trail of vinyl

The internet at Lookingglass was down the other day, so I hung out with this book for awhile:


Highlights


J.J. Abram's favorite.


The Dharma preferred.


The Other's favorite.


The Kwon's favorite.


Hurley's favorite.


The Island's favorite.


Oceanic's endorsed favorite.


EVERYONE's favorite.

if i am dead or missing

I wanted some Law & Order-style crime drama, but it ended up being the profiles of sisters from an abusive family whose choice in men continued the cycle of abuse. I learned about that lesson from Oprah a long time ago. The lady can write though, her story just wasn't all that interesting.
C+

dear john

I hate it when movies change the endings of the books that inspired them. However, in this movie's case, I preferred the movie ending over the book ending. Which was an unsettling realization to make.

B

buffalo lockjaw

I think some houses shoud get funerals. Favorite bedrooms deserve obituariaries. Certain kitchens have earned memorials. Instead we just walk away from the wrecks like amnesiacs.

This is the last book I read from the York library.

A+

19 mins

I had complicated feelings going into this book. I remember a long time ago, my dad had this book and I read the inside cover and thought it sounded like it could be good but probably wasn't. This was before I loved Jodi and my dad hadn't said he was wowed, so we the book got lumped into the donate pile. That book is probably the same one I took out of the libary to read. It made me sad to think of though, partly because anything with a dad association has a cloud around it, and partly because I wish I had read it back in the day so I could have talked to him about it. Moral of the story: always read the book.
It was a good one. There is something about school shootings that make for the best fiction, IMO. I guess because you are guaranteed a good court tangle, extreme characters, backstories/flashbacks, and just the drama of it from every angle. This book was a prime example of how JP takes seemingly straight-up situations and floods you with the specifics from life that make the unthinkable kind of understandable. She recycled two good characters fromo other books and those two characters were my stand-out favorites. I liked or loved it, but there was something about the ending that didn't click well for me.
B+

songs from humpback whale

Let me tell you a little something about love. It's different everytime. It's nothing more than a chemical reaction, an arrow over an equation, but the elements change. The most fragile kind of love is that between a man and a woman. Chemistry, again: if you introduce a new element, you never know how stable the original bond is. You may wind up with a new union, with something left behind. I believe that you can fall in love many times with many different people. However I don't think that you can fall in love the same way twice. One type of relationship my be steady. Another may be fire and brimstone. Who is to say if one of these is better than the other? The deciding factor is how it all fits together. Your love, I mean, and your life.
The problem is that when you're old enough to really find a soulmate, you're already carrying around all this extra baggage. Like where you grew up, and how much money you make, and whether you like the city or the country. And sometimes, most of the time, you fall really hard for someone who you just can't squeeze into the limits of your life. The bottom line is: when your heart sets its sights on someone, it doesn't consult with your mind.

Not my favorite JP. It felt like the leftovers from too many other books that were smushed together and made a meal that lacked order and originality. It lacked that awkwardness that is necessary for the characters to feel real and the plot to seem plausible. It felt like it could have been her first book.
B-

perfect match

PROs
The central mother central mother character was one that was more flawed than usual. I liked that that the priest molestation stuff was written as an undertone rather than as some fictious expose. Good surprises, good characters, good flow, good story.

CONs
I have no idea what the book title means.

QUOTEs
There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face to face with a catastrophe. The garbage cans still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers interrupt dinner.
This sums up 2009.

[from an interview with JP in the back]
Crawiling into the minds of characters is actually one of the best parts of writing for me. After all, I'm never going to get to be a five-year-old boy, so it's a challenge to be able to pull it off. It's a little like trying on a costume--and getting to shrug it off my shoulders when I'm finished.
JP has a little theatre major in her too, which is just one of the many reasons we are BFF.

A

heart books

I was skeptical of this book because the word heart is in the title. I just read a JP about a motherless daughter, so that element didn't wow me either. But, overall, I loved the book. It reminded me of Lost Season 1 with the flashbacks and character unpeeling. I loved the main character and kept picturing her as Ellen Page.
A


Knowing a JP book is going to be about religion is like knowing an episode of Lost is going to be about Ben: cream of the crop hour is coming. The Gnostic Christianity element was awesome. This book incorporated a few of JP's trademarks that I have come to love: a New England setting, a legal drama, a story told from a variety of narrative viewpoints, and incorporating characters from her other books. Some of the chapters were too short, though, and I didn't resonate as well with these characters are with ones in her other books.
B

library card

I just read my first book from the York library. It seems a shame that I finally got a library card when the end of my York days is in sight. But whatever, I read:

It was on the New Books shelf and I didn't really feel like searching for a book. The description made it seem like Closer [movie/play, not TV show or something], but it was like the Jennifer Weiner version of Closer. I didn't dislike it while I was reading it, but, afterwards, it seemed to not be worth the time.
D

back to jodi

The premise of this book was a man on trial for killing his wife who was dying of cancer. I liked that idea because it seemed like it was going to get really muddy like the other conflicts in her books. But the the whole mercy killing issue didn't really go anywhere. The characters became more developed as the plotline complicated and I was more interested in that than anything. Not what I expected, but it worked.
B-


I realized I like the JP books that have chlildren written in the storylines. I think this is because (1) the kids are never given too much page time and (2) she has a very loving & insightful voice when writing about the parent/child relationship. The kid characters are never annoying because she writes as such a parent that sees the kids realistically but with the love goggles. Reminds me of this song:

The story was about a dad who kidnapped his daughter from an alchoholic mother and set up a new life as the perfect single father. Good stuff, but a little bit dry. Sometimes the story was too close-knit, character-wise. The book needed more characters to loop throughout. It needed more, in general. It felt like the bare bones of a book that would be good once the lines were colored in.
B-

borrowed books

My boss at the coffeeshop has my own good taste in books and lent me these. The first two were stories set in contemporary Afghanistan. The third was very Oprah's Book Club, in the best possible way.


B+


B


A

picture perfect

This book felt more Jennifer Weiner than Picoult. I read a Jennifer Weiner book straight through on a flight from Alaska to Philly because it was engaging enough to hold my interest that long but not heavy enough to ever need to take a break to digest the story. History repeats, except this time I was in York wishing I was on an airplane to anywhere.
C

handle with care

I would not have fallen so hard in love with Jodi if this book had been my first impression. It is also her most recent, so I'm not all that surprised that success has led her to drop the ball a bit. There were too many similarities between this and My Sister's Keeper--the mother who has lost herself in her crusade to save her sick daughter, the father who is startled to realize his ineffectiveness but is so emotionally invested that he is sympathetic (and the warrior for the daughter who becomes an underdog because she is healthy). Not a bad book, but not up to par.
C

salem falls

She used allusions to The Crucible and the Jack & Jill nursery rhyme, which I love. I'm a big fan of authors incorporating other voices within their own. I feel like the themes of The Crucible/McCarthy hearings/etc. have gotten to the point of being boring, but this was a fresh take on because there was just a hint of The Crucible flavor instead of it being the same old main course. It's fun that Jodi girl intertwines characters from book to book (esp. in this case since it was a lawyer and that makes sense). I think though, she needs to be careful of recycling plot points (a maybe-raped victim chops off her long red hair...didn't that happen in the 10th cirlce?). Girlfriend always has plot shockers but she dropped bombs right up until the last line. I liked the story that was told in Second Glance better, but liked the storyteller here best of all. In an interview, she said thepoint she wanted to hammer in was that lies can outpace the truth everytime. I don't know if I agree, but I definitely don't disagree.
A+

plain truth

One thing that I love about Jodi Picoult is that she takes ideas that are so easily generalized and researches them so well before writing them into a plotline. In Salem Falls, it was Wicca and in this one it was the Amish community. She usually uses an attorney in one of the main roles and this one was one of the most fully-developed outside the context of the case. I think I would put Plain Truth in my top 3 Picoult's so far.
A

keeping faith

I loved the title since it was about a custody for a girl named Faith and the role that religion is able to play in our clever clever world. The pacing was slower than her other books and the ending provided some resolution when it seemed impossible, but not as much as i was anticipating. Also, not every book needs a love story in it. The love story in this book went from 0 to 180 in a matter of pages and made me really have no sense of affection for the two who fell in love.

B

ice

So I read that book, My Sergei. It read kind of exactly how I had expected, but I liked reading about the background behind their routines. It was like they put on strange, tiny plays. And (mostly) anything Russian gets my stamp.
C-

Their prettiest:

December never felt so wrong,
cause youre not where you belong
-Ingrid Michaelson

Funny thing, six or so years after Sergei died, Ekaterina remarried the guy who played the Russian ballerinO in Center Stage (not to be confused with Cooper). That decision does not get my stamp.

2nd glance

My favorite Picoult yet! The quote on the front said:

"A fast-paced, densely layered exploration of love, the pull of family and the power of both to transcend time." People
Pretty much sums it up.

the tenth circle

I am in the middle of an affair with Jodi Picoult. The Tenth Circle was about her usual subject of family dynamics, blurring the lines of issues that seem black-and-white (and is the inspiration for a Lifetime movie, which never fail to please).


It wasn't my favorite Picoult because there were characters that were introduced & developed, but did not come full circle in having a purpose in the plot. I love her writing style, but I think the structure of this book was unbalanced. Dante's Inferno was constantly referenced & threaded through the novel. I loved using the circles of hell in theory (and actuality for the most part), but there were overwritten/boring bits. The Alaskan bush was used as metaphor for everything from the past, to disappearing, to simplicity, etc. I liked it because I thought it was a clean, interesting, and well-executed illusion (and I have a soft spot for Alaska):

She also incorporated graphic novels, both in allusions and in having little comic strips at the beginning of each chapter. I've never been a fan of graphic novels, but I do like it when authors weave different strands of writing within into their own. There were letters scattered in the comics to spell out the message that was to sum up the theme of the book. I found all the letters, but was to lazy to unscramble them, so I googled it:

Nothing is easier than self-deceit, for what each man wishes that he also believes to be true - Demosthenes
B

jodi & joyce

Recent reads by two of my favorite ladies. A+ x2