Sara Martin

I think this was a really awful book. I read the entire book because it was a) short and b) probably intellectual and deep and I just didn't get it.

I had not read Russell Banks Before. Not sure I will After. I found this book terribly offensive but with the idea that it was maybe SUPPOSED to be offensive. I have no idea. The depiction of Native Americans! For shock value? Making a statement? Cringe-worthy.

It was written in the 70s and then reprinted several times so I must be missing something. I see it is supposed to be a humorous allegory of life in the 70s in LA in suburbia. I totally did not get it. Was it supposed to be funny? Humorous it was not. Although I have no issues with LGBTQ people, I could not figure out why everyone was participating in gay sex, mostly non-consensual. WTF??

Okay, I did not get it. Born too late into a politically correct world, perhaps?

Wow, what a page turner! The story gets weirder and weirder with each chapter. Who is Sarah? Who is Andy? What is with that scar on Theo's face?

This is the story of Theo, who's avoiding high school because she was in some sort of accident that disfigured her face. She meets Andy from Texas in a coffee shop and he's searching for a girl named Sarah he met a few days ago who disappeared.

The problem is who IS Andy exactly? Things start to get totally bizarre as they start looking for Sarah.

The only downside I felt about this book is the ending. A little TOO bizarre, IMO.

I gave this book 2 stars instead of 1 star because I actually finished it. This is the story of two unlikable people who meet each other, one famous, the other not. He is a self-centered actor with a huge ego and she is just plain nuts. I kept reading to see if something would actually happen that was interesting. No. Never did. At the end, I didn't really care what happened with their relationship. Glad I was able to breeze through it.

Wow, what an odd book! Antoine, a highly intelligent man who can't find happiness decides his intellect is in the way. He tries drinking, pills, stock trading, TV, everything. Slowly he loses his conscience and starts blending into the society around him.

Very funny at times, this book also touches upon some serious subjects such as a loss of a moral compass and what can happen when you walk blithely through life, completely unaware of how your actions affect others.

I loved the part with the suicidal woman in the hospital, btw. Hilarious. Yes, the humor is dark.

The end is bizarre.

(I've just read the other reviews. There is so much hate for this book! I loved reading the other reviews - they are clever and funny. Yes, the ending sucks!)

What if your shadow controlled you? What if your shadow tried to kill you? What if when you flatlined, something came back to life with you? Not to mention what if you were a teenage girl in high school just trying to be normal and have a boyfriend like other girls?

Beyond: A Ghost Story deals with serious issues - abuse, kidnapping, predators - framed in the guise of a ghost story dealing with the wounds on the psyche such events can have on the individuals involved. This story manages to do this with plenty of “normal” activities mixed in such as a good family life, a great best friend, and creative outlets to express one's uniqueness.

An easy read - one that kept me turning the pages on my lunch hour to find out what happens to Jane as one weird thing after another keeps happening to her.

Wow, I had to power through this book to find out what happened!

Good suspense. The story involves a teenager who comes to the police with quite a story - he may have killed someone. Who? Besides following the narrative of Shayne Blank in the interview room at the station, we also follow the narrative of Mike Martin, another student at school. A lot happens to this group of teenagers in this short book, much of it involving the drug dealer, Jon.

Fast paced and interesting.

I seem to have a penchant for reading depressing books lately.

They have a nanny. She gets cancer. She dies. Not necessarily in that order.

I knew the plot from the jacket but I expected . . .I don't know. . .more? I didn't really get to see a lot of how Mrs. A lived, but a lot of how she died.

And the main couple. Their relationship seemed a bit off somehow. Most intriguing was Mrs. A's long dead husband. Too bad he couldn't be in the book more. Alive.

The narrator, God, is insufferable in this novel. Terribly unlikable. Actually, none of the characters are likeable, except maybe Daphne. All the men are described as pervs.

I got through it. There's a lot of stuff in here about environmentalism and its a little preachy and tedious.

I kept reading, thinking “Is this actually a good book and I just don't get it?” But this quasi-love story between God and a flawed human girl didn't cut it for me. And what's with God being so homophobic anyway?

What a sweet book, I loved it! This is the story of a woman in her twenties in the year after her step dad passed away. We go through her ups and downs, various boyfriends, family matters, apartments. It takes place in the 90's and I am her I think. I wasn't reeling from a loss back then, but I can identify with her life.

Some chapters are short, some longer. Just snatches of her life, but I feel like we're friends.

An odd little story by Sylvia Platt about a journey by train to a destination people don't seem too excited to arrive at but they go quietly. I didn't completely understand this, other than we all have free will if we wake up.

2 stars for depressing subject matter; 4 stars for a read I could not put down.

I read this in the middle of the night; seemed like the thing to do at the time.

This is a story of a citizenship test for Britain sometime in the future. This is a citizenship test gone wrong, horribly wrong.

Saying more would be too many spoilers but let me say this - This book is not a happy feel-good book. Do not expect to go to sleep at 2:30 AM all smiles and sunshine. No, not at all. You might dream of profound experiments on the human mind and what we are conditioned to do under certain circumstances, though.

This book is so funny! I did not expect that. Part 1 is funnier than part 2. I enjoyed Part 1 more.

Here are two men, hiking the Appalachian Trail, having some good times and some bad times and meeting interesting people along the way. The weather varies from one extreme to the other and it makes all of it an adventure. I ended up relaying some of these stories to my friends and family.

Bill Bryson also talks quite a bit about ecology and the environment. He throws in some history lessons. I did learn quite a bit. I believe I will check out more of Bryson's books.

I love Oak Island! If you know me, you know how much I love this show! I have not missed an episode in all the seasons it has been on the History channel.

Personally, I don't think we're going to find the Ark of the Covenant or Crown Jewels or Templar Treasure buried on the island; I'm leaning more toward pirate booty as it seems more historical. However, I would not mind being proved wrong.

I hope they find something, I really do.

So - the book! So excited to get it. I have read a few other older books on Oak Island (once I became a diehard Acorn). I knew some of the history that Randall Sullivan discusses in his book but I didn't mind reading it again and Randall also gave a lot more detail and more history than what I had previously read so I enjoyed the beginning of this book.

The ending was pretty good, too. I liked how he discussed the show and some of the excavations that I had watched. I would have liked more about the “modern era” of Oak Island but this was still okay.

Randall spent a lot of time on the theories that have been proposed by various visitors to the island and the show. We spent quite a bit of time on those theories; I would have rather read more historical Oak Island stuff but it's his book and I think people are really interested and intrigued by all these theories.

He seems to get personal about things in this book and that's when it gets weird. I got the impression from watching the show that the Laginas really didn't like him. Well, Marty anyway; Rick is so nice he appears to like everyone. His visit to Oak Island seemed a little weird, just reading about it was odd. He definitely did not distance himself away from the island at some point in the book and a portion of this book was - well, I said before - weird and odd with him being a little involved with the show.

All in all, though, loved the book. Couldn't put it down, carried it everywhere, stayed up late and was exhausted the next day trying to finish it. Recommended if you love the show!

Not bad, mostly movies from the 90s to mid 2000s. I've seen about 4. Got some titles to look up that seemed interesting. Wish it had been arrayed by genre to be more useful.

A very short, rather sad novel about a man who did not die of starvation during the siege of Leningrad though others around him did.

He finds ways to eat and he survives but not without a cost. His memories meander from happy times spent traveling the world to bittersweet remembrances of his wife.

This truly seems like a horrible thing to have endured and those that made it through are scarred.

Worst book I ever read. Almost. Both stories. Can't even go into it. I spent 9 weeks slogging through it. I am now FREE.

An interesting novel, one young woman (I) making sense of the loss of Mom (m) and various boyfriends (t)(a) by using diagrams of sets and subsets. Along the way, I learned about Argentina and the forced expats that left for Mexico during the 70s. The book was often confusing as it went back and forth in time but that was also part of the charm. Might be worth a re-read. I did not quite figure out if Mom appears at times or if she lives in the walls or if she really just walked out.

Odd little sci-fi book. In the future (or possibly happening right now) futurists who have mental breakdowns due to how the future looks to be, are sent to Normal Head in Oregon. Normal Head is a mental institution and is a pretty odd place itself. As for plot, a patient goes missing and there are a lot of insects crawling around. An investigation ensues.

I found some of this confusing, lots of technical mumbo-jumbo, but that doesn't detract from the plot. It does detract from holding my interest. Okay book, just at times a bit over my head.

Better than expected! After getting off to a slow start, the story amped up. We know the end as it's basically told in flashback, but it's still interesting. In retrospect, I didn't actually want the spoiler.

This is the story of the upside down man and a haunted house that you don't want to enter. Something bad will happen to you if you dare to go in. (The story started out a little bit Blair Witch style but after a while it lost that aspect.) Two people broke the rules and this is what happens.

Might have been interesting if there had been more scenes of exploring the house at night, but that's a minor complaint.

I normally avoid books about World War 2 as they are so sad, but this book intrigued me. It is so powerful, so emotional, and yes, so sad. This is a fictionalized version of true events the author lived with - the knowledge that at one time he had a brother killed in a concentration camp in Germany, a secret his parents never told him but which he discovered anyway. He grew up thinking things that were not true, things hidden from him out of love and protection.

Wow, this book was sad and powerful.

I was intrigued about this story of a young woman hospitalized for anorexia in Canada and what she went through and why it happened; all that stuff. I haven't experienced this and I still can't really explain or understand why she ended up the way she did, the desire to become light and a faerie and never really grow up. That sounds so fanciful and yet it turns out so horrible. Part of the issues seem to be growing up Indian in a white community but not entirely.

I certainly had questions about this. I'm not from Canada and I don't know if this would apply to an institution in the U.S. She was an in-patient in what seems like a terrible institution for a year and I kept wondering, “What happens when the insurance runs out? Who pays for this?” I can't imagine being kept somewhere for a year while doctors forced me to gain weight. And was this actually healthy? Solitary confinement and not allowed anything like books or TV for a year to entertain you, just a bed and and bed pan and four walls? Just because you won't eat? It seemed horrible and I don't know if it's really like that or if this would even help.

So, interesting, yes, but disturbing.

See now Then. Then is Now. Now is Then. At first, she had to think about the sentences, the rush of thoughts, the constant flow, because Then is Now and Now is Then and the circle of life is not linear, she thought, but the language, the language Then and the language Now is beautiful.

Then that being said, once I got used to the flow of the book and the unusual sentence structure, I was swept up in a sad sad story about a marriage gone painfully, sadly, awfully wrong. The three star rating that I gave this book is primarily due to the depressing subject and the cloud that never, ever lifts.

The back and forth, Then and Now storytelling is unusual and it does tend to try to round out the picture of the story in the sense that a flashback would do. This is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and how they perceive their worlds Now and how they perceive their worlds Then. It is also the story of their two children, Herakles and the Beautiful Persephone whose names I am certain are symbolic if I would take the time to research that.

I think a bit of joy would have lightened the heaviness of this book.

I enjoyed this story, it was creepy, albeit frustrating. I liked the setting and the weird things that kept happening in Towneley Manor. What frustrated me is the reluctance of Tamara, the main character, to talk to her husband about anything. I would have been a lot more outspoken. Also frustrating is some of the loose strings left untied at the end. We're all dying to know what's behind the door, what's in the envelope, but she's like, “nah, don't go there” and we don't. Bummer.

Other than all the weird loose ends that are never adequately explained, the story kept me interested through the end. If I'm ever in a horror novel, I'll talk a lot more and look behind more doors.

A very good poem that just drew me in and captured me. This is the story of a teenage girl from the streets of Harlem whose mom goes to jail for drug dealing and her boyfriend, a young middle class guy with a promising future.

They seem star-crossed, but I had to read to the end to see what happens to them. Were they truly doomed?

I'd have too many spoilers to discuss parts I really liked. I did like it when she tells her guy she'd not some fantasy princess he dreamed up in his head; she's a real girl with a real past. (And that's terribly paraphrased.)

My first Richard Brautigan book. I loved it. I remember my sister owned Trout Fishing in America. I was so young that every time I picked it up and looked through it I kept wondering why it wasn't a how-to book on going up to Gross and catching trout.

This book is so quirky. It touches on some serious subjects, but I love the meandering of Brautigan's main character's mind as he thinks about so many things and comes up with so many funny scenarios. It's not quite chronological, the main guy tries to make it so, but it just doesn't happen. The book had a very autobiographical feel to it but I'm not sure that it really is. I checked this out online after I read it and i never quite figured that part out.

I loved the mentions of Colorado, Denver, and Boulder. I wanted more! I definitely will visit some more Brautigan books.