Review: Klee Wyck

Klee Wyck by Emily Carr

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



That was really lovely. She describes the scenes well and I pictured what I remember about the forests and sea around Vancouver Island as I read.



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Review: The Little Blue-Eyed Vampire from Hell

The Little Blue-Eyed Vampire from Hell by Richard Ellis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Though occasionally over my head, this was really interesting. I'm ready for Kait's questions about Cephalopods now.



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Review: Holidays on Ice

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



This weekend I didn't venture out until Sunday afternoon book club/brunch. We read David Sedaris's Holidays on Ice - I wasn't a huge fan of the book, but the discussion was still interesting.

2014 - reread SantaLand Diaries. Alone it's a four star read for sure. Almost laughed hard enough to knock Kait off the nipple while she was nursing.



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Review: A Vampire's Christmas Carol

A Vampire's Christmas Carol by Cynthia Eden

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



A Christmas Carol with vampires, demons, shapeshifter a and a guardian angel. And sex. If you're into vamp porn, this one is pretty good.



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Review: Rho Magna, the Laotian War Dragon

Rho Magna, the Laotian War Dragon by Mark Berent

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Technically, there were some issues. Typos, missing commas, some awkward verb tense usage. In a short story, not too hard to ignore. There was a good emotional gut punch to the writing, and though I haven't been to alias, I learned a lot about the Ho Chi Min Trail while I was in Vietnam. There's an excerpt for the novel, Phantom Shadows, which was a bit too much plane talk for me, but the story wasn't bad at all. I'm fairly sure I got this as an Amazon freebie - I'd check out the author further, if another freebie came up.



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Review: All the Time in the World

All the Time in the World by Shiloh Walker

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



This is basically just a sex scene with a few hints of the world of the Grimms. I'm curious enough to read the first of the series, but in no rush.



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Review: Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The first section on life in the concentration camps was interesting and moving. The second section on logotherapy was a bit less interesting to me, though I generally found it well explained.



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Review: Santa Is Coming to Colorado

Santa Is Coming to Colorado by Steve Smallman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was Kait's first Christmas Eve read. I want to start the tradition of the Christmas Eve box: new pjs for everyone, a book for her, a movie and popcorn, hot chocolate, candy etc to go with it. I don't think we will be in Colorado for too long, so I liked the idea of a local book like this that we can revisit when we tell her stories about when she was a baby here. And as a bonus, the story was cute too.



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Review: The Thing Beneath the Bed

The Thing Beneath the Bed by Patrick Rothfuss

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



My brother got me this for Christmas and it is wonderful. For the first third, I was thinking that I didn't see why it wasn't for children. Then it took a turn. But everything was ok again for a moment until it took another turn. I disk not see that coming.



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Review: The Egg

The Egg by Andy Weir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



That was quick and fun- a very short story with a very big idea.



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Review: The Raven

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I've read this before, but it happened to be on my kindle and I thought I'd reread before deleting it. I love the flow and rhythm. It's a fun little poem.



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Review: Dates From Hell

Dates From Hell by Kim Harrison

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I read the Claire Switch Project and it was rather meh. I'll return to read the others at some point but I'm in no rush.

Undead In The Garden of Good and Evil was much better, but since that was my first taste of Kim Harrison; it was also confusing. Living vampires vs. undead vampires? I've no idea what's going on in this world, but I'm curious to read further now. Bit too much sex, though. Reminded me of the Anita Blake I read.

Chaotic by Kelley Armstrong was my favourite. The world sounds fun and both of the characters are appealing. Plus, the author's Canadian and I always mean to read more Canadian authors.

Dead Man Dating was the only story by an author I hadn't heard of and was the second best of the bunch.



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Review: The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



"Neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species "

And so starts off a very book-driven story, which I hadn't been expecting. Characters bond over books, talking about how exciting it is to live in an infinite fiction. I was also surprised by how funny the book is. The line "Your driving is unpleasant, but it isn't technically unsafe" made me actually laugh out loud.

I loved the father's take on the meaning of life:

"That's what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased towards consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed."

If the bookishness and humour of the book surprised me, it wasn't as much as the fact that it made me cry. I could blame the breastfeeding hormones, but there were tears. And not about anything I might have expected going in. There was a line about her mother saying when she almost died that she wouldn't be a mother anymore and it just hit right at my heart. And then that turned out to be a key issue to be resolved at the end. Hard thing to read while nursing and cuddling an infant.

I read this in the course of a day for an in-person book club. The plot struck me as rather silly at times (the whole trip to Amsterdam) or obvious (Gus's health) but the humour won me over.



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Review: Don't Eat Cat

Don't Eat Cat by Jess Walter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Hilarious short story that packs a few good dystopia punches too.



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Review: The Works of Edgar Allen Poe Volume 2

The Works of Edgar Allen Poe Volume 2 by Edgar Allan Poe

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I think I've now read Poe's most famous stories, which is interesting since I've got vol.s 1, 3 and 4 to go. A few of the stories were really similar to each other - for example The Tell-Tale Heart and the one earlier in the collection where the character does almost exactly the same thing at the end. I do like how he has this long lead up to what's going on because in the good stories, this adds to the suspense. In the ones I liked less though it was really tedious.

Let's blame the baby for the fact that this was meant to be read in October, as my plan was to read a volume each year. Didn't expect it to take until December! Oops.



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Review: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is a powerful read for Thanksgiving day. First off, it is so true in our present society that so much of our happy lives is based on the suffering of others. Capitalism has resulted in some horrible situations around the world. It's also a powerful read with everything going on in Ferguson right now. The description of the young people's outrage at injustice being dissipated because of a concern instead for their own happiness struck me as similar to how children learn to look away from racism and unfairness as they age.



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Review: A Book of Nonsense

A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Finished this ages ago and apparently forgot to review it. It was alright - amusing.



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Review: The Wolf: A Novel

The Wolf: A Novel by Lorenzo Carcaterra

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The mafia take on terrorism. Entertaining. Ridiculously silly but a pleasant distraction.

I took a long time to read this, but it was entirely circumstances. I started this the night I went to a lactation class. The next day I was induced and the baby took over my life. Then I picked it up one night while Kait was cluster feeding. Finished it by the time it was light, nursing the entire time.



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Review: A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924

A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I started reading this book 13 months ago. The oddest series of things have kept me from finishing it until now. At first, I bought it thinking I'd read it and send it to my father last Christmas. I started it on my week of summer vacation - only to be sidetracked when the plumbing in our apartment died and we had to move with virtually no notice. I picked it back up leading up to Christmas. Sure, it would be a bit late, I thought, but I was working 12 hour days with these nice long lunches and I thought I'd read it in the coffee shop next to work. I tried, but every time I'd finish my meal and the biggest coffee they had and I'd still fall asleep on top of the book. I was thinking I'd gotten old - it wasn't the book after all. I loved the book - history that read like fiction almost, it was so engrossing. Turns out, of course, that I was pregnant and that was the cause of the constant napping. Then I thought I'd send it to Dad for his birthday, so I had to finish it by June. I took it with me on the plane when I moved from Seoul to Colorado and it just sat there. No job, and yet I didn't read it. But a rough pregnancy left me with zero concentration - I didn't even like having to sit through an entire movie, much less plow through hundreds of pages of revolution. Turns out, all I needed to do to finally finish this book off was start breastfeeding. I've been reading it out loud to Kaitlin while she eats, and she's a slow eater.

It's a fantastic book. I learned a great deal. And possibly I've started educating a new little socialist.



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Review: Ricochet: Two Women War Reporters and a Friendship Under Fire

Ricochet: Two Women War Reporters and a Friendship Under Fire by Mary Jo McConahay

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Fantastic. Not just an examination of the lives of a reporter and photographer reporting on the war in El Salvador, but also an examination of friendship and the changes that can rock the foundations of friendship. Well-written and fascinating.



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Review: Medic Against Bomb: A Doctor's Poetry of War

Medic Against Bomb: A Doctor's Poetry of War by Frederick Foote

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Some of these poems really moved me, some really confused me. I suppose that's unsurprising, as I'm not much of a poetry reader. Overall, it was interesting but I think I prefer poetic prose to poetry itself.



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Review: Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I don't think I could have picked a better book with everything that's going on if I tried. It's not just that with the gestational diabetes and the needles and the stress that I needed a good laugh, but that it turns out there's a chapter in this book all about Jenny Lawson having to give herself needles in the belly while she was pregnant. I'd never met anyone who'd had to do this, or even heard about it and it was reassuring to learn that I'm not the only one to be freaked out at the possibility of hitting the baby with the needle.

Plus, as I told Wyatt, it's funnier than small pox.



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Review: The Speckled Monster

The Speckled Monster by Jennifer Lee Carrell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This book was so damn good. Granted, I LOVE stuff like this. They should make all the anti-vaxers read it, really, so they understand what exactly is at stake when one chooses not to vaccinate. It's such an easy read too, with endnotes that explain where the author filled in the details and extrapolated from what is known.



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Review: War of the Gods

War of the Gods by Justine Borrego

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



So, that wasn't very good at all. Nothing really ever happens in this book. I'm an adult and I'm not sure I really get how the kid beat Zeus and Jupiter at the end. Too much telling, not enough showing. Too much travelling across the sea, not enough actual action. And it's not like there was character development instead of plot either.



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Review: Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy

Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy by Karen Foxlee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



So freaking good. So good, in fact, I put it on the baby registry, because I kept picturing myself someday reading it to Kaitlin. It's a lovely modern fairy tale about a very scientific-minded girl who ends up having to believe in magic in order to save the world, and at the same time, her family. Charming.



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Review: Lilly Babysits Her Brother

Lilly Babysits Her Brother by Brenda Bellingham

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Meh. If I had a child who had a severe allergy, or a sibling with one, I might buy this for them. But in general, I found it too lesson-based and not interesting enough narrative-wise.



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Review: Phoebe's Way

Phoebe's Way by Pamela Ditchoff

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



For the first part of the book, I was super annoyed by the dog narration. Particularly the repetitive way each chapter started. About halfway through though, I became interested enough in the individual histories to not mind at all.



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Review: Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices

Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices by Kirstin Cronn-Mills

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This was a good introduction to transgender issues. It alternated chapters of people's lived experiences with chapters on issues. I found the latter to be a bit on the basic side but I enjoyed reading the people's stories.



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Review: The F- It List

The F- It List by Julie Halpern

My rating: 0 of 5 stars



I like it when teenagers in novels remind me of students I've taught. These teens masturbate, smoke, swear, and have sex. The plot line was occasionally a bit much - that's a lot of death and illness surrounding one teenager - but overall, I found it interesting and moving.



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Review: Honey Bee's Adventures at Wilderness Pond

Honey Bee's Adventures at Wilderness Pond by Cathryn Carman Davis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I really liked the language and the rhyming, but felt like the storyline needed a bit more.



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Review: The Little Moose Who Couldn't Go to Sleep

The Little Moose Who Couldn't Go to Sleep by Willy Claflin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I really liked the story line and the illustration. Wasn't very keen on the attempt to dialect the language.



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Review: Captain Courage and the World's Most Shocking Secret Book 2

Captain Courage and the World's Most Shocking Secret Book 2 by Stacey a Marshall

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Children's stories tend to have two main elements - to entertain and to teach. I thought this one was too much in the direction of teaching the lesson, without enough entertaining. Granted, I didn't read this one with a child, so perhaps they'd be more amused by it than I was. Still, I really enjoy children's literature and this one didn't do much for me. Just as the Goodreads rating suggests, this one was just ok.



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Review: The Deja Vu Experiment

The Deja Vu Experiment by J.G. Renato

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Wait, what? WTF did I just read? First off, Diana is the most impressive sounding waitress from Iowa who ever existed. Who knew waitresses from Iowa had all the answers to how to live your life? Secondly, is this New Age mumbo-jumbo wrapped in science or...? Yeah, that wasn't what I was expecting, in the least. And I'm probably the worst possible reader for it, seeing as spirituality is really not my thing.



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Review: Let's Tell This Story Properly

Let's Tell This Story Properly by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, this short story tells the tale of Nnam, whose husband was hiding a second family in Uganda.



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Review: The Foot Soldier, a novella

The Foot Soldier, a novella by Mark Rubinstein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I got this for free from Netgalley. It was a well written novella about Vietnam. I enjoyed how the ending and the title come together.



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Review: Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I didn't expect the kid to be such an asshole. I wish I'd read this with some students, because I'm curious about how they'd respond to him - would they see that he's quite a bully, while himself worrying about being bullied?



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Review: The Story of the Red Cross

The Story of the Red Cross by Krishna Satyanand

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Sometimes I download random books - I'm not even sure where this came from or why. Now that I'm choosing my next book at random (Wyatt picks a page, I read the shortest book on my Kindle list on that page), it's getting, well, interesting.

This is clearly a children's book, but I won't lie, I learned things from it. I'm going to poke around and see if I can find Dunant's A Memory of Solferino, because I think that would be quite an interesting read.



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Review: Dirty Cop

Dirty Cop by Kyle Adams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This was an amazon freebie. I get an email that alerts me to deals and based on whatever the blurb was, I downloaded this. Turns out it's MM erotica -not what I was expecting, but it was a decently written short story.



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Review: Where There's Smoke

Where There's Smoke by Jodi Picoult

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



That was quick and fun, though I wouldn't normally be all that interested in psychics.



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Review: Swift as Desire

Swift as Desire by Laura Esquivel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I really enjoyed this..an interesting look at Mexico and a sweet love story.



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Review: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



These fables are hilarious.



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Review: The Vampyre: A Tale

The Vampyre: A Tale by John William Polidori

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Now that was fun. Also short, which is what I'm going for right now. Pregnancy seems to have left me with little reading focus - or focus of any kind, actually. Right now I pick a number at random, go to that page on my Kindle list of books and read the shortest thing on the page.



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Review: Fairy Tales from the Arabian Nights

Fairy Tales from the Arabian Nights by Anonymous

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The tales were fantastic and aside from Sinbad, I'd never even heard of any of them. I'll have to read the rest one day.



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Review: A Fatal Grace

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Loved it. The characters of Three Pines are so much fun, as are all of the detectives. It feels like the kind of town I'd like to live in, in spite of my general dislike of small towns. The mystery was fun, in that there were parts I guessed well in advance, but the over all answers escaped me. It was slightly odd to read such a winter book in the summer though.



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Review: Menace

Menace by Gary Fry

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I clicked on this randomly while scrolling through my Kindle book list. I really quite enjoyed it, although I found the ending disappointed. The suspense had built up quite nicely, only to hit an anti-climatic end.



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Review: The Magiker

The Magiker by Charles Dennis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I really liked this - found the plot and characters interesting and enjoyed trying to figure out how it was all going to go horribly wrong.



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Review: Kilingiri

Kilingiri by Janna Gray

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



It's hard to express what I didn't like about this book, exactly, except that it felt like the narrative just went from tragedy to tragedy without enough emotional impact of each. It has what I call Party of Five syndrome - too many bad things happening to one family making the whole unbelievable. I did enjoy all the exotic settings.



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Review: The Grrrl of Limberlost

The Grrrl of Limberlost by Annie Pearson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This was okay. It took me something like a third of the book to really see what was going on - if I didn't have such long stretches of reading time right now and an anal need to finish all books started, I might have given up. But I did come to be interested enough in the main characters to enjoy the rest of the book.



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Review: The Boy in the Suitcase

The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbøl

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I accidentally clicked on this on my Kindle while looking for something else, but it drew me in immediately. First, because the switching between the various characters without much information put me right into the story before I knew what was what and secondly, because I found the main character, Nina, intriguing. I hadn't realized it was the first in a series, but I look forward to the next one, especially since I read this one in half a day, between spurts of napping. This baby growing is tiring.



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Review: The White Dragon

The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Reread - April 2014 - I had forgotten how much I love this book in particular. It shifts the series significantly in a new direction and Jaxom is one of my favourite characters.



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