2014: Year in review

Well, goodbye to my sixth year of blogging. Somehow I've managed to keep it up, even though I'll never be at reading levels I once was. Yet I'm still proud I'm usually managing a few books a month, especially now that I'm mom to an active four and a half month old! I return to work in a few weeks, which means reading in 2015--beyond the board book Sheep in a Jeep for the millionth time--will be especially challenging. But, I just try to make sure reading's always a pleasure, never a chore.

My top books read in 2014:
1. On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee
2. Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk by Ben Fountain
3. The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
4. The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
5. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
6. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
7. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Total books read and reviewed: 30 (plus 6 baby-related books partially read and briefly reviewed)

Fiction read: 24
Nonfiction read: 6

Adult read: 27
Young adult read: 3

Female authors: 17
Male authors: 13
I think this is the first time I've read more female than male! Woot!

Years published:
- 2014: 12
- 2013: 13
- 2012: 3
- 2011: 1
- 2005: 1

Book sources:
- Total borrowed: 30

Happy New Year!

"Me Before You" by Jojo Moyes

I thought I would hate Me Before You, as I don't do romance, and I don't do weepies. Just from the book's blurb, it was clear how the story would go:

Quirky Girl gets job caring for rich, recalcitrant quadriplegic who wants to commit suicide.

Quirky Girl gets Quad to loosen up and enjoy life again.

Quad gets Quirky Girl to see life beyond small town.

Quirky Girl and Quad fall in love.

But their love can't change Quad's mind (cue tears).

And I was right about the plot progression, but I didn't realize I'd enjoy the story as much as I did. It's not new or especially different. Louisa is chatty and won't put up with Will's stubborn grumpiness. Will has a heart of gold behind his gruff exterior. But, okay, they were cute, as was the development of their relationship.

There is, also, interesting commentary about assisted suicide and how we respond to those desiring such a choice (which also corresponds with current events given the recent decision of young Brittany Maynard to commit suicide). One of the points that Will returns to is that his accident has robbed him of the ability to make most choices in his life, and that by refusing him the choice to die, those who love him only serve to remove his autonomy further.

It's stuff worth discussion, even if the book itself is more expected than groundbreaking.

"Without You, There Is No Us" by Suki Kim

I've talked before about my interest in North Korea, though it's only coincidental that I got around to writing this review just as North Korea entered the news again with the Sony hacking and cancellation of the movie The Interview. But I picked up Without You after hearing an interview with author Kim on NPR. The other books I'd read on North Korea were about everyday people, largely dissidents and defectors. Kim's book, on the other hand, is about young North Korean elite: the men who attended a Christian missionary-funded university at which Kim taught English.

The whole set-up immediately exposes the craziness that is North Korea. They oppose Christianity, but they're happy to allow the missionaries to set up their school (they're forbidden from proselytizing or mentioning God/Jesus, of course). They hate the U.S. but want to ensure the elite men can speak English. Kim teaches at a STEM-themed school, but the students have little access to technology and no access to the internet. The college is for 19- and 20-year-old men, yet they often come across as young teenagers, innocent to the world around them.

Of course, the school's very set-up exposes craziness in others. Though Kim doesn't really go there (and I wish she had), you have to question the missionaries' very purpose. They fundraise back home to open this school, knowing they can't profess their faith to the students. They just want an "in" in the country should the dictatorship eventually fall. But, in the meantime, they're raising money, in the name of God, to support the privileged elite in a country where most of the population is barely surviving. How is that Christian?

As a narrative, though, Without You feels fairly empty. Kim's existence as a teacher is heavily guarded and structured, which means she doesn't have much to talk about other than feeling isolated and down. She's purposefully kept from developing close relationships with any of the students, which means most of them stay vague, rather than emerging as characters. Thus there's no real continuing narrative to string together her time at the school. The book reads as tiny vignettes pieced together with repetitive descriptions of her emotional state.

I also found her attitude somewhat problematic. She wants to covertly expose the students to elements of the world beyond, which seems a good thing. But she goes about it mostly by showing off--describing her world-wide travels or parading her laptop or Kindle in front of the students. She's put off when they don't show more interest. Why would they? They're smart enough to recognize they don't have such items, and they're old enough to buy the government line (which, in this case at least, is probably correct) about American arrogance. I feel like she could have taken a better approach, as she does when she teaches them essay form. In a culture not used to having to use evidence to support an assertion, the essay is a radical departure.

Without You does show that even the elite in North Korea are also heavily censored, but it doesn't offer a lot to the enigma that is the country.

"Yes, Please" by Amy Poehler

I love Amy Poehler, mostly because I love Parks and Rec and her character Leslie Knope. It's hard to read a book by the real person behind the show and fictional character you adore because you're just asking for her to disappoint. I preface this review that way because I wanted to like Yes, Please so much more than I did, but I don't know that my reaction is totally Poehler's fault.

There were some good parts. She gushes about Parks and Rec and her costars, which made me happy. And her recounting of some award show gags was funny--but just because the gags were funny. I would have rather seen a YouTube compilation of them.

Other parts really didn't work. A longish chapter about an SNL skit she did in which she (unknowingly) mocked a real disabled girl just felt self-serving: "see how bad I felt about it and how I made it all better." And, "innocent" that I am, I winced a little whenever she talked about her frequent drug use, even if it wasn't heavy stuff. Leslie Knope would never use drugs! The frequent name-dropping, even if Poehler acknowledged doing it, grew old.

Poehler's background is in improv, and she clearly excels in that arena. On the printed page, she often feels flat and unfunny. I imagine even listening to the audiobook would improve the book significantly.

Or maybe she just can't live up to her friend Tina Fey when it comes to memoir/essays. Bossypants still rocks my world.

"We Were Liars" by E. Lockhart

How did I end up reading two YA books in a row after reading only one other the entire year? Oh, well. We Were Liars is certainly a different kind of YA than The Infinite Sea, and it comes from E. Lockhart, the author of The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, a smart, funny, feminist YA that I loved.

We Were Liars is also different than Disreputable History, as it's centered on a mystery and potentially unreliable narrator. Its narrator is Cadence, the oldest grandchild of the Sinclairs, a wealthy family that summers on their own island. The three aunts (including Cadence's mother) spend most of the summer sniping over the family wealth, but Cadence and her cousins Mirren and Johnny--as well as Johnny's Indian friend Gat--don't want anything to do with the family conflict. The book takes place two summers after a terrible accident that left Cadence with selective amnesia, and the novel's focus is on the process of Cadence unraveling what really happened.

Lockhart does a great job of building up the suspense around what happened to Cady, and she casts doubt on what all the characters have to say by including the family conflict and by telling us Cady and her cousins are collectively called "The Liars." The mystery drives the book at breakneck speed (I read it in one afternoon). The mystery is theoretically complemented by the romance between Cady and Gat, but I never felt much connection between them.

But, most unfortunately, Lockhart's reveal isn't able to live up to the tension of most of the novel. The "truth" isn't especially interesting or shocking (especially when the book's blurb summary sets huge expectations by proclaiming, "And if anybody asks you the ending, just lie."). And I never got why the group was called "The Liars." They didn't seem to lie all that much, and Cady's narration appeared to be truthful.

We Were Liars was still a good ride with a dud ending.

"The Infinite Sea" by Rick Yancey

Though I rarely read YA anymore, I'd enjoyed Yancey's The 5th Wave, a violent alien-invasion dystopian. Like all genre YA these days, The 5th Wave was only the first in a series, so I felt obliged to try The Infinite Sea.

When we finish The 5th Wave, Cassie has rescued her younger brother Sam, who was being trained by the alien invaders (disguised in human bodies) to kill other humans. She was able to execute the rescue only with the help of dreamy Evan Walker, one of the aforementioned alien-invader-in-human-body types who, of course, fell in love with Cassie. When The Infinite Sea begins, Cassie is holed up in a dilapidated motel with Sam and his fellow soldiers: Ben (aka Zombie, aka Cassie's high school crush), Ringer, Dumbo, Teacup, and Poundcake. Cassie's waiting for Evan, and since they're all recent escapees, everyone's pretty tense.

My problems with The Infinite Sea began pretty early. To start, there's not much going on. After a daring escape, they're sitting around, waiting and arguing. And Cassie, who narrates the first section, is just a boring narrator this time around. She's still a bit conflicted about Evan, but all this ground was covered in the last book. Evan's narration (which is thankfully short) is equally annoying. His Edward Cullen attachment to Cassie comes off creepy, not romantic.

The story gets better when Ringer picks up the narration, and fortunately her section is the longest of the novel. There's new characterization to be had here, and she has a little more to do.

Nevertheless, Ringer's narration doesn't make up for a lot of the novel's issues. For one, the outlandish injuries just keep piling on and on. Nearly all the characters are mortally wounded--in multiple places--at some point, yet they all heroically trudge and fight on. One minor character's mortally wounded stand is so absurd that it comes off as comical rather than brave. The hyper-violence even started to bother me; it's gratuitous and occurs toward children as young as six.

Yancey also tries to address some of the criticisms of the first novel, namely the question of why the aliens would bother with a complicated multi-step extermination scheme of humankind when there's easy ways to wipe the whole population out at once. Over and over the characters wonder about this issue (it's as if Yancey's saying, "SEE--I meant for it to make no sense! It was all part of the plot plan!"), but an answer's never given (saved for the third book, I'm sure). The twist "reveal" that does occur at the end of the novel is pretty unexciting.

I was bored through the first half, and though the second half improved, I'm not sure I'm too eager to finish the series.

"The Magician's Land" by Lev Grossman

My husband and I are at odds about Grossman's The Magicians trilogy. I love the subversive fantasy because it's an unexpected take on a genre I love. My husband hates it because it's dark and refuses to create heroes, villains, and traditional victories. Well, he might just complain it's bone-crushingly depressing, and that's true too--at least for the first two books.

So maybe my husband would find he actually likes The Magician's Land, whereas, for me, the final book in the trilogy is the least interesting. The story feels more traditional, and the satire of the worlds of Harry Potter and Narnia, which made the first two books so fresh, feels more stale this time. And there's finally that happy ending, though I won't complain about that--the characters deserve that much.

The Magician's Land focuses on a much older Quentin. Gone is the whiny college student of the first novel. This Quentin is in his 30s and exiled from his beloved Fillory. He grew and became a better man in the last book, but his sacrifices haven't made his life better. Instead, he's getting involved in a shady magical heist. And this is where I first began to lose interest. The heist set-up is out of Ocean's Eleven (okay, a less cool Ocean's Eleven), but it just didn't grab my interest. Maybe that's because because there is no real stake in it for Quentin. He wants the money payout, but his reasons seem nebulous.

And that nebulous-ness continues throughout the book. Quentin's father dies, and the death affects him significantly, but he never really had a relationship with his father to begin with. And then--out of nowhere to me--he becomes devoted to finding Alice, his girlfriend from the first book who died and became a niffin (a kind of rage demon). Redeeming Alice eventually becomes his singular purpose, but I felt like reference to Alice had been almost wholly missing from book two. [Tangent: Maybe I'm wrong here. My memories of the plots of the first two books are very hazy. I tried to find complete summaries online, but I could only find teaser synopses. You definitely need a good understanding of the established characters to follow The Magician's Land appropriately.]

The book also follows Janet and Josh, who are currently ruling Fillory, and their quest to save Fillory--which is dying, of course--feels more like the previous two books.

Though I've complained about much of The Magician's Land, I can understand that a change from the other two books is necessary in order to reflect the change in Quentin. Much of the book focuses on his maturity, and while he (and the book) still acknowledge that the world sucks, there's no longer a sense of hopelessness. Even still, there was a lack of "realness" to the book and an over-abundance of exposition that makes it the weakest Grossman's three novels.