Olive Kittridge by Elizabeth Strout

The word that immediately comes to mind when I think of Olive Kittridge is melancholy...but it's a beautiful kind of melancholy. You know how it is when it's a rainy Saturday in the middle of the summer? When everything is silent and all you can here is the pitter-patter of the raindrops on the roof, on the asphalt outside? That's what this book is like. It's cool breezes and raindrops.

Olive Kittridge is the story of a small town...somewhere...Massachusetts? I have no idea. Somewhere on the East Coast, I know that. So essentially it's a collection of short stories about different members of the community but every short story ties back to Olive. She's one of the members that holds everyone else in the community together - even though individual members of the community appear to not like her very much.

I love the way that Strout told the stories. She told 95% of the stories - she got you to a certain point, told you a certain amount about the characters, and let you get the rest of the way on your own, let you form your own assumptions. I loved that. I loved how much she inspired me to feel and think about the characters she introduced me to.

This book has nothing to do, really, with what happens to the characters throughout their lives - it has everything to do with the characters themselves and how they react to the world around them, and that's why I loved it so much - it was a study in personalities, an exercise in human nature. Don't you love stories like that? When it's like you're a fly on the wall and you learn things about people that you normally wouldn't get to hear?

This isn't one of those books with a happy ending or an unhappy ending, because it's not really a story that ends - it's just about people. How fragile people are, how delicate their egos are. Kind of makes you feel small...I like feeling that way every once in a while.

The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

I must admit, when I first heard about the premise of The Hunger Games, I was not all that interested in picking it up. It's a story about the North America of the future - when the United States have disbanded and the new government ("The Capitol") has divided North America into 13 districts. There's an uprising in District 13 that leads The Capitol to create an annual tournament called the Hunger Games, to which each district must send one male and one female "tribute." The tributes are locked in an arena specially designed for the games and must remain there, fighting each other and the elements until only one remains, essentially just to show that the government has ultimate control over the lives of all its citizens. Sounded a little bit sick and twisted to me, but so many people recommended it to me that I figured I had to give it a shot.

And I was so happy I did. I devoured The Hunger Games, and then went out and bought the sequel (Catching Fire) within an hour of finishing the first book. Yes, the subject matter is sick, but the story is great. It's YA fiction (like the Twilight Saga) so there's plenty of drama. Lots of twists and turns - and it isn't as gruesome as you might expect. Collins tells the story she wants to tell without relying on blood and guts as much as she could have. I literally found my heart racing during tense moments in the plot, which I think is evidence of great writing. I also always think it's fun to read books set in the future - you've gotta wonder, what's going to happen? Look at how much the country and society have changed in the past 50 years, 100 years - which is such a relatively short amount of time - what's going to happen in the next? Your guess (or Collins') is as good as mine - but let's hope Collins isn't spot on.

I can't tell you much about Catching Fire without giving up information about The Hunger Games, but one criticism I will throw out there is this - I think Collins should have only written two books instead of three. Mockingjay - the final book of the series - is due out in late August. Granted I haven't read Mockingjay, so I can't say whether she could have fit all of the material into two books, but Catching Fire was definitely a transitional text. The first half of Catching Fire was spent wrapping up The Hunger Games, and the second half was spent setting up Mockingjay. Maybe Mockingjay will be able to stand on its own, and the set up needed to be left to another book to cut down on the length - but I felt like Catching Fire should have been divided into an Epilogue and a Prologue for the two other texts. Letting it be a book on its own, giving it that weight of expectation (especially after all the action of The Hunger Games), sort of set it up to fail. I felt like it couldn't carry the amount of story that it needed to. Was it released in that way to build anticipation and set the stage for sales of Mockingjay? Maybe, but I think The Hunger Games really ensured the success of its sequel through its own success.

All that said - don't miss out on Catching Fire. Just because it was used to bridge what I assume are going to be two great books doesn't mean it doesn't tell an important part of the story. Don't miss out on either of them...go get them now (I'll wait for you to come back). Perfect poolside reading for the summer!

Recommendations for all my teacher friends...

Check out this list of memoirs re: the first year of teaching...

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

During the week or so that I was reading The White Queen by Philippa Gregory, when people asked what I was reading and how I was liking it, I told them the title and then I followed it up with what I usually say about Gregory - she basically writes drugstore smut and disguises it as historical fiction.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Does it seem like that's a recurring theme? I read books that are basically some varying degree of chick lit, but if you don't look out you could actually learn something in the process - but maybe that's really the point of reading. Food for thought.

ANYWAY, overarching themes aside, Gregory is done with writing about the Tudor dynasty of England and has moved on to the Plantagenets and the House of York (the dynasty that came before the Tudors). This book is the first in a new series - and I'm sure it'll be just as good (and popular) as the series about the Tudors.

This book focuses on Elizabeth Woodville - "The White Queen" - who was rumored to be a witch, or at least have tendencies towards witchcraft, which are explored in the book and add a new element to Gregory's writing. I didn't particularly enjoy that aspect of the book - it felt like Gregory was using it as a crutch to add an additional element of excitement to the story, whereas usually the brilliance her books (as far as I know, let's be real, I'm not any historical expert) is that they just rely on the known facts about the historical figures to build her stories. I kind of thought that her whole point was that there was enough drama in the truth and therefore there was no need to spice it up. Granted, she has to take some liberties in writing her dialogue - it's not like that was recorded anywhere - but this just felt like more than usual. That may be a welcome departure for some people - so don't let me turn you off from reading the book entirely. Just a comment.

As in all good drugstore smut, there is romance and intrigue. There's war, there's royalty, and as stated before there's witchcraft. Pretty good elements that add up to a pretty good story.

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant

So, did I give Sacred Hearts a ringing endorsement by forgetting that I had read it for 5 months?

Should you read it? Yeah, if you're looking for something entertaining that won't make you think too hard. You also might just learn something about history in the meantime.

The basic story is that there's a young woman named Serafina (that's her nun name...I don't recall her "real" name) whose father forces her to enter the convent to avoid her having a scandalous love affair with her voice coach. Serafina has a wonderful singing voice, so the convent is invested in her staying so that they will receive increased donations from the public who come to hear Serafina sing in the choir. There's a lot more politics involved in the running of a convent than I would have previously imagined, but I suppose one has to realize that politics are everywhere. Dunant is a talented author - her use of description and detail really transport you to the historical setting (16th century Italy) - and she manages to make the reader care about a romance between a young woman and a man who we never really meet.

There's suspense, there's romance. It was a great vacation read as I drifted around the lazy river at the resort, but the story is over the second you close the back cover. If you're looking for something that will stay with you, this probably isn't it. I like to think of certain books as rebound books - the kind that you read after a book that greatly impacted you in order to "get over" the previous book - this is one of those.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert

Listen, Gilbert. I tried. I really did. I tried, and tried, and tried to read your sophomore novel, even while being tempted by all the other great books that are out there.

I couldn't deal with it. I don't mean to typecast you as an author, but you wrote, and we loved Eat, Pray, Love. Why couldn't you just continue in the same vein?

I couldn't finish. It's pretty rare that I leave a book unfinished. Committed (at least as far as I read) was basically a whiny account of the fact that Gilbert's lover (the man she met in EPL) was barred from entering the United States, so they had to get married to get him citizenship, a move that they never saw on their horizon previously. While plotting how they were going to pull off said marriage without being able to get him back into the US, they traveled around the world and studied marriage in different cultures around the world. That's as far as I got.

My bottom line is this -- I feel like she set out to write something when she wrote EPL. When she wrote Committed, though, I think she just set out to write anything. And there's a big difference.

The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - very good. In my opinion, not as good as the original, but good nonetheless. I think one of the best parts of the original book was how intertwined everything/everyone was. The same plot device exists to a certain degree within this book, but not with the same intricacy, which was a bit of a disappointment. That said, though, still better than the majority of the books I've read recently. So should you read it? Yes.

The main players are back - Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander - but while the last story focused much more on Mikael Blomkvist and his vendetta, this one is the story of Lisbeth's. I think my favorite thing about Lisbeth is just how unlikeable she is. I think she's an especially interesting female character given that she was created by a man, but I love that she is so complicated and generally just...prickly. I don't always consider myself to be the most simple or likeable person, so I found it easy to relate to Lisbeth (even though yes, I will agree she is a little more extreme than I am in pretty much every sense of the word).

I don't want to tell you too much about the plot - I want you to discover it all on your own - but basically there's a murder, someone is framed for said murder, and the whole thing winds itself up and then works itself out from there. Same pace as the first novel (extremely fast paced), same great characters, just not quite as many connection points in the web.

The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes

Long story short: I expected more from Marian Keyes.

I love Keyes' work and have read everything she's published. I was disappointed in this book. It's basically the story of the inhabitants of one apartment building - kind of the "Love Actually" of books in that you meet a cast of characters and then eventually figure out how A is related to B who is related to C, so on and so forth. Six degrees of separation, etc. It's told from the point of view of...I don't know what to call this narrator. If I were to say exactly what he/she is, I'd give away the ending of the book, so I can't do that, but basically it's a third-person omniscient narrator.

The voice of the narrator is a little too peppy/optimistic for me, especially when contrasted with the actual characters in the novel - each of whom is supremely screwed up in their own way (not at all saying this isn't realistic).

All in all, I don't think I'd recommend this book, which hurts to write about Marian Keyes. Usually her work is slightly depressing/serious but all in all optimistic...but this time the positive doesn't really outweigh the negative, both in terms of the subject matter and the writing.

Sorry, Marian.