http://www.goodreads.com/user/updates_rss/165589 en-US Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:10:07 -0700 60 http://www.goodreads.com/ 200 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/gr_logo.gif 32783128 Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:10:07 -0700 Review28386774 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/28386774 How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion (Paperback) by Daniel H. Wilson
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> 32783056 Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:09:06 -0700 Review28386713 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/28386713 Astonishing X-Men Vol. 1: Gifted (Paperback) by Joss Whedon
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> 30480436 Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:28:37 -0700 Review26600636 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/26600636 to: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Hardcover) by Sherman Alexie
Well, first, I bought this book at a Wal-Mart in rural Oklahoma when I was desperate for something to read, and I didn't realize it was a young adult book. Not that I'm opposed to reading young adult fiction, I was just a little surprised.

Anyway, I liked the book, though I didn't necessarily think it was as great as apparently everyone else in the world did (it won a bunch of awards). I love the angle of writing about an American Indian kid struggling with the alcoholism and poverty, and the despair they lead to, on the Spokane reservation. The narrator's struggle to figure out how to be part of his tribe but also avoid the negative aspects of reservation life--and his feeling that he's betraying his tribe when he thinks of leaving--is heart-breaking, particularly because I know how many American Indian kids struggle with those decisions. Many of the characters felt like people I knew from back home--particularly his dad, his friend Rowdy, and his older sister.

My main issue was that there were some places where the narration or dialog just didn't ring true to me. His friend Gordy just didn't seem like what a real teenager would be like to me--I just didn't buy a lot of the super-wise or meaningful things he said. It felt forced. There were a few other places where I just felt like the things the narrator was saying/thinking were a bit too suddenly insightful or perfect. It reminded me a little, oddly enough, of the TV show "Dawson's Creek," where you thought, "ok, some kids somewhere probably say some of these things some of the time, but no actual kids are like this." [I don't need any snarky comments about the fact that I know that about "Dawson's Creek.]

So it was a good book, and I enjoyed reading it, and the last couple of chapters made me want to cry because, though in a different context, they made me think of my own struggles to figure out how to be part of my family but not stay in a crappy, poor town in Oklahoma. I just don't think it's the greatest young adult novel I've ever read. ]]> 30221594 Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:04:10 -0700 Review26397063 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/26397063 to: The Kite Runner (Paperback) by Khaled Hosseini
I'm probably the last person I know who hadn't read this book yet, but I was in a Wal-Mart in a rural area of Oklahoma, desperate for a book, and saw it. There's not much point in me saying more than everyone else has already said--it's good. You see the slow descent of Afghanistan into absolute lawlessness and brutality, the initial relief when the Taliban takes over, and the horror when their true character is revealed--as well as the insanity of giving teenagers guns and allowing them to exert complete control over others based on their beliefs in their own superior morality.

I thought some of the plot lines tied and story arcs tied together a bit too nicely for my taste--I know it's a literary conceit and that's the whole point and all, but still, having ever character re-enter each other's lives later on was a little forced to me--and I didn't like it was well as his other novel, "A Thousand Splendid Sons," but it's still excellent. ]]> 30221530 Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:58:03 -0700 Review15665843 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/15665843 to: Lullabies for Little Criminals: A Novel (P.S.) by Heather O'Neill
My friend Kristina suggested this book, and I enjoyed it. The author is a contributor to "This American Life" on NPR and had a rough childhood, which she uses for the basis of this book, set in Montreal. It's about a pre-teen girl living with her junkie dad as their life slowly descends into utter chaos. The kids in the book live mostly unsupervised and make bad or self-destructive decisions as they try to take care of themselves in the absence of stable adults, or of exploitative or abusive adults in their lives.

It's a fast read, and while there were passages where I felt she was a little over-the-top, overall it was a fun little novel to read. If, you know, reading about young girls becoming prostitutes and using drugs can in any way be fun. ]]> 29123056 Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:34:15 -0700 Comment1059720 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/25434435 Mary's review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames
by David Sedaris

I also don't give a crap about the exaggerating. If he wrote academic work, historical tomes, or even memoirs that were supposed to be all serious, inspiring, and life-affirming, then ok, yes, you can complain if things turn out to be incorrect or exaggerated or whatever.

But I read David Sedaris to laugh. Also, I think he's fairly nuts and probably couldn't remember things accurately and in an even somewhat unbiased, un-self-centered way if he tried.

If embellishing or exaggerating stories becomes totally unacceptable, the entire Southern storytelling tradition will go extinct. And I'll have to relabel a lot of my relatives as liars. ]]> 28954550 Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:09:52 -0700 Comment1048592 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/11420563 Kelly's review of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Signet Classics)
by L. Frank Baum

I don't know if you're aware or not, but the book, written as a kids' fable, is interpreted by many to be a progressive political allegory, though Baum never said so about this particular book (he was openly political in future writings). He was a big supporter of rural progressive midwestern/Great Plains political movements and many things in the book seem to fit in with his politics. Dorothy represented the sincere, innocent, good farmers who were being exploited by the financial system. The Wizard of Oz was the sneaky financiers who had nothing real to offer farmers and lied to them. The Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the banking centers on the East and West coast (esp. NY and San Francisco) that farmers were often indebted to. I can't remember what the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow seemed to be representing, but the Tin Man could be organized labor, which Baum and many progressives argued had lost its vigor and needed to be rejuvenated to fight for workers' rights.

In the original, which you may have noticed, Dorothy's slippers, the source of her ability to go home, weren't ruby, they were silver. Progressives at the time wanted to move the dollar from a gold standard, which made credit very expensive for farmers and other citizens, to the silver standard, which would have made credit cheaper and therefore benefited farmers, who almost always had to take out loans to make it through the year until the next harvest. When they follow the Yellow Brick Road (gold), it just takes them to Oz, not home--the silver shoes do that.

Here's a thing from wikipedia about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

We actually discussed the book in a seminar about soc of agriculture in grad school when we were discussing agricultural political movements. ]]> 26801501 Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:18:09 -0700 Review23708050 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/23708050 to: It's So You: 35 Women Write About Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style (Paperback) by Michelle Tea
I was really excited about this book because I love fashion but not in a name-brand labels kind of way, and this was a bunch of essays from indie-hipster-type women, transsexuals, and others about their love of, hate for, and struggles with fashion.

But it wasn't as good as I was hoping. There are a few excellent essays--I particularly enjoyed one by a male-to-female transsexual about the problems of being too big to buy women's clothing. But too many of them fell into that "I'm cooler than you because I was around when punks wore safety pins because their clothes were literally falling apart and we shopped at thrift stores because we were poor and living in squats on the Lower East Side while shooting heroin and being very, very countercultural and cool." While I'm not into labels or haute couture, it seems a little sad to be in your 50s or 60s and still sniffy about how much cooler you are because you dug your shirt out of a dumpster.

That said, I'm a total hypocrite because I'm always so proud of how cheap the clothes I wear are. And I would totally dig a cool shirt out of a dumpster. I would not, however, wear polyester '60s-era dresses just because I found them cheap at Salvation Army.

So basically, there are a few gems but a lot of skip-able essays here. ]]> 25768346 Sat, 24 May 2008 23:05:05 -0700 Comment833588 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7653803 Kelly's review of The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini

I just read another book by this author ("A Thousand Splendid Suns") and absolutely loved it, so I'll check out this one soon too. ]]> 25030589 Thu, 15 May 2008 16:31:56 -0700 Review20071730 http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/20071730 to: A Thousand Splendid Suns (Hardcover) by Khaled Hosseini
I assume I don't have to tell you that a book about women in Afghanistan from the 1960s until 2003 is going to be pretty depressing. This novel follows two women whose lives become intertwined and the ways their lives are changed and often torn apart by forces beyond their control--a parent's rejection, the bombing of Kabul as warlords fought for control, the rise of the Taliban, forced marriages, and so on. The brutality of the women's lives, and the assumption that life is an unbroken series of suffering and heartache and cruelty, is horrifying. At the same time, the book is extremely readable and draws you in immediately--by page 3 or 4 I was already hooked. And the end was a surprise. There were a couple of places where I found myself getting all misty-eyed, and I'm not a hugely emotional person that way.

The novel is all the more gut-wrenching because it's set among real-life events and many, many women certainly faced lives much like those of the women in the book.

FYI, the author also wrote "The Kite Runner," the basis of the movie that came out last year and was so controversial in Afghanistan that the young stars had to be taken out of the country to ensure their safety. ]]>