Entertaining the Alien

37. Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, J. K. Rowling

I was late reading this, but will still endeavor to keep my comments spoiler-free. That said, ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH! Where's book 7?

Ahem.

In some ways, not as dark as OOTP, but in others, darker still. I think I'm going to need to sit down and read the series from cover to cover again, just to watch how things progress. As always, Rowling does an excellent job with the character's development, especially the kids. She writes them believably at whatever age they are. I'm glad Harry seems to have gotten over his angry-yelly phase.

Still a fan, and definitely eager to see what happens in the last book.

36. The Hedonism Handbook, Michael Flocker

What a delightful little bit of fluff this was. The central message, in case the title wasn't a giveaway, is this: Let go, enjoy life, relax. Here're some ways to do it.

Flocker takes a tongue in cheek look at various ways and reasons people have resorted to different vices, from sex to drugs to spending money to eating... and so on. Furthermore, he provides some excellent justifications for indulging in any or all of the above, depending on your preferences. Interestingly, he also suggests that moderation can be and is a vital part of a hedonist's lifestyle.

Definitely a cheerful little book, and anyone's bound to come away with a few more ideas of ways to have fun.

35. Captain Alatriste, Arturo Perez-Reverte

This is one of the books that came to my attention only because I found some reviews for it at work. After reading the first couple reviews, I knew I wanted very much to get my hands on it. It was quite an enjoyable little swashbuckler (especially coming on the heels of Allende's Zorro), and I look forward to reading more of the series, due out next year (they've already been published in Spanish, but the English translations are just starting to trickle out). My only complaint is that the ending seemed to come too abruptly. I know, it's part of a series, and there's more story to come, but even for a series novel, it felt too truncated. Or maybe that's partly because I zipped through it so quickly. In any case, my love of historical novels is being completely revitalized by this and a few other books I've read this year.

34. Against Depression, Peter D. Kramer

I found myself nodding emphatically for much of this book. It was a hard read, largely because there's a lot of technical stuff in it, but Kramer has a way of explaining depression that completely removes any and all stigma to it. If you want to understand major depression better, the large section where he explains, in fairly clear English, the current research on the disease is alone worth the price of the book.

He also takes an interesting look at the cultural history of depression as a sort of replacement for TB as a disease that only "refined" people suffer from. And of course, he deals with the old saw about "What if Van Gogh had been prescribed Prozac?", i.e., Artists Must Suffer For Their Art. That question, in fact, is what drove Kramer to write and book, and he dismantles that argument in favor of untreated depression pretty handily.

33. Zorro, Isabel Allende#

This is one of the few books I've heard on audio that I now HAVE to own a copy of. Blair Brown's reading was flawless, and her Spanish accent, at least to me, sounded perfect. The story itself is a literary rendering of the equivalent of a comic's origin story. We get to see how Zorro became Zorro, and what a trip it is. Allende does an excellent job of explaining how our hero came by his collection of skills, without sounding like she's trying to dryly explain some high character sheet stats (you gamers will understand that one).

Like all good swashbucklers, there's a lot of humor in Zorro, but there's a lot of pathos and adventure and excitement and romance too. Allende managed to work the formula without being formulaic. The identity of the initially unnamed narrator won't surprise anyone who's been paying attention, but by the time you get there, the narrator's identity doesn't matter nearly as much as the hero's. Definitely have to read this one again.

32. Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott

There just aren't enough words for my growing love of Anne Lamott. I know her brands of Christianity and spirituality aren't for everyone, but wow do they speak to me. She has a way of soothing my soul, of saying the things I need to hear, even if maybe I didn't want to hear them. I'd thought about grabbing the book and listing some quotes here, but there's just too much. There's too much goodness in this book to pick just one or two quotes.

I have almost nothing in common with Lamott, who is a single mother and recovering addict and alcoholic. What we do have in common is a belief in a God of love and social justice, and that all of the dogmatic crap people tend to get so bogged down in is a gigantic waste of time. She reminds me that Christianity can (and should) have room for everybody, regardless of our personal differences.

31. G is for Gumshoe, Sue Grafton

It always surprises me to discover that I enjoy the mystery genre. I rarely pick it up willingly (as was the case with this one--I was in a situation with nothing else around to read) with the sole exception of Agatha Christie. But I had fun with this book. It's pretty much exactly what you're looking for when you're looking for a series mystery. The dialogue is snappy, the main character is quirky and interesting, and the mystery gets solved in 250 pages or less. There was nothing deep here at all, just pure brain candy. I may surprise myself and go looking for a few more of the books in the series.

30. Eyeing the Flash: The Education of a Carnival Con Artist, Peter Fenton

Peter Fenton spent a portion of his adolescence working the games at a carnival--all of which are rigged. This memoir is fascinating, if perhaps of dubious veracity, as Mr. Fenton spent a long time writing for the Enquirer. It certainly painted a different pictures of the carnivals I remember going to and loving as a kid. As a matter of fact, as the carnival he describes in the book traveled throughout Michigan, chances are pretty good that at some point I went to the carnival he writes about.

The biggest trouble with the book, though, is that absolutely none of the characters are the least bit likeable, not even the narrator. One of the reviewers on Amazon commented that after he or she had finished the book they felt like they needed a shower--and that's completely accurate. Everybody in this memoir is greasy or slimy in some way or another, it's hard not to come away from it feeling a little soiled. Still, if you're a bundle of naivete (like me), it's an intriguing look at the other side of the world.

29. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey

Would you believe this is the first time I've read this book? I think I read one or two of the Pern books way back when I was a kid, but I know I didn't read this one. I enjoyed it in a faintly nostalgic "god I would have adored this when I was eleven" type way. It was a good study in worldbuilding, as well. In addition to getting caught up in the story, I found myself analyzing the ways McCaffrey communicated facts about Pern to the reader--and in fact, I may end up referring to it again as I try to fix up my own worldbuilding.

The characters were largely likeable, if a little two-dimensional. I was a little bothered by the constant references to a character's body size and the character traits associated with it--but that's a quirk of mine, and for some weird reason, every single book I read this weekend did something similar.

Anyway, I may pick up one or two of the other books in the series, out of curiosity.

28. The Working Poor, David K. Shipler

Yes, this book pissed me off exactly as much as I thought it would. Shipler does an excellent job of covering all the varied reasons for poverty, and shows that despite the politics of the matter, neither the Left nor the Right is exactly correct on what causes poverty and what should/can be done about it. I found myself outraged while reading this, but more, I found myself trying to think of ways that I could be part of a solution. I still haven't decided what I could do yet, but I'm thinking about it.

The class system in the US is so fucked up. We try to ignore it, and everybody thinks they're middle-class, no matter where they are or how much money they actually make, so as a result, nobody ever tries to address the actual differences in terms of expectations and upbringing and communication skills and values. Class does matter, even here, and it's time we start dealing with it.

27. Hotel Babylon, Anonymous & Imogen Edwards-Jones

Subtitled "Inside the Extravagance and Mayhem of a Luxury Five-Star Hotel", I read this expecting non-fiction. And supposedly it is, in the sense that everything described within really happened. However, it's written from a very narrative and fictionalized standpoint, compressing all of the events into a 24-hour period. This sort of stretches credibility a little bit, but doesn't make the book any less fascinating a read. In fact, it's worth noting that I picked the book up (which has been sitting waiting on my bookshelves for months) last night at about 5:30 PM, and minus a small break for dinner and some email-checking, didn't stop reading it until I finished at about 11:00 PM.

The stories of sheer excess are mind-boggling (whiskey that costs 750 pounds a shot), but my favorite surreal moment is when a drug-addled guest starts doing a striptease in the middle of the lobby at 5:00 AM.

Still, it's probably no accident (and is proving an interesting contrast) that the next book I picked up was David Shipler's The Working Poor.

26. Hammered, Elizabeth Bear

I'm a little ashamed that it took me this long to get a copy of this book and read it. I got to hear the author read a bit from it at WorldCon in September, and got really excited to read the rest. It wasn't until WisCon that I actually bought it and started reading. In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably note that I've met the author a couple of times and follow her livejournal regularly.

That said... wow. Usually anything even vaguely cyberpunky leaves me cold, mostly because emotions are not the focus of the genre, and it's hard to care about a lot of the characters. There have been two exceptions to this: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and now Hammered. Jenny Casey may be one of my new favorite SF/F characters. She's unabashedly tough and independent without turning into a man with boobs, like so many tough, independent women in fiction.

It was interesting that I found myself reading this on two levels, as a reader, and as a writer. I do that fairly often nowadays, but maybe because I read about Bear's process as a writer, I was more aware of it here. I was able to see how things worked, and why they worked, while at the same time, as a reader, feeling the effects that the author no doubt meant for me to feel. It was impressive as hell. I don't think I will wait nearly as long to get my hands on the follow up, Scardown, which comes out at the end of the month.

25. 'Salem's Lot, Stephen King*#

It's funny how audiobooks can help you rediscover books you already love. There have been several new audiobook versions of classic Stephen King novels recently, such as Carrie as read by Sissy Spacek (amazing!) and Salem's Lot, read by Ron McLarty--whom I had never heard of, before his first novel came out earlier this year, The Memory of Running. I don't know what kind of a writer he is, but he is an incredible audiobook reader. He's the type who does character voices, but does them so well that it's not obnoxious at all, and you can tell who's speaking even before he reads the dialogue attribution. I really enjoyed 'Salem's Lot when I read it for the first time (believe it or not) last year, but McLarty's reading added a whole new dimension. I got weepy in several places, because the characters became so heart-rending. And I finally got to hear the voices of the Maine oldtimers who populate King's books. Definitely worth checking this one out, particularly since it's unabridged.

(As a note, the list for 2005 is updated, but is tremendously out of order, and I doubt I'll go back and fill in comments for each book. It is, however, as complete as I can make it, and I'll add in any books I discovered that I missed along the way.)

49. Thinner Than Thou, Kit Reed

You know, when I saw this book I was really intrigued by the premise. Science fiction where the premise is a dystopian future that values body image above--almost to the exclusion of--everything else. Too fat or too thin, and you get locked up until the "problem" gets resolved.

I was excited to read this book. Unfortunately, by page ten, I was rolling my eyes.

Friends, this is a Bad Book. And it's bad on multiple levels. First of all, it's preachy as hell. And I say that as someone who, initially, agreed with Reed's premise (i.e., our nation's focus on body image is destructive). When you're preaching to the choir, and the choir is yawning and rolling their eyes? You're too preachy.

Second, Reed has a love affair with exclamation points and present tense in this book. Neither is a healthy relationship. The dialogue... well... I can tell that she's trying to go for ultra realistic dialogue, but here's the thing. Ultra realistic dialogue makes for horrible prose. Rendering every vocal pause, every 'um', every 'like', does not make your writing interesting. It makes Baby Jesus cry. Want proof?

"...We pay through the nose to look better and none of it really works... And every lousy bit of originated here. It's also. Agh. Ah." The woman is grieving. She can hardly get out the words. When she does they come up like a little fusillade of hair balls. "Ack. The endgame phase of Solutions is here."

This is a major dramatic moment in the book, and I spent it trying to figure out if the 'agh' was supposed to be back in the throat or farther forward. And also? 'Ack' will kill any dramatic tension around it.

Also, for a book that purports to be so body image positive, her portrayals of fat characters are absolutely appalling. Enraging, even. The character for whom we're supposed to have the most sympathy is an anorexic teenager. We're supposed to resent the people who are force-feeding her, resent anyone trying to 'cure' her. The fat characters, without a single exception, are presented as every negative stereotype you can think of--the literary equivalent of those horrible stock neck-down shots that accompany every news story about obesity. The fat characters are all utterly incapable of turning down food, they are helpless before it. When Annie (the anorexic--get it? get it? Annie the Anorexic?) is trying to flee the evil people who are making her eat, a fat girl named Kelly accompanies her (although, of course, she can barely walk and slows our heroine down). Kelly, although her life is in danger, absolutely has to stop and take the doughnuts from the sleeping guard. Because she can't resist. Because she's fat. Another fat character winds up in the custody of the evil fitness guru because his mother (whom he lives with, despite being an overwhelmingly successful executive) pushes him into a Barcalounger and flips up the footrest. And of course, he is too fat to get up by himself. I am not denying that people have been immobilized by their size, but you can't tell me that someone who clearly has no other issues as far as mobility is concerned could be turned turtle just by a recliner. This character replaces sex with food, and has some serious mommy issues. Aside from the characterizations, the language Reed uses to describe her fat characters is anything but accepting, and hints at a strong sense of disgust on her part. They don't walk. They waddle. They shuffle. The bigger they are, the less human Reed makes them, and in so doing, undermines her own message.

Finally, her worldbuilding makes absolutely no logical sense. In her world, religion has been literally driven underground by the all-powerful Reverend Earl, fitness guru. The United States government has apparently vanished from the face of the earth, and forget civil rights. All of this in a future so close to our own that people still drive cars and watch DVDs. How could anybody take a look at the world we live in and think for a minute that religion would be banished by fitness in the space of ten to fifteen years? Especially when there are increasing signs of religion combining with fitness? Who needs Reverend Earl and his theories of the "Afterfat" when we have televangelists preaching health and wealth doctrines, when you have diet books coming out that are essentially WWJE (what would Jesus eat)?

This book is so bad and infuriating, I've only just scratched the surface. It's poorly written and was, for me at least, offensive. I think I finished it only out of sheer stubbornness. And because every time I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, it did. I read books like these so y'all don't have to. Honestly.

48. Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller

This is a book I stumbled across at work, and it was honestly something of a revelation. Miller, a youth pastor about my age and writing for my generation, manages to describe a Christianity that's worlds closer to one I can reconcile, not only with my own conscience, but with what I know about the Bible. In doing so, he turns pretty much everything I was taught as a child on its ear.

Instead of a collection of rules and steps to follow to salvation, he says, Christianity should be a relationship between a person and God. Along the way, he expresses some pretty interesting opinions on things like the radical right and their political involvement, among other things.

Of course, I don't agree with him completely. He spends far too much time "reassuring" us that he does think things like homosexuality and premarital sex are sinful--an angle that really detracts from his overall message. Still, it was a pretty inspiring and thought-provoking book. I'm definitely going to check out his other works as well.