Poppy L

Our August theme for my regular book club is “Tess Garritson” - Read any book of hers and discuss at the next meeting.

This was a decent mystery. A tad bit predictable - I guessed both of the villians of the piece before they were uncovered. Garritson knows her stuff - sometimes too well. I found it difficult to get started on the book as just three pages in she gives a fairly explicit description of an autopsy. Since I never intend to attend an autopsy and be able to remember it (the only one I hope to ever be at is my own!), and medical descriptions make me a bit nervous, I took the first few chapters slowly, and finally braced myself for the rest of the book.

Recommended to anyone who likes mysteries, conspiracies, and accurate medical depictions.

This is the first in a post-apocalyptic series taking place in my home, the Pacific Northwest. An excellent read, although this first book gets a little gritty in the details. Stirling's characterization is phenomenal - he's very good at writing anti-heroes, flawed heroes, and generally people who seem real - there's always some facet of their personality that you just know you'd hate about them if they were real.

Characterization aside, this is a great series. There's generally very little set in the Pacific Northwest, and knowing the places adds a fun element to reading this series. I'm hooked - I can't wait for book 4 to move to paperback!

I'm still reading this one, but I had a hard time putting it down. It's downright depressing in places, the way advertisers push to sell an image of cheerful housewify-ness when that's simply not reality, and the number of people who buy into it and start telling themselves it's the way things should be. A good read, but expect to gnash your teeth some!

Cimmorene is what every little girl should aspire to: smart, sassy, and independent. She'd rather run away and live with a dragon than marry the prince her parents picked out for her.

Good book. More review later.

SPOILER ALERT






Yeeeesssssss!!!! She FINALLY lets her character die. He's only been trying since the first book in the series....

We read this book for the October book club meeting. It was a cute book, with a lovely love story about the main characters preparing for their wedding. It's a shame about the murder.

This book should have been shelved in the romance section, and stands as an example of why some authors should not attempt to cross genres. This entire series about the Judge and the Deputy is characterized by some very cute love stories as two childhood friends fall in love, marry, and solve mysteries together. It's low on the mystery rating, though, as the love story takes precedence.

All in all, a very cute, very fluffy read.

I am very glad that this was a short book, so that it did not take too much time to read. He could easily have cut out about half of the book and not changed the story.

Aaron was a whiny character, who mostly just needed someone to smack him upside the head and explain that the world really isn't about him and maybe he should stuff his ego.

The last couple of chapters validated my dislike of Aaron, because evidently, the author didn't like any of his characters any better than I did.

Which is really too bad. I would have liked to know who actually killed Declan and why. And why on earth no-one had dug him up sooner, seeing as how he'd been buried in a GARDEN. And why both Kitty and Lolly were evidently completely insane.

I respectfully submit that the next time the author is tired of his own characters and story and wishes the quickest exit possible from his own creation, instead of rewriting it to make it more enjoyable, he try one of these plot devices:

“Suddenly, an out of control lorry crashed into the living room, killing all four of them instantly. Declan sat in the corner and grinned. The End”

“Suddenly, pirates landed on the beach and sacked the town. The End.”

Or “Suddenly, Vikings landed on the beach and sacked the town. The End.”

It's a bit unusual for a coming-of-age story set at a boarding school to be about one of the teachers.

The mystery was good - too slow, but good. The coming of age story, not so much. Almost as if she really should have written it as two separate books. I found it hard to care what happened to Charu and much preferred Nandita as a character. The “two stories in one” also made it difficult for Ms. Currimbhoy to give either story its proper due, and the mystery lacks for it. She spent so much time on the class differences in Charu's coming-of-age story that she failed to properly write the generation gap that drove the denuement of the mystery. As a result, understanding the ending is overly subtle - there, but only for those readers who can fill in what is not said regarding the generations.

There's an atmosphere to this story that feels like the air just before the monsoon hits - heavy, damp, and oppressive. It put me off, and it was a struggle to read the first half of the book. I had virtually no investment in the mystery of what happened to Moira - I had assumed from the start that she had jumped - until the revelation about Miss Nelson appeared.

I bought this book for the second half - on social media and its effects on human relationships - and so skipped the section on sociable robots. Perhaps I will go back and read this section later.

I was a little hesitant after reading the introduction - Turkle is a psychoanalytically trained psychologist, and I was afraid that her writing would be focused on completely unprovable psychoanalytic theories. However, her area of expertise only comes out in her insistence that it is human relationships that create growth - and while unprovable, this is not an extreme stand.

I appreciated the discussions with teens regarding the ubiquitousness of cell phones and the changes it has caused in their lives as compared to mine at a similar age. This is the first writing I have seen that admits that etiquette has changed such that a phone call is now considered the kind of intrusion that an unannounced visit once might have been. And I am intrigued and plan to do some thinking myself on Facebook as a performance medium - are we sharing our lives with our friends, or are we performing them?

This was a fabulous read. I tried to postpone reading it until I'd finished Montaigne's essays, and I'm very glad that I didn't. Bakewell provides a lot of backstory and history and context - things that a contemporary Montaigne reader would know, but we, 400 years later, don't have access to off the tops of our heads. Now I'm ready to jump in and start Montaigne over with a better understanding of the world he lived in.

Lots of information, lots of examples. Gives me a lot to think about, and I'm still processing what I have learned.

This will give me a good foundation in understanding similar books, written for a lay audience, and the underpinnings of some of the primary conflicts in our culture.

American politics is a struggle between people who believe that an 8th grade education should be sufficient to understand the issues facing us, and people who understand that it is not so.

American religion is a dichotomy between people who believe that understanding not only the Bible, but historical writings in religion and philosophy are important to understanding the word of God. And people who believe that faith and spirit are all you need to understand God's will, and in fact, that any study intended to instruct one in historical context will actually detract from faith and spirit.

American education has been, and continues to be, plagued by a misunderstanding of “democracy” - having high-achievers and low-achievers does not make a school undemocratic - as well as a very practical “preparation for life” curriculum which considers theory irrelevant in comparison to practice. Learning physiology, for example, has at times been considered less useful than learning how to exercise, although the latter is an extension of the former. It's not even so much that schools at varying points in the last 100 years have failed to teach students to think for themselves, it's that schools have at varying points assumed that the average student cannot think for him or herself.

This book was recommended to me in my Woman's Studies/Psychology class in college as a great depiction of how young girls betray each other on a constant basis. It does that. However, another of Atwood's books, [book: The Robber Bride] does better at describing the ways back-stabbing girls turn into back-stabbing women.

Interesting read. I read most of the book, but skipped Schopenhauer because I'm not brokenhearted and don't need his advice. Really appreciated the grounding in the ancient philosophers - Socrates and Epicurus in particular, as I've not read much of the Western Canon yet. However, the quotations aren't sourced in the book, which makes me suspicious that they've been cherry-picked to death. Obviously, they are cherry-picked, but without being sure what translation they're from or having a way to verify the context, I feel less trusting overall. And I'm uncomfortable with that, because I've developed some respect for de Botton after reading this book, his website, and the School of Life in London with which he is affiliated.

This was a quick read. Follows the coming of age of a set of friends in and near Dublin in the late 1950s. Overall, a character driven book, which I enjoy - it was the personalities of the people that pulled the story forward, not the circumstances they found themselves in. However, I did have some problesm with the believability of the characters and their motivations - in particular, I'm left scratching my head and wondering what exactly drew Simon to Nan - he's characterized as 30-ish, she's not quite 20. Sure, she's beautiful and dresses like an heiress, but it didn't really seem to be enough to drive their relationship forward.

I was disappointed with Jack's character at the end of the book - I really wanted Binchy to leave him a better person with more hope of improvement than she did.

What's amazing about KoD is that this is the book that convinced me that Jordan actually did have the series plotted out and that he did actually know which characters were where and doing what. Finally getting some questions answered in this book convinced me that he wasn't insane, just very devious. Sometimes, the distinction gets lost.

Dark and creepy mysteries. Family secrets. Brooding mansions. Dusty libraries. Crazy Bertha locked up in the opposite tower. Setterfield has pulled off a classic romantic mystery, although the worst her heroine Margaret suffers is a nasty cold from having wandered the gardens at night with no wrap. No knife-wielding crazy people chasing her, no suspicious young men befriending her, just an old lady who may or may not be telling her the truth.

Heavily influenced by the Bronte sisters and Yorkshire landscapes. If you thought Jane Eyre was stuffy or Wuthering Heights was creepy, you won't like this book.

I saw the movie first, and thought movie-Scarlett was insufferably snotty and selfish. The book really opened my eyes - what a strong, capable person whose only limitation was that she was expected to be so feminine. I have a lot of respect for book-Scarlett.

This book ended the series well. Very little trace of whiny and emotional Harry from Half Blood Prince remains - evidently, Dumbledore's death at the end of that book was enough to vault Harry out of the teenage angst he struggled with through most of that book.

I have to be fair - out of the whole series, in this book, the Campbellian themes are stronger than they've been since the beginning of the books. Harry is quite a little “Gary Stu”, and I'm still disappointed that a woman, writing a story that started out as a tale for her daughter, would make so few female characters to identify with, and to keep those as “the girl sidekick”, “the mother”, and “the girlfriend” is disappointing.

Still, anyone who's picked this series up expecting high-brow literature should expect to be disappointed. It's not. JKR is a good storyteller, and the end of the story managed to prove nearly all of the theories about how the story would end right.

I'm actually hoping - as good of a storyteller as she is - that her next series is about completely different people doing different things in a different world. I've heard some suggestions that she should write about the next generation of wizards, but I think that's overkill. Let Harry's story end here and let the fanfic writers go nuts with the next generation.

I've been pretty accepting of my introversion since I was young, but in recent years, juggling family, work, friends, etc., has made it difficult for me to set aside the time I need to process my experience.

Helgoe's book provided some useful things to consider, some good suggestions, and some emotional support. Sure, I needed to take a week off of as many activities as I could schedule myself out of to make space to think about her exercises, but any introvert reading this will understand what a blessing it was to have an excuse to do that.

Interesting and thought-provoking read, as all of Gladwell's books have been so far.

Unfortunately, the thoughts they have come to provoke are wondering how provable his theses are and how I would go about fact-checking them. There's a fine balance between too much proof, causing tedium, and not enough, causing disbelief. What he says about success rings true - but is it?

Cute story, but it was somewhat confusing... My dad handed this book to my mom and I, and told us both we had to read it. So I'm a little confused as to his motive. I'm hoping he's not planning on sending either of us to go sleep on park benches in Paris!

I didn't expect to enjoy this book at all, but it has a subtle charm. Violet is an intriguing character, and I really felt for her situation most of the way through. She had very little hopes for her life, and what she did have, she lost, but managed to pick up and find her path through anyway. I felt the end was a little unrealistic, but don't mind it so much.

This book and the author's lack of research irritated me. A simple Google search instructed me in the anthropological and historical background of Coyote as a Trickster character - and he's not from the Cherokee nations. I'm disgusted that the author couldn't have bothered putting even that much research into this book - this is the type of bad research that gives non-Native Americans a bad name. To be true to her character's background, she should have had Rabbit or Fox appear in Joanne's dreams to coach her through learning to become a Shaman.

Richardson's Greywalker books are fascinating. Just enough horror to fit in “urban fantasy”, while coming down firmly on the side of spooky instead of gory. I appreciate that while her protagonist has relationships, unlike Sookie, her relationships do not dominate her personality.