Book Review

A Note from Kim: After the Book Blogger Convention, I came home with a pretty sweet bag of books. Not all of them were really my thing, so I passed on a few to my sister to read and review. Jenny’s been on the blog before – last summer we did a series of Sister’s Reviews – but this is her first solo review. Please give her a warm welcome back!

I will start my review by saying that Deb Caletti has been compared a lot to Sarah Dessen. If you recall from our Sister Reviews last summer, Sarah Dessen has written one of my favorite books ever The Truth About Forever, so I had high hopes for The Secret Life of Prince Charming going in.

One Sentence Summary: A bunch of well-off California kids and their parents stress about the college application process for elite universities across the U.S.

One Sentence Review: Good writing saves what is otherwise an average book full of people with very few actual problems.

One Sentence Summary: Parallel stories look at people damaged directly or indirectly by lightning.

One Sentence Review: The book flips between competing storylines with ease and lets every character, however small, have a space and story in the novel.

Hello and welcome to my post on The Things They Carried, and what I hope will be a good discussion of the book. I’ve never done this before, so we’ll just have to see how it goes.

I’d love the discussion in the comments to be between all of us. I encourage you to read the previous comments and respond to them — don’t be afraid to leave multiple comment at a time. There’s a REPLY link underneath each comment, so you can reply to specific posts. I’ll be at work today and can’t really blog, so responding to others will keep the discussion interesting.

The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts is a book of literary criticism looking at the role of time in memoir (duh, I guess). It also explores why memoirs are important and gives a defense of memoir against some of its common criticisms.

As Birkerts explains it, most memoirs have at least one thing in common:
They all, to greater or lesser degree, use the vantage point of the present to gain access to what might be called the hidden narrative of the past. Each is in its own way an account of detection, a realized effort to assemble the puzzle of what happened in the light of subsequent realization.

I didn’t like Bill Bryson’s travelogue The Lost Continent because I thought his sense of humor was too dark, mean, and inconsistent for my tastes.

I decided to give Bryson’s travel writing a second try by listening to an audio book of In a Sunburned Country, a travelogue about Australia. While I liked In a Sunburned Country better than The Lost Continent, I’m not sure that I’ll ever love Bryson as a travel writer because he travels a lot like me, and I travel pretty boring.

Before reading Nine Humorous Tales I mostly knew Russian writer Anton Chekov from his plays like The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. Turns out he was also considered a master of the short story, so when he came up on The Classics Circuit I decided to try a collection of those.

I decided on Nine Humorous Tales, a book I could get for free on my nook via Google Books. The nine stories are all quite short – the book is only 67 pages online – and don’t take much time to get through.

One Sentence Summary: An expert on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder revisits her childhood rape to explore the connections between sexual assault and being terrorized.

One Sentence Review: The format of Denial didn’t exactly work for me, but I still think it’s a book that is important to read and is one that I would still recommend to other readers interested in this topic.

One Sentence Summary: A gay Manhattan couple buys an old mansion and starts to experiment with a life as gentleman farmers complete with goats, tomatoes and drama.

One Sentence Review: The Beekman Boys’ backgrounds and sense of humor help the book be a unique addition to the growing canon of back-to-the-farm memoirs.