Book Review

When I first heard that there was going to be a documentary made about what it is like to work at the New York Times, I may have squealed. Loudly and repeatedly. Just maybe.

Although I’ve never wanted to work at the Times, that newspaper — for better or for worse — is the standard of journalism in the United States. During my first visit to New York for the Book Blogger Convention in 2010, I was one of those total dorks that took a photo in front of the New York Times building (well, Care took the photo, I just posed like a total fan girl).

The Nobodies Album starts out with deceptively simple plot: Octavia Frost, a bestselling novelist, is on her way to her editor to deliver a manuscript of her most recent book — a novel comprised of rewritten endings to her previous books — when she learned that her estranged, musician son Milo has been accused of murdering his girlfriend. Octavia immediately flies out to San Francisco to be near Milo, even though she doesn’t quite know what to do once she gets there. The book follows Octavia’s dual mission to reconnect with her son and use her novelist’s instinct for plot to see if she can figure out what happened the night Milo is accused of murder (a night he can’t entirely remember).

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is a perfect example of a book where an innovative approach to storytelling takes an otherwise pretty traditional story and makes it into something special. In this case, author Caroline Preston uses an extensive collection of vintage memorabilia to create a vintage Smash Book for a young woman coming of age in the turbulent 1920s.

I think one of the reasons I’ve procrastinated on writing this review is because I just don’t quite know what to say about What It Is Like to Go to War. Karl Marlantes’ nonfiction follow-up to his widely-regarded novel Matterhorn a fascinating hybrid of a nonfiction book — part memoir, part history, part manifesto — that explores a central conflict from Marlantes’ time as a Marine:

The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn’t teach me how to deal with killing.

Fresh from her stint at Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Paris (chronicled in her first memoir, The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry) author/chef Kathleen Flinn isn’t sure where her path leads. The idea for her next project comes after a chance encounter in the grocery store. Flinn notices a woman filling her cart full of processed foods. When she gets up the nerve to ask the customer about it, Flinn discovers that the customer wants to eat better, but feels overwhelmed choosing and preparing healthier options.

Oryx and Crake started out really slow for me. Whether that was my reading slump or a fault of the book, I couldn’t tell you, but the first 100 or so pages felt like they dragged. There is quite a bit of setup to the story, which on most days wouldn’t seem slow, but in the middle of a reading slump seem tedious. In order to show how Crake became the mastermind of some sort of crazy world, you have to start with Jimmy and Crake as kids, and that part of the story is really more about setting up what kind of society these characters are functioning in.

Confession time: I picked up this book because I fell in love with the subtitle. I have this readerly weakness for a great subtitle, and Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn has one of the best that I’ve read in awhile:
The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys, Lost at Sea and of the Beachocombers, Oceaongraphers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
Doesn’t that make your heart flutter a little bit? Just me?

I bookmarked so many fantastic passages from The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, it’s hard for me to pick just one to start this review with. But really, if there’s one quote that epitomizes the things I loved best about this book, I think it would be this one:
This image — of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelganger — is so haunting because it is at least party true. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism.

When I was doing some blog maintenance last week, I came across an un-posted “review” that I wrote soon after finishing Priceless (Yes, I did actually read the book!). Rather than let more than 1,100 words of bitter sarcasm go to waste, I turned the review into a post over at Book Riot that went up yesterday where I talked about the Not So Great Expectations Book Club and my thoughts on reading Richie.