| Neil Gaiman, American Gods Shadow, recently released from jail, meets Wednesday, a strange old man who offers him a job running errands and protecting him. As he works his way around the Midwest, he finds that he is working for an old god who is trying to rally other old gods, some forgotten, some passé, to fight for their survival against the new gods of American life. If you don't mind that it's a fantasy, this book is worth a read. |
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| Jane Austen, Northanger
Abbey I must confess that I'd never read anything by Jane Austen until now. Why didn't anyone ever tell me how witty she was? I laughed out loud while reading this one. Austen tells the story of Catherine, a relatively simple girl who goes to Bath with family friends. While in Bath, she meets a brother and sister who invite her to visit their home, Northanger Abbey, about which Catherine has many fantastic ideas. Austen piles on the social commentary and satire in this one, and that's fine with me. Some of Catherine's wild ideas come from reading her favorite book, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. So I bought it. |
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| Ann Radcliffe, The
Mysteries of Udolpho I probably shouldn't write about this one before I even finish it, but I make the rules around here. I read Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly in my Resources for Young Adults class at Iowa. I think it was the first teen romance novel. And it's pretty painful. It's long, way too wordy and has no plot. The Mysteries of Udolpho is a Gothic romance. It's also pretty painful. It's long, way too wordy, but at least there's a plot. I'm on page 398 out of 632 after about six months. It's just not very engaging. Oh, and there's all kinds of flowery poetry thrown into it. I don't have much patience for that, so I skip it. |
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| Eric Schlosser, Fast
Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal A lot of people have read this book. And that's a good thing. I haven't had a fast food burger since I read it and I'm not sure I ever will. Schlosser documents how nearly everyone gets screwed by fast food, from farmers to consumers. McDonald's and Burger Kings are still closing all over the place. Da Mons thinks fast food's a thing of the past, something for the Boomers that even they're giving up as they age. Wishful thinking? Maybe. |
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| Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting
By in America I got this book at the same time as Fast Food Nation and read them back-to-back. This is one that I had wanted to read for quite a while. Barbara Ehrenreich is an author and homemaker who decided to investigate the conditions of the working poor by becoming one of them. She took jobs at Wal-Mart, a restaurant, a cleaning service, a hotel and a nursing home and then tried to live on the wages she made. Her experiences as a waitress were similar in many respects to my own experiences waiting tables. My only complaint with the book was the ease with which she quit some of the jobs. It was pretty easy for her to return to her upper-middle class lifestyle when she needed to. My good friend Manda, who was the one who reminded me that I needed to read this, said she doesn't view the Target workers in the same way at all. Read this book. |
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| Carl Hiaasen, Hoot Some lady brought a young adult book onto my bus! I was kind of excited about that because, as you might know, I focused on YA librarianship. This book was a 2003 Newbery Honor book and the folks that award those things know a lot more about books than I do. But I didn't really like it. I've wanted to read some of Hiaasen's other books, but never got around to them. And I still think I will, but not based on this one. I suspect that I'll think he should stick to writing for adults. Hoot seemed to me like a YA-by-numbers book. The kid's the new kid in town and kind of a loner. There's a mystery of sorts. There's a social message. (Yeah, it's borderline didactic- a warning for any children's book...) Etc. etc. etc. Mostly, I just wanted these people to tell each other what they knew. I didn't think the interaction between the kid and his parents and their interaction with everyone else was consistent at all. Anyway, enough of that. Don't bother. |
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| Dorothy Parker, Complete
Stories I should quit falling in love with dead writers, shouldn't I? |
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