Even Though I Read For A Living, I Like Reading For Pleasure. Sue Me.

I haven't done book reviews in a while. Here's a bunch I recently finished:

The Road. Cormac McCarthy.
I always liked Cormac McCarthy's name. Cormac. Imagine growing up with that doozy of a moniker! I've also read his book All the Pretty Horses, which is solid. Anyhoo, The Road is about a post-apocalyptic world blah blah snore. We've seen that all elsewhere. What makes the book amazing though is the writing itself. Now hold up, it's not often when the structure of the prose itself is something that makes me stop and think. I always thought that was a just a dumb doohicky nubbin-type superfluousness that middle school English teachers assigned to make you think you think they were smart (because, really, what do you do, with a B.A. in English? <---NAME THE REFERENCE!!!!). But The Road is crunchy and helps to paint a picture that would be woefully inadequate via descriptions alone. To wit, here's one of my favorite lines: "The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening." In this case, it's all about the how, not the what, of the story. Totes recommended.

Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt Vonnegut.
I would love to have read this as part of a class -- maybe like 11th grade, when I felt like it was okay to care about school, and not 9th grade where I still acted aloof because I didn't want to be tagged as an even bigger nerd than I already was. I like S-5; there was symbolism with every line written, but not in a purple, bloated way. Reading it casually is tough, because I'm often too tired to think about what I'm reading (preferring Sparknotes lite, i.e., wikipedia summaries). But I think I caught most of it, and it's kind of a cool coincidence that I read it right when I listened to a RadioLab podcast about a theory of the universe as a multiverse. They go hand in hand. It's far too nerdy to get into here, so I won't. Mostly because I'm lazy. Remember, I embrace my nerdiness now, so that's not it.

The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins.
AMAZING! It's surprising, I know, that I hate Twilight. And it's not just because I'm a sci-fi geek and think that sparkly vampires are stoopid. I tried reading the first book and just hated myself more and more with each passing page until I had to just put the durn pile of poop down. It sits, unfinished, on my shelf, as a symbol of me growing up -- right next to a rubber duckie. But then I read about THG in EW as another YA brouhaha. It's about a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which teens are thrown into a battle royale extravaganza. And it's awesome. So I've regressed back to being 14 years old. But at least stuff happens in this book. There's actual action, and the confusion of being a teen is rendered far more palpably here than in some Twilight "book" where a chick's pining for a dude who might kill her. Although, come to think of it, this book has that, too, only it doesn't seem like a sales trap intended to get tween gyrlz to shell out their money. My only prob? That book 2 is NOT on Kindle yet, and that book 3, the conclusion, isn't being published until this August. What am I supposed to do? Read more Vonnegut or sumthin' smrtypants like that?

The Girl With the Dragan Tattoo. Stieg Larsson.
I'm just going to put this out there and see what happens: This book was terrible. Remember how when Harry Potter really hit the zeitgeist, the third book had already been published? And then when the Goblet of Fire was ready to print -- it ended up being twice as long as any of the previous volumes? It needed editing. As good as a writer as J.K. is, her celebrity allowed her to override any major edits, and you could see it. The book rambled a bit. The thing was -- that's what audiences wanted. By that point, J.K. had absolutely earned our trust and so thoroughly and convincingly created this alterna-world where Harry, Hermy-One-Kenobi, and Ginger Lad ruled, that we just wanted more of that world.

TGWTDT is basically a rambling fourth book in a series, except that it's the first book of the actual series. It presents a mystery set in Sweden against a backdrop of corporate corruption and dark family secrets. Sounds saucy, right? Except that the plotlines don't really have anything to do with each other, and they don't add up to anything profound either. Bookending the central mystery (which isn't really set-up or solved until at least 300 pages in -- I'm not kidding) is a vendetta that we learn about only in the context of a trial verdict. In other words, there is nothing that makes us care about that, but we keep plugging along reading about how the protagonist goes to the market -- and doesn't learn anything about the mystery. Over and over.

This book is one of those great publishing stories of an author who posthumously gets published and garners wide acclaim and sales. Too bad the book sucks. This was a HUGE disappointment.