In an effort to maybe, perhaps, hopefully get caught up on all the books I haven’t reviewed, I’m planning to start doing mini-reviews every couple of weeks for books that I read but didn’t have much to say about. If you have more specific questions about any of this week’s titles, leave them in the comments!

Even though I primarily write about nonfiction on the blog, I do still love to read really great fiction because I love to get lost in a good story. And, I’ll be honest, because I like being able to read the books that everyone seems to be talking about. I don’t always get that buzzy community fannishness with nonfiction, you know? So in today’s reviewletts, I’m going to share some brief thoughts on a couple of popular books I read and really loved.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy’s diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer?

As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister, Margo, at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn’t do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet? (Source)

It’s really better to go into Gone Girl knowing as little as possible about the plot of the book because the twists are part of what makes it such a fun read. But in addition to being a fun mystery/thriller, Gillian Flynn does a remarkable job of really exploring the psychology of these very distinctive narrators. I tend to like my fiction with a little bit of an edge or a little strangeness, and this book has it in leaps and bounds. Oh, and Flynn can flat-out write. The prose just pulls you in. Overall, Gone Girl was a good, suspenseful, unsettling read that I recommend picking up.

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

Joe Spork fixes clocks. He has turned his back on his father’s legacy as one of London’s flashiest and most powerful gangsters and aims to live a quiet life. Edie Banister retired long ago from her career as a British secret agent. She spends her days with a cantankerous old pug for company. That is, until Joe repairs a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism, inadvertently triggering a 1950s doomsday machine. His once-quiet life is suddenly overrun by mad monks who worship John Ruskin, psychopathic serial killers, mad geniuses and dastardly villains. On the upside, he catches the eye of bright and brassy Polly, a woman with enough smarts to get anyone out of a sticky situation. In order to save the world and defeat the nefarious forces threatening it, Joe must help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago, and he must summon the courage to pick up his father’s old gun and join the fight. (Source)

There are just so many things about the description of Angelmaker that got me super excited for this book. Like I said before, I like my fiction with a bit of weird… and this book has a TON of craziness in it. But at the heart of a plot that feels a bit like a madcap James Bond movie is a really careful constructed story about a man coming to understand himself and his place in the world. It has a lot of heart, in the midst of mystery/spy thriller/love story about the potential end of the world. This one was a really delightful read, and it made me excited to read more from Nick Harkaway.

Disclosure: I borrowed Gone Girl from my local library and purchased a copy of Angelmaker for myself.

Photo Credit: albertogp123 via Flickr

November has been a very, very slow month of reading, but I did reach my Goodreads goal of reading 100 books on November 19 when I finished Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway. In total, I read three books this month:

• How the French Invented Love by Marilyn Yalom
• Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
• Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

I think three books is the fewest books I’ve read in a month since I started blogging. Yikes! In general, it’s just been a very busy month, between work and some crocheting projects (to be revealed very soon). I’ve also been making slow progress on two very big books — Bleak House by Charles Dickens on audio book and Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. A friend and I went to see Lincoln over Thanksgiving, and now I’m feeling even more motivated to finish Team of Rivals, it’s just a giant book!

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Earlier this month, Aarti (Book Lust) wrote a wonderful post about the forgotten pleasures of browsing for books. I knew this was a post I was going to love by the first two paragraphs alone:

I am not sure when or how it happened, but some time after becoming a book blogger, I stopped being a book browser. I would go to the library and the bookstore and book fairs and Amazon armed with a wish list and look for specific authors and titles that I have been wanting for months. And I would feel so thrilled to get a book that I wanted – it was like a treasure hunt and I was always shocked to find that a book so high up on my wish list was, for some unknown reason, not high up on anyone else’s, and it felt so wonderful to find a book waiting for me like a gift.

But somewhere along the way, I forgot about the pleasure of walking slowly down a library aisle, looking at so many titles of books, pulling one down from the shelf, and deciding that it was one I wanted to take home with me. I forgot about opening up a book I know nothing about and realizing that I can get just as immersed in that one as I can in all those other books that my friends keep telling me to read. I forgot about how calming it can be to go into a bookstore without an agenda, just open to finding something that appeals to you.

Those paragraphs describe me almost exactly. When I was a kid, even into being a teenager, I was a book browser. When I went to the library I had a few “next in a series” books I looked for, but otherwise spent a lot of time just grabbing books that looked interesting off the shelves. I was also an avid used bookstore browser, going into my local Half Price Books to buy many of the $1 and $2 clearance books they had along their back wall. The only time I ever went into a store with a specific book in mind was a visit to say, Barnes & Noble, where it felt like an investment to get a new book for my shelves.

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As much as I love a good foodie memoir, one of the things that never rings quite true with me is the sophistication of the food — memoirs about food seem, inevitably, to be about people with palates that are more refined than average. But food is memory and family and important even when the only spices used on a roast chicken are garlic powder and Lawry’s Seasoned Salt, as Alex Witchel elegantly and poignantly points out in her memoir All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia, With Refreshments.

At just over 70, Witchel’s mother — smart, loving, independent — started to show early signs up dementia. At first, Witchel tried to be the perfect daughter and fix her mother, making every appointment and being there at every moment. But as it became clear that doctors didn’t have an answer to the illness, Witchel returned to the kitchen for comfort, revising the recipes of her childhood to explore the other ways everything her mother was remained in many small things.

I read All Gone back in September, but it took me until this weekend, with my family’s first Thanksgiving without my grandpa coming up, to really have my thoughts on the book crystallize into something coherent.

As I alluded to before, the part of this book that seemed to resonate with me most were the recipes, something that is not typical when I read memoirs centered around food.The comfort foods that Witchel returns to during her mother’s illness are of the 1960s and 1970s variety of canned staples plus processed ingredients made with technological marvels like the microwave. There’s a recipe for Frankenfurter Goulash with Hebrew National franks and canned tomatoes and tomato sauce, and a meatloaf flavored with tomato soup and corn flakes. These are not sophisticated meals, but their familiarity is what’s important, not necessarily the quality.

(Slightly related, Tom Junod had a lovely essay on this topic in Esquire in 2010).

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