Anna and the French Kiss - Stephanie Perkins

How cute was THIS book? YA is in this pattern, as Alice has pointed out , of following either the Stephenie Meyer or the John Green paths of fiction; that is, the Possibly Paranormal but Definitely Controlling Boyfriend and Mary Sue Path, or the Super-Witty Self-Aware-Teen Path. Two paths, someone once said, diverged in a wood, and Stephanie Perkins took neither of them.

I worked hard on that metaphor

Anna’s dad is a pretentious author who decides that she needs to spend her senior year at a school for Americans in Paris instead of in her own hometown. Anna, being a teenager, vigorously protests this move because she didn’t think of it first.

I really liked how… teenager-ish this novel was. Anna does stupid things, kids drink without someone dying (it’s legal in Paris which is why no one has to Learn a Lesson about Drinking), characters miscommunicate and then figure it out – or not, and despite the setting of Paris – which seems not quite like a real place to me – it’s realistic and adorable.

“Beautiful. He called me beautiful! But wait. I don’t like Dave.
Do I like Dave?”

Being a teenager is so confusing.

“We stop at a red light. Mom stares at me. ‘You like him.’”
“OH GOD, MOM.”

And embarrassing.

So good for you, Stephanie Perkins, for creating interesting teenagers upon whom adults can smile sagely, and to whom teenagers themselves can relate without reinforcing their terrible relationships or their self-satisfaction.

And hey, congratulations for actually completing NaNiWriMo!

8 out of 11 Lost Dorm Room Keys

Attachments - Rainbow Rowell

This is a book aimed at people who read the internet, who love snark, have a soft spot for the cute IT guy down the hall, who are lonely for romance sometimes but know they have great friends, who are flawed, and who have the ability (along with said friends) to find themselves endlessly entertaining.

Basically, Rainbow Rowell wrote a book-cannon that is aimed in my exact direction. A paginated SCUD missile with the coordinates of my person embedded in its little wiry bits.

And it. is. great. Like, Kirsten Bell-loving-sloths-great.

Lincoln is the "internet security" guy hired to read and send threatening responses to any emails that get flagged through his company's email system - when really he'd pictured himself as a white hat hacker, saving his company from the Evil Internet. For you babies out there, this used to happen back in the 90's when bosses thought that if people had unlimited access to email, they would chat back and forth all day and not get any work done. (They were not far wrong, we've all just moved to gchat.)

Onward! Lincoln starts reading the email exchanges between Beth and Jennifer, discovers that they're talking about... him, and adorable hijinks ensue. I read this over Christmas and had to return it before I wrote down quotes, which is probably for the best because I would have just quoted the whole damn thing and that would probably have landed me in hot water with Rowell, who - aside from being a charming author - is an absolute HOOT on Twitter.

SO! Attachments. If you have not yet read it, you should do so! Tout de suite!

9.5 out of 11 Late Night Snack Machines

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow WIlson

This is a curious little book - and yes, I tend to consider anything under 500 pages "little" because this is Reading the Bricks, not Reading Some Thin Things. Keep up!

Alif is the hacker name of a kid in an unmentioned Middle Eastern town who gets dumped by the upper-caste girl he was in love with and writes a computer program to identify her "signature"-  that is, not just her ISP and other internetty things, but there's a keylogger that figures out her keystroke pattern and over time learns to identify her based on her syntax.

In other words, he creates a program that is essentially AI, and then the Government hears about it and gets ahold of it and they try to start using it to find hackers. Which is TYPICAL, Big Bad Governmental Propaganda Machine, and you should stop doing that! Information wants to be figuratively free!

Sidebar: my boss recently told me that "information literally wants to be free." To which I smiled and nodded because if I'd opened my mouth at that particular moment I might have figuratively died on that grammatical hill. In retaliation that seems to be taking the form of torturing only me, I've started over-using the word "figuratively." So, I apologize in advance. Literally.

G.Willow Wilson has a way with ideas, my friends. As in her way, if you knowwhutImean.

"Dear Nurse, as much as I love you, you are terribly muddled when it comes to the morals of stories."
"Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.
"How terrible," said Farukhuaz.
"Do you think so? I find it reassuring. It saves me from having to divine meaning in every sorrow that comes my way" (139).

Just think about that for a minute. If we accept the nurse's first premise, then we can accept the second - and I can share with you from experience that accepting the second premise makes life much more bearable - not to mention self-centered.

But she's unexpectedly sly, too:

"You have that sullen expression young men get when they've been jilted. It's why men are meant to have beards - growing all that hair leaves no energy for moodiness. Much more dignified" (190). 

Dignity.

And lastly, a girl whose sense and responsible nature we can all get behind:

"No," said Dina. "We don't burn books."
"Who's we?"
"People with an ounce of brain." 

Renly Baratheon would probably not burn books either. Too bad he dies.

The thing that struck me most about this book is how not Western-centric it was. As if people who aren't Westerners generally don't give two figs about us - which is an interesting reminder that the bulk of the world will never read ANY of the books I've read, simply because there are books originally written in their own languages that are more important to them. How can Middlemarch and House of Mirth not be important to everyone?

That is so weird, you guys.

8.5 out of 11 Djinn Posing as Mob Leaders in your Home Town

The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson Walker

There is this thing publishing has started doing in the last *mumblemumble* years where they call a first novel a debut novel. This always makes me think of débutantes dressed in white, swanning their way down stairs on their fathers' arms so they can be introduced to society, and I kind of hate it.

Firstly because there's suddenly all this pressure to make your début novel amazing, which only happens if you're Susanna Clarke or Harper Lee or Margaret Mitchell, which you are not. And secondly because it puts unrealistic expectations on the book to be HAAAA-mazing and flawless, which is hard enough for a seasoned writer, much less a débutante  And if there's one thing I will do when I'm expected to find a book to be flawless, it's... find a fuckton of flaws.

Julia is 11 when the world starts slowing on its axis. Days gain hours, and while it's kind of a thing, it's not really because she's eleven and has other stuff to worry about, like being the weird kid at the bus stop and liking the handsome skateboarder guy.

Now I'd like you to please pause and think about what you knew when you were eleven. If the answer is "almost nothing," then you are in the same boat as me and the rest of society. Julia, however, is outside of this boat. She's already made it to Adult Reflections Land, where people say things (to themselves) like,

"Carlotta's long gray hair swung near her waist, a ghost, I suspected, of its younger and sexier self" (p. 106).

Reeeeally.

Look, KT-Dubs, I dunno how long it's been since you were eleven, but I have a 12-year-old brother and I am here to tell you that considering the ghosts of people's formerly sexy hair is not on that age group's radar. AT ALL.

The narrator could have been 19, or 25, or 47 years 3 months and 7 days, because she's speaking through an adult mouthpiece - which I haaaaaaated. And I get that this is a coming-of-age novel, wherein the heroine Learns Lots of Things and Puts Away Childish Ideas, and that it's sad that she has to do that while the world is ending (slooooowly). And when there's a concept as fascinating as the Earth slowing its roll, it seems almost wasteful to overlay it with the everyday issues of a pre-teen girl, which to those of us who are no longer pre-teens are about as exciting and urgent as getting you car washed during the rainy season.

This would have been sooooooer much better as a short story or a novella. Cut 150 pages, throw a couple of other short stories on top about other people in this world, call it a collection and BOOM! Better.

Also because I don't read short stories, and thus wouldn't have read it or felt left out for skipping it.

4.5 of 11 Stockpiles of Apocalypse-Friendly Foodstuffs

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams

I consider myself to be a moderately serious Anglophile - particularly when it comes to books. I mean, I've been to a couple of Jane Austen events, seen several Andrew Lloyd Webber productions, memorized Bridget Jones, and had high Victorian tea at a big hotel in London that I've since forgotten the name of - the Regency, maybe? I don't remember because I was 13 and at that age all I could think about was how desperately I wanted to sink into the floor in a puddle of my own hormones.

This is how it feels to be a teenager. 

So imagine my surprise and dismay when I realized that I'd skipped Douglas Adams' entire catalogue! I promptly ordered Dirk Gently from my library and put Hitchiker's Guide on my Classics Club list, and I was super-excited to start; after all, I was a theater/sci-fi nerd in high school!

And dudes, I... I think maybe Douglas Adams is not my thing? Just in a very overall sense, not in the "I hated every minute of this book" sense, which I most assuredly did NOT. Much of it was quite clever. But I feel like Adams and Pratchett are similarly enamored of their own cleverness, so the plots don't quite line up? Even though there are lines like these:

"He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which he was now trying to identify and correct for." (p. 96)

And:

"Dirk turned away and sagged sideways off his chair, much as the sitter for 'The Thinker' probably did when Rodin went off to be excused." (p. 217)

OKAY I CHUCKLED AT THAT. I am, after all, an art history major with a keen appreciation of art-y stuff, and also an appreciation of how Adams chose his joke carefully so that people on pretty much any part of the art-understanding spectrum would find it funny.

But can we talk about Chapter 26, which miiiight be my favorite chapter ever with the possible exception of Chapter 13 of The French Lieutenant's Woman? Because it starts on a train with a bunch of drunks and turns subtly into the beginning of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." When I realized what was happening, I wanted to get up out of bed and run around the room like Rocky, except it was the middle of the night and I was cozy so I settled for a book nerd wriggle.

Don't tell me you don't know what those are. You know you do.


7.5 out of 11 hitchikers, Fnordlings.

The Smoke Thief - Shana Abe

Historical fantasy romance, I'm not sure how I feel about you. I appreciate you for your fluffy, cheerful qualities and your ability to increase my Books Read in 2012 total in short order - it is difficult, as it turns out, to read 350+ pages of Gone with the Wind in one sitting [mostly because of the page/type size but also because hellooo, real plot and dynamic characters and OMG Ashley Wilkes you are all the milksops and milquetoasts for all eternity and that is not a compliment. I am going to print out copies of chapter 31 of GwtW and hand it to prospective lovers to read from now on, and if they identify with even ONE quality you exhibit, then KA-POW!

(in this scenario I am the jumping goat)]

Ahem. Where was I?

Ahh, yes. Historical fantasy romance. We begin with a VERY CRYPTIC story about the original drakon and how they were in tune with gems and some such thing, then they lost everyone (but not everyone?) and this one gem had the biggest draw so the last of the drakon (but not the last, obvs., because this is the prologue) threw it and herself into the deepest darkest mineshaft at the bottom of the deepest, darkest mine so no one would ever get it, ever.

Because that always works.

And then we cut to " the recent past," which is 17mumblemumble* and 12-year-old half-drakon/half human Clarissa falls asleep on the moors and wakes up to see Heir to the Duchy schtupping some chick who (of course) haaaaates Clarissa because she's a mudblood half-breed. Fade to black.

Announcement: Clarissa has been tragically drowned/eaten by wolves/something at the tender age of 17 and no body was ever found. She is definitely dead.

So let's recap:
-Carpathian mountains but no vampires, just big gems and deep mines (there's a metaphor there but I just... can't... reach it...
- All the drakon are dead but jokes! They really moved to England.
- Clarissa is a half-breed and dead.

Oh, and drakon can take human form (duh) but their between drakon/human form is smoke. And when they turn to smoke, they lose all their clothes.

I know, right, Kim? I was shocked - SHOCKED! - too!

There is a WHOLE LOT of coalescing in tight spaces like belfrys and dovecotes and whatnot with no clothes and heaving bosoms and lingering looks. So many nekkid people drakon, you guys.

And then really everything after is just an excuse for the hero to express to the heroine (spoiler: Clarissa isn't dead after all! Also the boat sinks in the end of Titanic.) how much he wants her to be his wife while she unsuccessfully fends him off and then has to nurse him back to health because he got bit by an alligator? I don't even know because - as I mentioned - I read this whole thing in one sitting.

HOWEVER. There are definite pluses to this particular piece of fluffy drek. First, I didn't walk away (or rather, drift off to sleep) feeling like I wanted to strangle the author for turning her heroine into a hole for a man (fine, drakon) to stick his sausage into all willy-nilly. Have a little respect for your gender forchrissakes, lady authors of romance novels! Feminism is still happening! And second, I admire the way she didn't even deign to address how a half-breed turned out to be the Strongest Female of them All. Why bother? Everyone knows that hybridization leads to stronger stock. ALSO, remember way back to the prologue? It had nothing to do with the plot of this book.

So the real question is, will I read the second in the series? Probably, now that I have a local library card** and can throw things on to my hold list at will, and also I want to see whether throwing a ring gem in a deep dark mine ever really kept it from resurfacing. I suspect... not.

5.5 out of 11 rings, my preciousses.




*I'm writing this at work and the book is at home. Thank you, start-up culture, for not blocking Blogger on my computer while I wait for Very Important People to email me back.

**The hardest part about moving was deleting my hold queue in Sacramento. I'd been waiting for some of those books for simply ages! /sigh