The Seasonal Reading Challenge discussion

This is thread where you can submit reviews for the Best Review contest. The thread opened for submissions on December 1 and will close at Midnight EST on February 17, 2012. Voting will start the next day and run until the end of the day on February 29th. The person whose review gets the most votes will get to design a 20 point task for the Spring Challenge.

Just a reminder that each person can only submit one review - but you can make edits to your review up until the end. The review does not have to be any particular length and doesn't have to be a positive one (i.e. you can choose to review a book you didn't like).

PLEASE DO NOT comment on people's reviews in this thread - this is for submissions only - you will be able to comment when voting begins.

SPOILER ALERT!- These reviews may include spoilers.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

OK, so this book is listed as a microhistory, just like The Devil in the White City, no two books could be more different.

Devil is written and reads like a novel. Sometimes it's hard to remember you are reading documented facts.

THIS book on the other hand reads like a history book. And except for the fact that he claims that Andrew Jackson won the War of 1812 with the Battle of New Orleans (The Battle of New Orleans was unnecessary because the peace treaty had already been signed), you accept that what is written is true. Because it reads like a history book, you accept.

It really could have been a great story. The information about the Chinese salt production was cool, because it was being performed so far earlier than Western Civ. But that was in the beginning of the book. After 200 pages of getting every civ up to the today, got very repetitive.

I gave it 2 stars instead of one because it started so well, and there was a Chemistry chapter. Otherwise, I would have skipped this book and that would have been fine with me.

Review Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel


I have been looking for a great zombie book for a while now. Well, I have found it. This isn’t your average zombie book, zombies bad, humans good, apocalypse is here story. Black and White does not exist in this book, just a big huge gray area.

I really love the authors take on zombies. A virus has come in to play and when you die, some shortly after and some years later, will reanimate. Sounds simple right? Not really. In this world, in the future, in a “New Victoria Era” reanimation does not mean you will become some violent flesh eating monster. For reasons unknown, some will go crazy and lose their mind and others can stay sane and keep their soul remembering who they were before and remaining that person, well for the most part. They are of course dead and their bodies react differently to “life”

Lia Habel does a great job in painting us a world of steam punk. She is very descriptive without it getting boring, (you know the boring that makes you want to skim through the paragraph) and the descriptions made everything so vivid in my mind.

The story is told from 5 points of view. Yes that is a lot, but it made the story so real. I have always loved books with alternate points of view. I love to get in the head of as many characters as I can. I admit I did at first think that this many points of view would be challenging to keep up with, it was well worth it.

The Characters are all so amazing in their own way and are quite different from each other.
Nora was a little difficult to get into at first. She seemed a little whiny and clueless. After getting into more of the story I did start to understand her personality more and the reasons she seemed this way. She does mature and starts to think clearly, It just takes a while. She was a great character but not my favorite. My favorite was her best friend Pamela. She seemed smart, brave, and very independent. The two really did compliment each other well. The other main characters were great too. Bram is easy to love and it’s really hard not to feel for him and his situation. He is sincere and gentle which I really did appreciate. Nora’s father did not stand out as much, but is really important to the story. The last character that had a point of view was Wolfe, I will not say much for this character. I would hate to give anything away.

This story goes beyond what we perceive is good and bad or right and wrong. There isn’t always an easy way or even an easier way. And, of course there is the love story… You will need to read to find out more.

I gave the book 5/5 Stars.

Review of Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr

5/5 stars

The title story, Memory Wall, is a gorgeous novella. It's unrealistic events are rendered believable through the quiet, steady prose and its ability to probe deep into the minds of the characters, who are all very different but all struggling. The idea of the memory therapy is clever and Luvo's experiences and thoughts were especially thought-provoking.

The theme tying all the stories together is the things in our lives (natural and man-made) that serve as memory in some way - fossils, embryos (and the egg and sperm), handwritten letters, seeds, photographs, endangered species, the stories of our elders. I was beyond sucked in by this collection. Each story drew me in and aspects of each one were heartbreaking but each ends with at least a tiny kernel of hope and renewal.

My second favorite in the collection is Afterworld, in which 81-year-old Esther, who has visions of the afterlife, recalls her escape from Hamburg in 1942. Like the opening novella, this story suspends disbelief with ease and is the most haunting thing I've read in quite some time. Esther's comfort is her grandson, and this story's message is that even though memories die when people do all the time, new ones are constantly forming as new people are born. There's a moment when Esther sees death as coming more completely into the core of yourself, returning to the seed, the real you that has always been inside. This idea is a beautiful summing up of this collection as a whole.

Themes: memory, old age, poverty, empathy, sense of place/home, time fading history and memory, hope, renewal

Review of Nothing with Strings: NPR's Beloved Holiday Stories

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. Fair enough. But there are some books about which you should be able to make a fairly accurate guess as to the subject matter based on the title. For example, if you picked up a book titled “Tales About the First President of the United States,” you would probably expect a book about George Washington, and you'd probably be surprised, and more than a little upset, when the book turned out to be about Millard Fillmore.

Now we come to the title of the book being reviewed: “Nothing With Strings: NPR’s Beloved Holiday Stories” by Bailey White. Even if you were not familiar with White’s witty National Public Radio commentaries on life in the Deep South, it would not seem too much of a stretch for the fearless reader to expect heartwarming holiday stories. And this is where the cover does come into play. The cover shows a red-cushioned window seat upon which lies an open box surrounded by a string of Christmas lights. A beat up old red pickup truck (the universal hieroglyph for rural southern environs) is driving off in the distance. These two pieces of evidence would seem to suggest that the book’s stories are 1) rural in nature and 2) Christmas is very likely the holiday noted in the title. But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that even though it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, what we have here is one big turkey of a book.

In fact, Nothing With Strings has nothing to do with any holidays. Instead these stories are concentrated on the themes of aging, dementia, divorce, and death. Not exactly the kind of stories that make you want to deck the halls. But it's the marketing department that should be faulted, not White's writing. In fact, under a different title, a number of these stories would be—if not exactly enjoyable—at least capable of being appreciated for their literary merit. Two stories in particular, “The Bus Ride,” in which the lives of five bus passengers and the driver are slowly revealed, and “Almost Gone,” about the last memory of an Alzheimer’s patient, are wonderfully crafted. However, as holiday entertainment, they’re more likely to make you want to stick a candy cane in your eye.

Holiday shoppers beware.

Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? by Steven Tyler

When I first heard about this book, I was amused by the title. "Steven," I thought, "you're a musician, possibly my favorite of all time, how can you have noise in your head? Music, for sure, but noise?" Ah, but he does, and lots of it.

As I started reading this book, I realized I was reading a manifesto that perhaps ought to be titled "Just Say No." Steven Tyler is a wonderful musician and performer, but author... not so much. Compound that with the copious amounts of drugs and alcohol he's ingested over the years (many, many years, he started quite young), and you get a mish-mash of stories about his youth, about his style, about his infamous arguments with the band, and some of his less than grounded thoughts on the universe. He speaks of using the Earth's magnetic field as an instrument to communicate with aliens and orgasms as a way to communicate with God. There were whole paragraphs where I couldn't really tell what the hell he was trying to say. And those were just the pages where you can see the effects that drug use has had on his brain. There are whole chapters where he talks about his actual use and stints in rehab.

There are also sections where the man's brilliance shines. He's not stupid. He's well-read and well aware of society and pop culture. He drops in lines of philosophy and poetry and jabs at reality TV and people's 15 minutes of fame. He doesn't talk a lot about writing songs and music (which I was thoroughly disappointed about), but he does show you the process through his baby "Dream On," which makes repeated appearances throughout the book. Those were my favorite moments, as you got to see how seriously he takes his music, how hard he works at it, how much it still means to him all these years later.

So to answer your question, Steven, the noise in your head would bother me, but somehow you are able to take that ramble and turn it into sweet, slamming rock and roll, and I hope you keep it up for many more years to come.