Playground by 50 Cent: #tbt review

(Finished April 25, 2015)

Butterball is a 13-year-old playground bully who has just landed another kid in the hospital. And he's absolutely not interested in telling his therapist, an out-of-touch white lady, what happened and why. His mom has made him move to Long Island with her when all he wants to do is live in the City with his dad, nobody will leave him alone about his weight, and he pretty much has nothing to say to anybody. 

I started reading this book with almost literally no idea what to expect. I was being a good librarian and deliberately reading outside of my wheelhouse. When I walked over to the Young Adult section, this book happened to be displayed with its very eye-catching cover facing out. So I picked it up, read the teaser on the back, and decided to go for it.

It turned out to be completely engaging—at first because the narrator manages to be such a complete idiot and yet display this intriguingly sharp, dry sense of humor, and then because I wanted to know what had happened on that playground, and then because I needed to know why and what would become of him. Little drawings throughout gave me a sense of what Butterball's world looks like to him. This, and the richness, realness, and effortless-seeming naive charm of Butterball's narrative of his own life, kept me right there with him—when being a mom of a teenager, and a white lady of a certain age, might have tempted me to empathize more with his mom or with his therapist.

This is a quick read that reminds you what trauma can do to kids, what their resilience looks like from within, and that there is such a thing as redemption. Highly recommend.

A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising by Raymond A. Villareal

read by Jim Meskimen, Christine Lakin, Robert Petkoff, full cast

I wanted a trashy vampire novel, and that’s exactly what I got: plenty of yummy World-War-Z-style bang for my buck. It takes place in the very near future—In fact it begins right now, in 2018, and goes on for a few years—with a scientist from the CDC being asked to investigate a mysterious corpse which mysteriously vanishes before she can lay eyes on it.

Fortunately, the mortal remains of another person exhibiting the same symptoms, posthumously of course, is available for her examination. And then—whee!—that one disappears too, and the fun begins.

The comparisons I’ve seen elsewhere to World War Z are apt, but an even more apt comparison would be Stand on Zanzibar. The POV shifts among characters, but news and pop culture are also part of the narrative, and that news and pop culture sound an awful lot like today’s. This isn’t just a joy ride, though it is that; it’s also a straight-up satire about social stratification and political correctness (sorry, fellow liberals, we’re the pearl-clutching dodos here who are too PC to call a gloaming a gloaming, even for our own very obvious good) and racism/ableism/otherism.

The book does get just a little muddled in the last third or so. The number of characters and subplots is definitely on the high side, right from the start, and at a certain point my brain got a little tired of trying to keep them all straight. I started to regret not having taken notes from the beginning! Nevertheless, I was entertained enough not to mind too much, and I just let myself be confused by the confusing bits and kept going. Also, this problem will be solved in the (hopefully) inevitable movie version, when you can *see* all the characters.

It was a fun ride. Four out of five stars.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson: #tbt review

(Finished September 24, 2015)

If you love good, hard science fiction, this book is for you. If you love The Expanse or Battlestar: Galactica, this book is for you. If you love a good apocalypse, like I do, this book is for you. If you loved Snow Crash and The Diamond Age but felt meh about Stephenson's alternate-history stuff, this book is for you.

It doesn't hark back to those earlier, less messy, shorter (all things being relative) tales—but the plot, while sprawling, is clean, with no gratuitous elements, and the characters are compelling again. Thank goodness; I used to love Neal Stephenson's work, and it's wonderful to be able to love it again.

There's damn little else I can say about this book without spoilers. It's incredibly plot-driven, and yet it manages to have real—really lovable as well as really despicable and really complex—characters throughout. Not to mention one major appearance by a thinly-veiled actual person, who happens to be one of my favorite living celebrities. My mind was blown on numerous occasions while reading. I was more deeply sucked-in to this book than I have been in a long, long time. 

It gripped me in much the way that Battlestar: Galactica (the modern series) gripped me: I cared too much about the people in this book, and their plight was too desperate, for me to be able to stop reading before I knew what became of them all. There were a number of nights that I stayed up far too late reading this because I HAD TO KNOW how a situation would resolve itself before I could compose myself for sleep.

The ending... well. It fizzles just a bit. I can't say anything about it without wrecking the book for you, but I will say that the last few hundred pages, though clearly Stevenson did a lot of thinking about how things would pan out, just weren't as vividly painted as the rest of the book. And the characters didn't shine through in the same way. And—well. I can't say more. It was a perfectly fine ending, satisfying, but not up to the standard of the rest of the book.

But that's because the rest of the book set an incredibly high standard. Read this. Truly. That is all.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

Read by Nick Podehl

I am so mad at this book, I don’t know where to start. It began so well, and kept getting even better—

This is a YA science fiction novel that’s so well-conceived and beautifully written that it has tremendous crossover potential (crossing over both into adult SF, and SF for non-SF readers). It starts in a failed colony on a planet called New World. The protagonist, Todd Hewitt, is a month shy of his 13th birthday, and he’s the last child in a dying town—a town populated entirely by men, because the women all died shortly after Todd was born.

Surprisingly, that’s not even the worst of it. In this town, the men all broadcast all of their thoughts and feelings all the time—they can’t help it. They call it Noise, and there’s no escape from it. Even the animals produce Noise: the germ that caused it in humans (and killed all the women) infected pets, livestock, and native species as well.

As the book opens, our protagonist is outside of town foraging for fruit when he hears… silence. For the first time in his life. He has no idea what to make of it—and before he can figure it out, the silence moves.

I can’t say more than that without giving away too much; this book is super plot-focused. But it explores, with fierce courage and without ever, ever lecturing or talking down even a tiny bit, the nature of love, and violence, and truth, and manhood, and gender, and guilt, and of course communication. I found the story deeply compelling, and the characters incredibly moving and real.

And then that goddamn ending. I’m not sure I can describe it as a cliffhanger. The author didn’t introduce a new plot element or storyline and then leave you to wonder where it could lead; instead, he got you so worried and worked up about what kind of resolution he was leading to—and then he just ended the book. Nothing’s resolved, the tension is sky high, and sayonara. Want more? Read the next book.

There is a next book. And I will be reading it, once I’m done being mad about this one. But, dammit, this is not how a cliffhanger is done. Clearly this should have been one longer book, not two shorter ones.

I’m not sure what led the author and/or publisher to decide to end this book like this. I suppose they get more money for two shorter books than for one longer one? I hate to impute such a motive to someone who has written what is, apart from that, a wonderful, empathic, utterly alien and utterly human story. But I don’t know what else it could be.

Do read this book. I recommend the audiobook version, if you like that sort of thing; the narrator is spot on. But plan on having book two, The Ask and the Answer, on hand for when you finish. Otherwise you may well end up throwing The Knife of Never Letting Go across the room. Hard enough to break something.

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki: #tbt review

(Finished April 22, 2015)

I don't often sit down and take in a whole book, even a short one, in one sitting anymore, but this was so absorbing I did just that. The characters and situations are very imperfect and very real. There's so much tension between things everlastingly staying always the same whether you want them to or not, and things inexorably changing whether you want them to or not—and the girls are right at that cusp of becoming teenagers, and developing (internally, externally) unevenly, as kids do—and it's just a chapter in their lives, just this one summer—

We see coming-of-age books about boys all the time. And sexy ones about girls. This book is just real. In some ways it's more of a window than a mirror--I didn't have the kind of childhood where staying at a summer cottage was a thing--but I saw myself, too, in the push and pull between wanting to stay a child and being impatient with the whole thing and wanting to just grow up already. 

And there's the whole thing where your parents become suddenly human and the way their human imperfections impact your life becomes—not exactly a thing you question, but at least you begin to see it. It's still the water you swim in every day, but you're getting close to the point in your life where you will be breaching the surface tension. 

And there's the other thing where your childhood friendships, based on nothing more than proximity and age and yet seeming as permanent as the landscape around you, become something that may or may not last through the next argument or your family's next living situation. Just because someone's proximity has made them almost part of who you are doesn't mean that the person they're growing up to be won't be a stranger to you. And that feels so, so strange when you realize it.

I guess what I mean is, read this.

White Houses by Amy Bloom

Read by Tonya Cornelisse

So many thoughts and feelings about this book. It’s a historical novel, the story of Eleanor Roosevelt and her lover, Lorena Hickock, affectionately referred to by her friends and closer associates as Hick. That’s right, the First Lady was bisexual, or possibly a lesbian. The two of them met when they were middle-aged ladies, a fact that makes my middle-aged heart go pitter-pat. And Hick lived in the White House for a good chunk of the 1930s—in a bedroom adjoining the First Lady’s.

All of that, as well as the fact that the President himself had girlfriends that his wife not only knew about but was distinctly friendly with, is historical fact. This being a novel, the author fills in where the historical record leaves off. Bloom writes of the reserved, upper-class Eleanor and hard-nosed reporter Hick as the love of each other’s life. Hick gave up journalism for Eleanor, when it became clear that she couldn’t write objectively about her or about her husband (who was one of Hick’s heroes as well as her rival).

Eventually Eleanor’s life distanced her from Hick, but they remained close friends, corresponding as their lives continued along separate tracks. Hick was the person Eleanor turned to when her husband died, and Hick never stopped loving her.

This is a really moving story, as well as a fascinating view of the life of the inner circle of the Roosevelt administration. There’s also quite a bit about Hick’s childhood and adolescence, which makes the life of poor kids in the early 20th century vividly clear. There’s also quite a bit of exploration of the differing lives of upper-class white lesbians and those of their lower- and middle-class sisters. Very readable; highly recommend.

Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup

Read by Louis Gosset, Jr.

In this harrowing 1841 memoir, Solomon Northrup, a free man of color from New York State, is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the swamps of Louisiana. The memoir, published in 1853, was groundbreaking in its day; it played a huge role in opening northern whites’ eyes to the brutalizing effect of the “peculiar institution” and significantly changed public opinion in favor of abolition.

I never saw the movie—very deliberately, because I didn’t feel like I could stand to be immersed in the story that way. But I finally decided I did need to know the story, so I decided listening to the audiobook was the way to go.

It’s a deeply painful story, even knowing in advance that it has a “happy ending”—as if having twelve years of your life stolen can ever have a truly happy ending. Knowing the sort of life enslaved people must have led is one thing; reading a first-hand account is something else entirely. Mr. Northrup endured having absolutely everything, even his name, taken away, and was treated with a brutality that would be hard to believe if we didn’t know better. His keen observation of people and of how things were done is put to eloquent use in his memoir. Every American should read this book.

Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite: #tbt review

When I first read this book in 2002, it was still too soon after the 90s for me to realize just what a product of the 90s it really was (all the mansplaining about the magic you can do with a laptop and a modem becomes a little heavy-handed after a while, for example), and I was still too young to realize the degree to which Brite is maybe just a touch too close to her characters in all their just-post-teen rebellion. 

Rereading it in 2013, I concluded that in spite of my minor quibbles with it, this is a gorgeous, highly readable book. The settings are flawlessly painted, the characters have depths that they themselves aren't aware of, and, like all the best haunted-house stories, the plot hooks you remorselessly and draws you along until your knuckles are white and you are tempted to close the book--but you can't, because you have to know what happens next. Very, very worth reading.

Not convinced yet? Read this review by Paul Jr. on Goodreads.

Robin by Dave Itzkoff

Read by Fred Berman

Wow. Just… truly. Wow.

When Robin Williams died, it hit me hard. Yes, he’d been in quite a few embarrassingly bad movies. But he’d also been the heart and soul of some that had been sources of joy and comfort and solace to me. He was a bright light in the world and the loss of that light made my world noticeably dimmer.

I was also deeply furious with him, for having taken his own life. And bewildered that somebody who was so loved by so many, and had such obvious and brilliant talent, would do such a thing. How could he fail to understand that the world would be a dimmer place without him? That lasted a long time.

Finally enough time had passed that when this book came to my attention I decided I could stand to read about him. And it was just right. Itzkoff takes us through his life story, from his parents and their backgrounds, through his lonely childhood and his insecure early career, to the years we remember best. And of course we didn’t know him at all. In some ways, nobody did; I came away with the impression of an incredibly lonely man.

Itzkoff is gentle with his subject, but thorough. This isn’t a money-grubbing, celebrity-shaming tell-all, by any means, and yet I came away with an impression of having at least glimpsed every side of Robin Williams, including the less-shiny bits. But I also came away with an impression of the whys. Why he became who he became, why he took those roles, why he ended his life. Whether my impression is accurate or not, of course I will never know. Nobody but Robin Williams really knew Robin Williams. But I feel like I know some of the reasons for that, and I’m glad. And devastated all over again that he’s gone.

The narrator, Fred Berman, does a great job giving us a feel for the voices of the people whose quotes he’s reading, without quite mimicking them. I’d give him five stars--but he somehow failed to learn that Marin (as in Marin County, where Robin Williams spent much of his adult life, so it gets mentioned a lot in the book) is pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable. This was seriously and frequently irritating and seems like a major oversight. Aside from that, excellent narration.