Becca

This was a fun read, reviewing patriarchal and gender-defining thoughts and marketing in the 1940's-1960's. It's not particularly methodical or thorough, nor does it attempt to be, but full of period-relevant pictures, and artifacts.

The most positive thing I have to say was that this was an easy read, which was vaguely enlightening on what it's like to work minimum wage. And it's well annotated with multiple scholarly citations.

On the other hand, I'm a resident. It's like the trump card in all pity poker games forever. Which makes pity poker no fun at all. Oh, normal people whine about not getting paid time and a half to work 11 hours in a row? I've worked 34 hours in a row for less than $10.00/hour. You stand for four hours in a row? I've stood for 30 hours in a row, in an operating room. You had to clean up peoples pubic hairs? I've had to put my hands in people's orifices, including orifices that someone just created with a scalpel and hold their spleen in the air so that the stool that accidentally just entered the peritoneal cavity doesn't get on it. And I've had almost every bodily fluid imaginable on my hands, feet, and occasionally face. When I was a med student, I paid for such privileges. Cry me a freaking river. I just can't be bothered to feel sorry for someone working 60 hours/week or 7 days/week with some of them being part time.

Also, while I agree that the amount of money spent on the criminalization and prosecution of marijuana (in this case, evidenced by drug testing) is nothing short of inane, you lose your moral high-ground if you actually were using marijuana just proximal to the time you knew you were applying for a job. Like seriously, ideals are all well and good if you serve them with a side of common sense.

And there's just no answers offered here, either. You think the minimum wage isn't a living wage? You do realize that if you pay everyone more, prices will just go up, right? And as much as I'd love to live in the socialist wonderland that she proposes in her afterword - with government-subsidised school and healthcare and housing, I'd rather read a book about how she's trying to get there or stop-gap measures we can employ, rather than “I worked at Walmart and it was awful, but the people who worked there full time didn't seem to mind so much.”

This slender volume tackles a couple of the most insidious examples of marketing to children: “educational” products that lack any educational research supporting them, cartoon branding of products and the involvement of very young children in marketing. Thomas interviews industry insiders to understand and explain how decisions about children's TV, children's books, children's characters and even preschool curricula are influenced by money making decisions. Some of her research is truly eye-opening - for instance that young children can recognize characters but not truly follow plot or context and this makes them extremely vulnerable to branding.

However, for such a small volume, I would hope it were crammed to the brim with commentary on marketing to children. Instead, she gets side tracked with the topic of screened media (important in its own right, but not central), and feels the need to repeat several points throughout the book. I also wish she would have spoken a little bit about the Gen-Y parent. She seems to think that all of the current parents are Gen-Xers. I personally missed Gen-X by a handful of years and was still well into my 20's when this book came out. Surely Gen-Y parents warranted at least a sentence?

Richard Powers' writing prowess is a delight. So while I have complaints that strike to the heart of the novel, they seemed trivial in the face of the most powerful prose I've read in a long time. Generosity is one of the tightest novels I've ever read. Every sentence is honed to perfection - imagery, flow, scanning, and purpose in the overall story. His commentary is both timely on the matters of genetic engineering, the growing expanse of the internet and culture globalization and timeless on the matters of what it truly means to be happy and what we should be searching for in life, any way. The research is also impeccable, down to the percentage of the human genome that is patented as of his writing.

The flaws? The first is the title, and overall the theme of “generosity” - I know that Powers is using it for the wordplay potential, in that Genetics and Generosity share a Latin root; however, Congeniality might be a better bang for the same pun-based buck. Nowhere does he show that Thassa is generous, despite her label of “Miss Generosity.” In fact, the primary flaw is that he does not really show Thassa, the congenitally happy woman, to be much of anything at all. So while other characters run about fawning over her, the reader is still struggling to “get it.”

In a lesser writers hands, these flaws would be fatal. In Powers' case it's merely an annoyance, in an otherwise superb novel.

This is intended to be a complete overview of medical genetics and the current dilemmas at the forefront of the field. And, to be honest, as a medical geneticist (trainee) myself, I felt a little bored at times. It hits all of the cliche notes: Dor Yeshorim, Jesse Gelsinger, Dolly the Sheep, Rosalind Franklin, the Ashkenazi Y chromosome, HeLa cells, Myriad's BRCA patents and sickle cell screening; basically, if you've read anything about genetics in the news in the last ten plus years, it's in this book.

The organization is also sloppy - chapters tend to be made up of semi-related topics trying desperately to coalesce into a theme. There's no segue or connection between chapters, to the point where if a concept explained in one chapter comes up in another, it is explained again (sometimes verbatim from the prior chapter.) I'm also not sure that there is consistency in the explanations of topics for a lay audience. Sometimes there would be an extensive explanation of a topic that seemed pretty self-explanatory and other times, I was left wondering if the average reader would come away with any understanding of what mass-spectroscopy is and why it's different than a Guthrie test. Each chapter ends anti-climatically with a sentence such as “we hope we have convinced you that [this chapter's issue] is worth thinking about”

That being said, it really is a thorough coverage of almost all recent issues in medical genetics and highlights of where the field is going, as seen by two big names in the field. And despite my high level of knowledge going into the book, I found a sizable handful of anecdotes that I had not previously known.

Wow. Oryx and Crake is a masterpiece of literature. I almost didn't read it because of my disappointment in [b:The Blind Assassin 78433 The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/416HQRCQjnL.SL75.jpg 3246409], which I mention not to further disparage but rather because I'm the third person I've spoken to who feels similarly, and I would hate for anyone else to miss out.Oryx and Crake is phenomenal. Yes, it hits on the major tropes of our time: commercialization, corporate ownership (of ideas, culture, people), isolation via computers and instant gratification and, of course, genetic engineering. And in all of those areas, Atwood draws apt, occasionally chill-worthy parallels. Even without agreeing with all of her conclusions, the skill is evident. But nearly all of those points have been made by roughly a trillion other dystopic fantasy novels and reading it yet another time, even if superlatively done, would not be worth it in and of itself.Rather, where Atwood shines is the novel's treatment of existential questions: how easy it is to exterminate a species, a language, a culture, an idea. How irrevocable extinguishing something can be. And yet, underneath that, the converse: how honed the survival mechanism is. How a single organism still carrying a philosophy can seed it universally until it is impossible to extricate. These ideas are so fascinating that I spent probably hours with Oryx and Crake propped on my lap thinking about the implications.The other existential theme is what the nature of humanity really is and what can be sanitized to make a better world versus what are the qualities that are necessary to call a being actually human. Atwood's handling of these themes is unapproached by any other modern novel, making Oryx and Crake a must-read for everyone.

This was so perfectly comfortable. I read it in one sitting, when I was post-call from a shift at work and it was the perfect book for my semi-sleep deprived brain to read while curled up on the couch.

There are some books that are terrific because they're profound, or the writing is beautiful or the plot is breathtaking. This isn't one of those books. This book is terrific because it's essentially the platonic ideal of a young adult speculative fiction novel. The writing is approachable by the young reader, tight with nothing extra. The story is both fun and underlined by a coming of age theme. None of it is new, but Stead does it so perfectly and with her own witty twist that I didn't really mind. Her depiction of the transformation from mean middle schooler into young adult with insight into human imperfections could have easily veered into moralizing, but it was so on the nose with the depiction that one can't really complain.

Pure fun.

The almost melodious writing style of Ann Patchett is, of course, this book's best feature. And, as I am coming to understand is typical Patchett, the story before the story truly brought me in: a stolen Virgin Mary statue, a question of what it means to be family, rife with sibling rivalry, single parenting and trans-racial adoption. That was a story that was full of potential.

And I really liked huge chunks of Run, but most of it felt just like that – palpable potential resting underneath: the woman who claimed to be the birth mother, and was she or was she just a groupie and the creepy, loving way she stalked her biologic sons. The saintly, dying Catholic priest uncle, and the did he or didn't he actually have the power to heal the sick. The forgotten mayor of Boston, fading into obscurity, trying to live by proxy through his sons. The prodigal son, returned home, a murderer and a thief, but possibly a modern Robin Hood, with a heart of gold and a knack for saving children. The problem is that by shifting around between all of these stories, none of them were really ever given an opportunity to come into their own.

The ending came too quickly and, as I'm also beginning to realize is typical Patchett, with a completely unnecessary time jump that left way too much unexplored. I would read the heck out of a story about an ichthyologist turned doctor turned ichthyologist (goodness knows I'm one quarter-life crisis away from writing an autobiography about the topic) and Patchett played with a lot of interesting concepts about why people go into medicine in specific, and careers as a chance of penance in general, but it A) had nothing to do with the first 300 pages and B) she didn't exactly do the topic justice in the 10 pages she had to deal with it. It added little to the book.

I'm giving Ann Patchett's fiction one more chance before I resign myself to the idea that it was truly Lucy Grealy who made Truth & Beauty come alive.

First off, unlike most of the other reviewers, I've actually never read [b:Memoirs of a Geisha 930 Memoirs of a Geisha Arthur Golden http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157749066s/930.jpg 1558965]. I picked this up because I've always been curious about geishas and I have a love of memoirs. I found Mineko's writing immediately engaging – I think her skill as a geisha really comes out in the way she writes. Her words are precise, but captivating and she really captures the emotional tone of a scene. Mineko's life is fascinating and otherworldly. She presents snippets of her life, leaving the reader to fill in details: a scene from her infancy, a scene from her toddlerhood, vignettes along the way to her being whisked into the secluded world of geisha-hood. The book toes the line between a description of specifically Mineko's life and exposition of the life of a geisha. Unfortunately, by compromising in to the middle ground, it does an adequate job to both sides, but is stellar on neither. I learned a lot of the terminology, economy and practical matters that go into being a geisha; however, while Mineko states several times that she has a passion about the lack of education that geishas get, this passion is not demonstrated at all in the book and the emotions that the geishas have are obscured. Similarly, Mineko's decision to retire as a geisha and become an art dealer happens over the course of a mere handful of pages and seems to have no basis in the rest of the book.Mineko also is very clearly a spoiled girl and woman, who is very used to being catered to. While she occasionally shows insight to that, there are also huge portions of the novel where she seems to have no insight, which left me wondering whether the injustices that she complains of were true, or figments of her unrealistic expectations.

The first thing to note about the book is the cover. I'm not a judge-the-book-by-its-cover kind of person, but there's something intensely embarrassing about reading a book with an embossed pink belt on the cover. I ran into a friend while carrying my copy and he asked what I was reading: “not a chick-lit rom-com” I answered, defensively.The only problem being, it kind of is. Lots of obsessing over what people are or aren't wearing, who is or is not dating whom and whether or not each character is popular. The attempt is to make it a self-aware, self-referential chick-lit rom-com, peppered with an introspective, if flawed protagonist.Which brings us to the crux of the issue: this would be fascinating, were it new territory. However, it's far from it. The flawed but introspective teenage protagonist who makes sense of the intricate, unexplicable world called teenagehood has already been done, most notably and incomparably by [b:The Perks of Being a Wallflower 22628 The Perks of Being a Wallflower Stephen Chbosky http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1313063835s/22628.jpg 2236198]. And also, while there's always room for another quality book in any genre, Lee Fiora has a lot more emphasis on the flawed than on the introspective. In fact, mostly, the best adjective for her is dumb. Its hard to imagine how she got into boarding school in the first place, much less on a scholarship. And every time she criticizes herself, you just want to agree with her: Yes, you're an idiot; yes you suck academically; yes you push away everyone who wants to be friends with you, of which there seem to be shockingly many, given that you're cruel to your friends, never make social overtures and push away everyone who wants to be friends with you.There was an attempt at a message about family and how hard it is to leave your family as a teenager, but Lee's family was so much more flawed than she was that I found the fact that she ever talked to them at all just another annoying quirk of hers (her father slapped her across the face in public. Last I checked, child abuse is rather unforgivable and never excusable)The bits that the book does well, on the other hand, it does very well - a sentence or two about the bond of a true friendship; the description of the sense of commingled sadness and joy when someone unexpectedly really and truly knows you; the episodic and fragmented nature of teenage experiences.

I'd had a long week last week (my pager went off starting at 1:30 PM and didn't stop for 18 hours.) I was too tired to do pretty much anything. Including getting up from the couch to find my book. So I did what any reasonable person would do, found the first ebook available from my library and downloaded it to my laptop.

I have intermittently watched the TV show of the same name (after it was recommended to me by a patient) and found it extremely entertaining - dark, dramatic and yet with relevance to actual teenage issues, without being a Very Special Show. So I chose Heartless from the library (none of the other books in the series were available.)

On the one hand, it was a quick read - it took me less than two hours. The characters were flat. There was no thematic intentions. I can ignore all of that for a good mystery, but literally nothing happened in Heartless. There were a couple of interesting plot threads, but they were left completely without conclusions. Very Ho-Hum.

Yeah, after the first couple of strikes, I kept trying (and failing) to love this series. What can I say? I really wanted a guilty pleasure

I read this in tandem with [b:The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements 7247854 The Disappearing Spoon And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements Sam Kean http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1276468318s/7247854.jpg 8246153]. What a great combination. The adjective that comes to mind when I think of this is cozy. It reminded me of my own childhood, filled with fingerprinting kits, lust for chemistry sets and Sherlock Holmes books. Flavia is a spunky heroine, who is posed between the confidence that children have as a consequence of not yet knowing enough to feel insecure and the equally inaccurate easy dismissal of children by adults. This tension is expertly woven by Bradley, especially in the ideas of reference that Flavia has - her serious concerns that the adults around her consider her the prime suspect in the central murder (an idea both laughable to an adult, and familiar to anyone who was ever a preteen.)Yes, at times, the mystery is a bit weak and predictable, but a well written child protaganist in a book for adults is much more unusual than a good mystery.

Remember your favorite chemistry teacher? The one who always anthropormorphized chemical compounds and added drama and flavor to their lectures? This book is a lot like that.

Okay, fine, chemistry is a substantial part of my livelihood, so maybe I have more fond chemistry-based memories than then average person. Nonetheless, The Disappearing Spoon should be as enticing to those who never took a science class outside of distribution requirements as well as those of us whose favorite class was organic chemistry.

To be honest, I was pretty nervous about this book; as a biochemist, it makes me a little uncomfortable to admit that there's anything interesting outside of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen (and a touch of phosphorus and sulfur.) But Kean's writing is the definition of compulsively readable.

Drama is brought by the often argumentative, usually eccentric and always genius scientists who founded the principals of modern chemistry. In addition, each chapter is riddled with historical anecdotes staring a particular element or two. But the real richness of the book comes from Kean's ease with the science itself, describing valence shells, chemical bonds, radioactivity, fusion and fission in accurate, accessible and extremely lively ways.

This was bland. Like “there was no there there.” No substance.

I'm a little concerned that, as this was my feeling for every book I've read on my Droid to date that it's my criticism of the medium, rather than the book. I like REAL books. I like the way pages feel. I like how cheap books are. I like the aesthetics of rows and rows of books in my library. I do NOT like ebooks. I don't like that I can click over without a second thought to something else. I don't like that they need electricity (I'm usually too absent minded to charge anything smaller than my laptop.) I don't like how they feel in my hand. And it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm almost NEVER without a real book, so if I'm reading an eBook it means either a) I finished my book and I still have time to kill, or more likely b) I found myself with time to read and I didn't bring a book, which is usually a result of having a ten or fifteen minute time bubble between activities. So most eBooks I read have to be dirt cheap, have to be short, and have to be frivolous enough that they're worth reading for only five minutes.

As a result, all three eBooks that I've finished have been self-published memoirs of emergency medicine physicians. And they've all read almost exactly the same. This is no exception. And honestly, I think if I'm seriously concerned that the delivery medium was a major factor in my opinion of the book that pretty much clenches the allegation that the book was without true substance.

This feels like someone strung together all of the posts in a mediocre blog. There's just...nothing. She's a perfectionist. Sometimes patients appreciate her. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're sick. Sometimes they're not so sick. Sometimes work-life balance is hard. Welcome to Being a Doctor 101. Also, 50% of the download is “samples” of Dr. Yuan-Innes' mystery novel starring a thinly-veiled self-insert character (who shares Dr. Yuan-Innes' hometown, training hospital, medical specialty and ethnicity) and her poetry, which reads like something I wrote in 9th grade.

I've read most of this book several times in the three weeks since I started my new role as a metabolism and genetics fellow.
In the weeks leading up to starting fellowship, I read this book once and was quite enchanted with how succinct and well-laid out it was. Once I started seeing patients; however, this book just doesn't cut it. It is much more a biochemical text with a few clinical pearls. Many relevant clinical details are completely absent. To be fair, many relevant biochemical details are also completely absent (want to know why glycine is high in MMA and PA? This book won't tell you.) Information about any given disease is scattered through many chapters. Sorting the book by organ system involvement makes some sense, but then diseases that are biochemically related, such as mitochondrial diseases, are splayed throughout. Also, to be done that way, the book should commit – I would expect a list of diseases that can cause epilepsy or liver failure, etc.
So why three stars? Because I haven't found a better alternative, especially not for the price. My coworkers make fun of me, because I spend a lot of time with MMBID up in my browser, at least one review article printed out on my lab, a basic biochemistry textbook on one desk, handdrawn diagrams up on my whiteboard and this book on my other desk. As long as it's part of that multi-reference puzzle, it deserves three stars. That being said, I would love to have one go-to reference.

I'm a Michael Cunningham fan girl. It's impossible for me to be unbiased about anything Michael Cunningham writes. I have a sneaking suspicion that I have some amount of cognitive dissonance about By Nightfall - a book that I've wanted for over a year; that I picked up and lingered over every time I was in a bookstore; that I scoured every used bookstore for; that I finally paid full price in a physical bookstore for a new copy because I wanted it that badly (paperback; I haven't lost my mind); that I derailed a vacation for in order to see Cunningham speak about at the national book fair. So, I'm a little obsessed. And I have a suspicion that I read the book that I wanted to read, rather than the book Cunningham wrote.

I loved the introspective pieces of this book. The interstitial portions where characters ordered coffee and went on train rides were Cunningham at his best - he describes the mundanity of the human condition in a way that is both honest and profound and is completely unparalleled.

I loved the concepts in this book - that we, as humans, are in love with beauty, in love with art, in love with the profound and constantly disappointed in the inability of reality to produce concrete things that live up to the expectations in our imaginations. That we cultivate the relationships that exist in our life for their symbolism, and for their reflection on ourselves and for the concepts that they engender moreso than for the actually people in them. That the people we are when we are honestly alone – mentally, physically alone – is not ever the person that we can be to others.

I did not love the actual plot of this book. I was bored, rather than enthralled by Mizzy. I felt that at times, the symbolism was too on the nose (seriously, a character named “The Mistake”) and other times the mundanity was, well, mundane. Perhaps those feelings are apropos, given the context – Cunningham is one of the artists he describes, striving to find beauty, to unsettle, to provoke and coming up just a little short.

This is a book that I would have absolutely loved as a high school student. I wished I were a high school student while I was reading it. Digesting it in huge chunks at a time. Hanging out in the study hall area before school, debating and quoting and dissecting with four or five other nerds who were reading it simultaneously. (That's how I've read most of the science fiction that I've really loved in my life. It's the best way to do it.) The problem with classic science fiction is that science fiction is a genre that eats it own and constantly regenerates ideas. So was Neal Stephenson's [b:Anathem 2845024 Anathem Neal Stephenson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1224107150s/2845024.jpg 6163095] a complete homage? Yes, in many important ways. And certainly, it was influenced by Canticle, which proceeded it by 30+ years. But I read Anathem first, so Canticle comes off looking the derivative one. I feel bad, because I know it's historically inaccurate, but I'm just kind of over post-apocalyptic-humanity-is-doomed-to-repeat-its-own-mistakes-and-perpetually-destroy-itself. There were a few tropes I loved - most notably the dilemma of is a species technologically generated by humans to replicate humans less than human? However, that was really only considered for a sentence or two.

The first couple of chapters were mild-blowingly good. I thought Harris' explanations of foods that are taboo or vaunted and how those roles are not only logical, but dictated by the socioenvironmental setting in which they originate fascinating. He treats cultural norms as almost the results of Darwinian processes, which is a fascinating and really revolutionary approach. I was awed both by his treatment of rules that are second nature to me, like Jewish dietary laws, as well as those that were quite foreign. Harris was a breath of fresh air to the “anthropology” I was exposed to in undergrad that tried to impress upon us that there is no way to understand other cultures and that trying to do so is cultural appropriation in and of itself.

However, the second half of the book fell flat. Perhaps it's because, as a Jew, I don't share Harris' fascination with Jesus (so much Jesus. Three chapters of Jesus. It was SO tedious) or because Harris' treatise on New England witches has really become conventional wisdom. Either way, I finished this book mostly through a sice of obligation.

What an uneven collection. It's not even just the wide variation of quality (although there IS a wide variation in quality), but it seems like the stories chosen have only a glancing association with the ostensible theme. This is particularly notable given the hubris expressed in the introduction that this will be the ur-collection of modern faery tales (Klima goes as far as to imply that it is the ONLY collection of this sort, which is laughable, given that not only are almost all of these stories pulled from other, similar, anthologies, but the vast majority of them have been published in one of the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling anthologies.) Its also poorly organized, with adjacent stories doing nothing to build or communicate with each other and some stories on the same faery tale are close to each other, while others aren't. The theme is also poorly defined, with some stories being modern interpretations of faery tales, some being retellings without a change in setting, and yet others seem to come from a universe where the words “faery tale” have no meaning.

All of that notwithstanding, there are some excellent stories:
-Wil McCarthy's He Died That Day, in Thirty Years is one of those rare pieces: a sci-fi short story that actually is satisfying. It stood on it's own and yet was clearly related to Alice in Wonderland. It was rich and provocative and wholly original. Perhaps particularly remarkable is how every little detail of the story was rich with information.

-Michelle West's The Rose Garden was something that I wanted to hate. I hate Beauty and the Best as the exemplar of the Bad Boy genre – that horribly insidious, misogynist trope by which women should cleave to cruel, angry men and by their love covert them into some sort of paragon. But The Rose Garden, while not being a full inversion, was raw and honest about its intentions. And, I'm a sucker for platonic romance, so...

-Robert J. Howe's Pinocchio's Diary is terrifying, brutal, and an absolutely fascinating retelling. I loved his exploration of “realness” and bullying and othering. This is faery tale telling at it's best – using a tale familiar to all of us, to tell a moral familiar to all of us, but to also tell a story that feels real and visceral and to twist it into something new that has a new moral.

There are also some completely AWFUL stories
-Howard Waldrop's The Sawing Boys is completely impenetrable. You see it's a modern twist on the faery tale in which a bunch of Yiddish gangsters are finally thwarted by a Klezmer band playing construction equipment. No? No hint of recognition? Maybe it will help if they only speak in roaring twenties slang, which is converted into Pig Latin such that you both have to decrypt every utterance and then further deduce it's meaning based on the glossary at the end of the story? No? Yeah, me neither. Also, apparently Yiddish is the new black in faery tales, as it also seems to infiltrate Leslie What's The Emperor's New (and Improved) Clothes for no clear reason, too.

-Gregory Maguire's The Seven Stage a Comeback, which unfortunately starts this collection, may work as a play, but as written media is completely god-awful. It's impossible to keep the dwarfs straight, as they have no names; only numbers, therefore there is no character development evident.

The rest is mostly pretty cliched and unmemorable. (I do love Neil Gaiman's The Troll Bridge, but I've already read it in a different collection, so it doesn't count)

I'm having trouble coming to terms with this book. Add it on the pile of my ambivalence about Michael Chabon. I think the thing that bugs me the most is the potential for greatness here.

An aging Sherlock Holmes is coming to terms with the fact that he is no longer in his prime and preparing himself for death and battling senility? Awesome, awesome premise. As a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes, I usually refuse to touch modern interpretations, because I don't trust authors to give me what Conan Doyle did to make Holmes so compelling. On this aspect, Chabon mostly delivers: he captures Holmes' greatness in his dedication and flashes of brillance and tempers it with his moodiness and self-destructiveness. It's not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Holmes mystery, though, failing in the complete lack of explanation of how Holmes deduces anything (and really, failing as a compelling mystery all over.) Holmes is aging, his brain isn't what it used to be, don't tell us that, show us by having Holmes try his famous Holmes deduction. Show us him missing clues, or thinking slowly, or coming to the wrong conclusions. It's an insanely original, compelling idea, that mostly only reaches it's full potential when Holmes reflects on a post-Blitz London with anger that London still exists in the post-Holmes area and that the Blitz and WWI have allowed it to change and grow into something else. I love the idea of what happens to the characters we love when they move past what they once were.

I think the big reason that this book fails is that while Chabon is good at many things, the novella is not an ideal format. His books become compelling over time, as you become more enmeshed with the characters. Pages give his language room to proliferate and his sprawling sentences feel less suffocating in longer books. There are so many ideas here, ripe for the picking. I can't possible imaging saying to myself “I have an idea for a book that's about an aging Holmes, in WWII, meeting a mute orphan, who will act as his foil, who has a parrot, who knows secret numbers, which may be the key to German codes, prompting discussion of the lengths one will go for national loyalty and exploring the tension between commitment to country and commitment to Jewish orphaned refuges in the middle of the holocaust, while also discussing the morally grey characters who form this boy's foster family and I want this story to be an exemplar of the modern mystery novel. That sounds like it can be done in 170 pages!” Everything loses in the brevity.

What really bothers me is that in the author's note, Chabon writes about the respect he has for “genre novels” and that he wants people who normally don't read genre to pick up this book and it to make them want to go back and read more mysteries. It's insulting to authors who frequently write genre. I agree that genre can be the most compelling form of fiction; it's freed from constraints; it can explore the worlds of possibilities and use that to reflect on the way our world is. This is not a great genre novel, and although Chabon has been a great friend to the melding of genre and literature in Kavalier and Clay (superhero/comic book) and Yiddish Policeman's Union (a much better version of mystery/noir), he should have left this one to the mystery writers.

I'm still mulling over exactly how I feel about this book. It's very, very rare for a book to ever make progress from my “partially read” shelf to my “read” shelf. I'm still a little shocked that I actually read this book. I meant to just make another college try at reading it, so that I could reshelve it without guilt. Instead, I found myself 50 pages in, than 100, than 300.I think part of the reason that I hadn't gotten very far in this book before is that I picked it up knowing nearly nothing about it. Being a big fan of [b:How to Buy a Love of Reading 5975766 How to Buy a Love of Reading Tanya Egan Gibson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1267911725s/5975766.jpg 6149015] and [b:Special Topics in Calamity Physics 3483 Special Topics in Calamity Physics Marisha Pessl http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309200115s/3483.jpg 910619], I anticipated it to be another meta-book. I was extremely disappointed to open it and realize that it was a holocaust book.You see, I spent much of my childhood haunted by the specter of the holocaust. My maternal grandparents are concentration camp survivors, and it felt like it was the only thing that my grandparents ever talked about. Every day in Hebrew school and day camp and overnight camp seemed to be Holocaust day. I think every fiction book my mother has ever read, and certainly every book she has sent to me unsolicited has been about the Holocaust. I think I've read nearly every Holocaust book every written, and the only one to date that I've liked has been [b:A Thread of Grace 16047 A Thread of Grace Mary Doria Russell http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166697257s/16047.jpg 882031] To say I am burned out on the Holocaust is a major understatement. And, more importantly, I was extremely skeptical that there is anything new to say about the Holocaust that hasn't been said already. But once I actually got into The Book Thief, it was gripping. Liesel was so vulnerable in the beginning, Hans was so warm and, I figured, at least it's about communists, not Jews. And then I got into Hans teaching Liesel to read and the beauty of those stark, midnight scenes, illuminated only by paternal love and the desire to read was so beautiful written, and the choice of the Gravedigger's Handbook both poignant and hilarious. Ultimately, what kept me reading was the characters. There's not a single character in the book who is forgetful. And far from being caricatures, all of the characters are well-rounding, with flaws and virtues and react appropriately to situations and change. Perhaps my favorites are the damaged, uncertain mayor's wife and the coarse, prickly, but loving Rosa. The imagery of words is heavy-handed, and often it feels like Zusak is screaming “I'm using imagery here! Look at me!” That being said, the animation of words as a concept is fascinating, and a powerful thread linking the book together. Words fly out of people's mouths, fall heavily and a thousand other movements. Much has been written about death as a narrator, but to me, it felt like a minor part of the novel. It certainly was not overdone: death barely made an appearance in the first 300 pages. By the time he did, it added a nice foreshadowing and helped contextualize the activity within a very small community within the broader setting of world war II.

This was a light, refreshing read. Populated by surrealist situations and characters just on the near side of believability, This Book Will Save Your Life sometimes erred on the side of being too frivolous. On the other hand, the voyage of Richard was poignant and extremely applicable to modern times. Richard starts the novel as a perfectionist, number crunching, rich business man, who only eats the healthiest, most organic, of foods and has no real connection to other humans at all. Through the introduction of increasingly wacky characters including an Indian donut baker with a penchant for puns, a lonely housewife, a rich movie star and Richard's even more self-absorbed ex-wife, and even more wacky situations (kidnappings, all-white houses, horse-filled sinkholes and silent retreats), Richard learns to reach out and embrace the world. My only other complaint, beyond the twee-ness of several scenes would be the way that the only way Richard actually manages to meet so many people and free himself from the banality of life is by being incredibly rich, which kind of undercuts the message.

I was kind of torn by this book. I had low expectations from the beginning – I was discomfited by the dialect, my northern-identity politicking-liberal arts sensitivities were a little appalled at a white woman writing this book and Skeeter read like an obvious self-insertion character.

That being said, I warmed up quickly. Stockett has clearly done a lot of research, in addition to having grown up in Mississippi with a maid. She is honest, at time brutally so, without taking a clear side. She depicts white people who do terrible things while being well-meaning, white people who have a lot of ingrained racism and are striving to be better and those who aren't. She has white characters who have grown up in poorer circumstances and are trying to fit in. She has African-American characters who pander to their white employers and those who hold their ground and those who have their own ingrained notions. My only complaint from a character development stand point is the completely villainous portrayal of Hilly – she's easy to hate in a novel that's supposed to be about realistic people in a toxic setting.

This was the vacation of disappointing reading material. There's little redeeming about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Perhaps the best thing I have to say about it is that it's fast paced, and once you actually get to the mystery, it's a little compelling to at least see what comes of it.

That being said, there's a lot not to like. Let's start with the fact that absolutely no progress is made on the central mystery until page 294, when the character all of a sudden announces that he's found three clues. What happens until then? Lots of backstory on totally extraneous materials and three very explicit sexual assaults that have literally nothing to do with the main plotline (and never really come up again.) The pacing is particularly awkward, because we're usually subjected to all information once in the main plotline, regurgitated a second time (often verbatim) by the private investigators and then a third time either in a newspaper article or quoted from the main character's book. Similarly, the book extends for over 100 pages after the mystery has been solved. These pages are ostensibly to wrap up the sketchy finances plotline, but pretty much exist to tell us that the main character is drinking coffee and not going into work for a 100 pages until an authorial fiat fixes the financial plotline.

Want to talk about characters? The main character is a flimsy self-insertion, who is adored by all women, hired to solve a mystery on the basis of zero credentials and seems to just manage to stumble into evidence ignored for the previous 50ish years. Perhaps the most damning thing is that after figuring out who the murder is, despite the Mikael knows that the murder knows who he is and has already tried to kill him twice, he decides to go over to the murder's house without any backup or anyone knowing where he is, passing the gasoline and rifle used in the previous murder attempts on the way to the front door. That, friends, is a suicide attempt.

His sidekick is not just a quirky anti-hero. She's a bona fide psychopath who gets revenge on a predator by sexually assaulting him. Um, not awesome. Also, her deep secret on how she's such a good private investigator? She's a hacker. That's so lame it doesn't even deserve spoiler tags. It keeps getting repeated – Oh no, someone might find out that Lisbeth is a hacker! Newsflash: every fictionalized private investigator since 1985 has hacked in some form or another.

How about the writing? The translation is definitely clumsy, but it can't camouflage the underlying clumsy writing. My two pet peeves? Larsson's decision that it is necessary for us to know everything that a character does at all times (at one point he tells us the time a character wakes up, the time he drinks his coffee and how long he waits before leaving the cabin.) The second is Larsson's need for us to know what brand of object is in use. It's like if I made sure you knew that Becca wrote this review on her husband's Dell laptop, having used her Android phone to use the Goodreads App to select this book at the Borders bookstore inside the Cleveland Hopkins Airport.

The graphic crimes, especially sex crimes depicted have been very controversial, and I don't feel I can review this completely without mentioning them. I'm far from squeamish, but both the crimes themselves and the statistics about violence against women in Sweden seemed to have no purpose to their inclusions. For an author who complains in his book about the use of sex crimes in literature for titillation, well, the lady doth protest too much, methinks.