supposed to be the foundation for all of his other actions that made up the remaining 1/2 of the novel - so the book fell apart for me. He was entirely resistible, it turned out. **1/2
I'm approximately in the middle of this one right now, just started it two days ago, and I can't stop talking and thinking about it. It's a biography/non-fiction narrative written and extremely well researched by a journalist all about the titular poor, black woman whose cervical cancer cells (taken unwittingly from her) have been used since her death in medical laboratories to find a vaccination for polio and to treat genetic abnormalities; they've been sent into space and used the world over for research, reproduced into the trillions since they were sliced from her cervix. She never knew all this, she died in 1951, and her family was never told until years later about these famous "HeLa cells" as they are known throughout the international medical research world. The book unfolds the untold (and very hard to come by) story of the woman from whom the immortal cells came with compassion, fervor, heartbreaking remembrances, a little bit of voodoo and sometimes humor. I can't recommend this enough. *****
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