Fight Club, Chuck Palahnuik

 

With a full-time job, I've got less time and energy to write anything about the books I'm reading, but here's a quickie. While it took me a while to get into this book, it eventually pulled me in. A more nuanced portrayal of the narrator's struggles and relationship with Marla awaits any fan of the movie who makes it through the first 20 pages. While Palahnuik's prose and character descriptions are spare, he manages to fully flesh out the story and personalities involved.

Inkheart Series: Inkheart, Inkspell

When I first heard of Claudia Funke's Inkheart series, I heard wonderful reviews from other middle school English teachers and kept it in my mind. After reading the first two books, Inkheart and Inkspell, a few months later, I am declining to read the finale, Inkdeath. While I liked the first book well enough, Inkspell was a slog and I considered putting it down at multiple points after the first hundred pages.
The basic plot is that Mo, AKA Silvertongue, is father to Meggie and a bookbinder. He travels hither and yon, replacing binding on books. In the modern times, when mobile phones exist. While these service exist for libraries, specifically academic libraries that purchase books for over $100, this is not a common profession and lent an aura of unbelievability, even for a fantasy novel. This detail, and the way the characters from this world lived immediately irritated me, but I had heard good things about the series, so I opened my mind to a good story. Mo's wife is not around, and after a mysterious stranger appears, he finally tells Meggie where her mother is. When Mo reads aloud, he can read things and people out of books, but he cannot control how he does this, and something comparable leaves this world, presumably for the book. When Meggie was a baby, he was reading Inkheart aloud, and several character came out, and Meggie's mother disappeared. The characters from the book that came into this world include Dustfinger, a firebreather and dancer, Capricorn, a villain who wants Mo to read out another evil character, and some minions. The first novel concerns the defeat of Capricorn and has many amusing part with a book-worshipping aunt. The two books I read would appeal to most book and fantasy lovers. Inkheart concludes with some of the novel-within-a-novel's characters still in the real world, but most vanquished, and could have ended there satisfactorily.
Unfortunately, Funke decided to tie up every loose end, taking all the characters back into the fantasy novel, starting wars, creating political schemes, and generally dragging down the entire action. I finished the book, but very slowly, and only to see if I might be at all interested in the finale. I was not.
If you love all books and the topic of bibliophilia, and all fantasy novels, then you might enjoy the entire trilogy. I recommend reading the first novel. If you can't get enough, then continue. If you found it decent, stop where you are.

Farmer's Boy Food

Over at The Hairpin, Jia Tolentino documented every meal that Almanzo eats in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy, one of my favorites from the series. It's just as I remember, with lots of hearty food, and yet again, I was left wanting pie. All the pie.

Chaos Walking Series: The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, Monsters of Men

Patrick Ness's dystopian series Chaos Walking is great and original. I devoured them quickly, in large chunks. That being said, only a couple weeks after reading this series, I am already forgetting most of the details, including the protagonists' names. Toby and. . . completely forgot the girl's name. Upon checking, it's Todd and Viola. Oh right, I was annoyed by the single reference to Twelfth Night, but nothing after that.
The basic plot is fascinating. In The Knife of Never Letting Go, we're introduced to Todd, who is a couple months away from the birthday on which he becomes a man. He lives in a village on a distant planet the consists entirely of men. When settlers reached this planet, they were attacked by the alien inhabitants, who we defeat, but not before infecting the human with the Noise germ, which causes the thoughts of all men and animals to be audible, and killed all the women. When Todd is forced to flee his village and encounters a girl settler in the swamps, he discovers that the entire narrative of his life has been a lie.
In The Ask and the Answer, the story concerns how Todd and Viola, the girl settler, survive the burgeoning war between Todd home village and other villages, including plotting by the women healers and new discrimination against women. The series completes with Monsters from Men, in which the warring humans incite a new war with the indigenous Spackle. These two books have a shifting point-of-view between Todd, Viola, and even a Spackle, showing how the actions of beings are misinterpreted by others.
This series has many good qualities, the least of which is that Ness appears to have thought out all three books in advance, instead of tacking the last one and a half on to drag out the series (I can't yet speak for the free prequel, The New World). Unfortunately, the characters are completely forgettable, with little personality. In addition, the way they never learn from their mistakes annoyed me to know end. I totally recommend this series, but advise you not the expect your world to be changed.

Every Day

I have been trying to get a different book of David Levithan's for a couple months at my library, but they only had Every Day, so I grabbed that one. I am thrilled that I did, because this book is phenomenal and so original!
Every Day is told from the perspective of A, a soul (mind/human spirit?) who does not own a body. Instead this person involuntarily switches bodies at midnight, waking up in a new body each morning. The body always belongs to someone the same general age and within about two hundred miles, and never is visited again, but otherwise there is no pattern or continuity. A attempts to live the day as the person would have done so, but without mining his or her brain for too much information. A basically lives by the campsite rule, leaving each person as A found it. Of course, since this is a book, A's situation can't remain the as is. A falls in love with the girlfriend of a boy whose body he or she's inhabiting, and begins to change his or her ways. A begins to influence the bodies, making these people do things they might not ordinarily do, just to see this girl.
While the romance is interesting, the concept just blew me away. It raised up so many questions for me that would be great to explore with students. What is identity, when you've got to live a new life every day? What is the moral choice, to live the life of another every day, live your own life, or to try to improve the life of the person you're inhabiting? Does A have the right to try to have a relationship with this girl?
In addition, A's descriptions of their earlier life were fascinating. As a mother, I ached for a small child, learning that they're the only one living as a transient being with no body. I'm keeping an eye out for Levithan's accompanying book, Six Earlier Days, which appears to only be available in digital form. I've read a few of Levithan's other books by now, and so far this is the best.

The Silver Bowl; The Cup and the Crown

 

I have been wanting to read more fantasy for the upper elementary set, and Diane Stanley's The Silver Bowl and The Cup and the Crown satisfy my requirements for and original plot and complex character quite nicely. The books concern Molly, a girl sold into service to the royal family. As she works as a scullery maid, she learns of a curse on the royal family and her own psychic powers. Determined to save the young prince Alaric, she and her friends plan his rescue and attempt to lift the curse. The book has accurate and interesting details about the goings on behind the scene of a great castle that will appeal to young historians, and positive messages about loyalty and friendship. Molly is a plucky and resourceful girl, and the interplay between elements of fantasy and historical fiction are pleasant, almost making the book into magical realism.
Like most sequels, The Cup and the Crown is less engaging, though Stanley creates wilder adventures and more outlandish characters. Now Molly has been elevated in status, and the king sends her on a quest to find a Loving Cup so that he can propose and be assured of his betrothed's love. She and her friends trace her grandfather, a silversmith, back to his land of origin, where Molly learns of her family's history. While the original characters ring true, Stanley add in so many ridiculous storylines that the charm of the first book is almost lost. The ending is hurried, so there is likely a third book in the works. While I plan to read it, I will do so hoping that Stanley regains her simply narrative style and not longer neglects the realism of character that kept the first book grounded.

Sarah's Key

 

I suppose, in my mother's way of speaking, that I'm being punished for checking out a book right under another reader's nose. I should not have read Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key. That book has left me haunted and depressed. This is not to say that the book was not good. Let me explain.
The book consists of two alternating stories. Sarah, a Jewish girl from Paris, is part of the major round-up during the Holocaust. Not understanding her situation, she leaves her four-year old brother locked in a secret cabinet in their apartment to stay safe. She holds the key and is determined to rescue him before it is too late. Julia, an American ex-pat journalist, lives in Paris with her cruel, philandering, Parisian husband and becomes interested in the round-up of thousands of Jews held in the Veldrome d'Hiver and Sarah's story. She investigates what happened to Sarah as her marriage and life in France fall apart.
This is a powerful book about innocence lost, guilt, and the end of love. But as a mother to two children under five, there are certain things I can no longer read, that now horrify me and haunt me. While I am continuing to read and enjoy de Rosnay's other books, I wish I had left this one alone. Her language twists and turns beautifully, and she has a flair for description, but the imaginary reality of Sarah's Key is too much for me to handle.