Author Archives: Kinsey

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

by Kinsey

Oh, you guys, this is the best book. If all the Atlas Shrugged has been crushing your faith in books and humanity, I recommend that you read Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan as a palate cleanser.

The main character, Clay, is  San Francisco Web designer who gets downsized out of his job after the economy tanks and ends up working at a bookstore. As if the idea of a store selling actual paper books isn’t weird enough these days, this store is open 24 hours a day and seems to have a very odd clientele. Clay starts investigating and, with the help of his friends, figures out that there is quite a bit more going on in this bookstore. I don’t want to give much more away, but the story involves Google, and hipsters, and medieval mysteries, and is just completely charming.

I’ve raved on this site about The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and in a lot of ways this book feels similar–it’s very much of the present-day, with lots of pop culture references and discussions of Gen X issues about the meaning of life and career and purpose and such. But The Magicians, and a lot of books like it, are so dark. I loved The Magicians, but reading it was a wrenching experience. This book manages to address of a lot of the same issues without being heavy or depressing. It’s a quick read that will leave you feeling good about people and books and the world in general. Who doesn’t need that occasionally?

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Fun, modern mystery.

You might also like: PopCo, or Neverwhere, or even So You Want to Be a Wizard, although Mr. Penumbra is lighter than any of those.

The Round House

by Kinsey

Well, Anna and Rebecca deserve awards for continue to slog away at Atlas Shrugged–I mean, my God, will that thing ever end? I, meanwhile, continue to read fantasy stories and romance novels and light, fluffy fun things that make no attempt to develop a new political philosophy. But I did just finish a lovely, quality book that I wanted to mention: The Round House by Louise Erdrich.

Erdrich is known for writing very literary novels about the American Indian experience (I’m using Indian, not Native American, since that’s what Erdrich most often does), often with a hint of magical realism. I’ve tried to read some of her work in the past and never really connected with it, but her latest novel won the National Book Award and was described as a mystery–I was intrigued. And I really enjoyed it!

The story, narrated by a teenage Indian boy, centers around a crime that happens on a Chippewa reservation, and how the main character and his family deal with the aftermath and try to figure out who did it. However, the mystery is secondary, in a lot of ways, to the descriptions of life as an Indian teenager. The details–from what the characters are eating to how they speak–are striking and Erdich does an amazing job of getting inside the head of a teenaged boy, who usually feel to me like they are members of an entirely different species. While this book didn’t have the driving, page-turning quality of Gone Girl, I enjoyed the mystery and the characters, and I would recommend this a starting point for Erdich’s work.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Haunting, lyrical mystery.

You might also like: Any of Tana French’s mysteries or, if you’d like to read more about life on a reservation, Sherman Alexie.

The Age of Miracles and Where’d You Go, Bernadette

by Kinsey

Okay, who could use a little break from all the Atlas Shrugged? Anna and Rebecca are both heroes, as far as I’m concerned, both for plowing through all those pages and for writing it all up so as to spare the rest of us from reading it. But I have to say that each time I read one of those entries, I am reminded how thankful I am to be reading enjoyable, non-creepy, non-propaganda books. So let’s talk about two of them: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker and Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple.

As a general rule, I don’t like books that feature children as the main characters. I’m not talking about young adult books here–those are almost always told from the perspective of a kid or teenager and those are great. I’m talking about “literature” by adult for adults that uses a child as a narrator. I find that way too often this is clever trick writers use to show off, and I find that it often comes off treacly and condescending. However, both of these books feature pre-teen young girls as main characters and although the stories are very different, they both work really well.

Walker’s book might actually be a YA book, but it reads to me very grown-up, and almost like a lengthy short story. It’s got a fascinating premise: one day the rotation of the earth starts slowing down, lengthening the days and nights and fundamentally changing life on the planet. The main character is a twelve-year-old girl who is trying to deal with typical middle-school friend/boy/parent issues, while everything we understand about time and the planet changes around here. It’s written as if the character is looking back from a much later perspective, but the story is not about what ultimately happens to the planet, it’s about how this girl experiences the changes. It’s sad and beautiful and disturbing–I couldn’t put it down.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review for The Age of Miracles: Sparse, elegiac memories.

You might also like: Susan Beth Pfeffer’s The Last Survivors series.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette has been getting rave reviews all over the place and with good cause–it is absolutely charming. The main character in this book is also a middle-school girl, who is trying to figure out what has happened to her mother, who has disappeared. That description doesn’t sound charming, does it? But it is, I promise! It’s told primarily through emails, news stories, interviews, and other “primary” materials that Bee (the main character) uses to try to piece together what happened to her mother. Most of the action takes place in Seattle and the portrayal of the culture of the Northwest is pretty scathing, but each character, even those that start off as caricatures, end of being really interesting, complete people. I just loved the whole thing.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review for Where’d You Go Bernadette: Delightful, funny, wistful.

You might also like: The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

Eli the Good

by Kinsey

While I’ve been enjoying Anna and Rebecca’s fall into the Randian rabbit hole that is Atlas Shrugged, I think it might be time to break all that up with something a little lighter. So let’s talk about the book that might be the polar opposite of Atlas Shrugged: Eli the Good by Silas House. One of the Amazon reviews called this book gentle, and that is the absolutely perfect word for it–it is a gentle story about a young boy growing up in a small town in the South in the 1970s. More specifically, the story follows Eli through the Bicentennial summer of 1976 as he and his family try to deal with his father’s trauma after coming home from Vietnam and the sudden arrival of his war-protestor aunt. I feel like that description makes it sounds more dramatic than it really is. While dramatic things definitely happen, overall the book has the sort of slow, leisurely feeling you get in the summer when even important things happen at half speed.

For me, the most powerful part of the book was how well House captures what it was like to be a kid in the rural South in the 70s. I am not quite old enough to remember the Bicentennial, but so many of the things he talks about in the book–trying to sleep in a house with no air-conditioning, riding bikes all over town with your best friend, riding around in the bed of a pick-up truck–were almost painfully familiar. (Okay, to be fair, my mother never let me ride in a truck bed. At the time I thought she was no fun, but now I’m thinking I should call and thank her for being ahead of her time in auto safety and for keeping me alive. See also: not letting me play with the fireworks you could buy on the side of the road.) The book also has a powerful feeling of nostalgia, since it is about Eli as a child but is told from a perspective of him looking back as a adult. This made the book feel even more like memories of my own childhood. I also really liked perspective on the political tensions of the Vietnam era. I feel like people don’t talk about that time much today–maybe because it’s too recent to be considered “History” but too long ago to be at the top of our minds–but it has shaped all sorts of things about the world today, so I always like reading about it.

At one point Anna and I had discussed doing one-word book reviews, and I think that is shorter than I can handle, but I am going to start trying a couple of new things in my reviews. From now on, I’m going to include a three-word review of each book, and a sort of book association game: “if you liked this other thing, you might enjoy this thing I am recommending.” My hope is that this helps our readers get a sense of the books, while also helping me really crystallize my feelings about the books. So, for Eli the Good:

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Sweet Southern tale.

You might also like: Bridge to Terabithia or anything by Lee Smith.

And now the Atlas Shrugged live blogging can continue. (And for the record, while I remember enjoying The Fountainhead well enough when I read it in college, these days you couldn’t pay me enough to tackle Atlas Shrugged. I will stick with my YA and vampire books.)

The Diviners

by Kinsey

Despite my best efforts at remaining separate from the sick people surrounding me, I started 2013 off with a wicked cold that left me too dazed to read or to even watch a movie. Instead I spent most of the first week of the new year slumped on my couch, grimly watching How I Met Your Mother reruns. But I finally appear to be pulling out of it, demonstrated by the fact that I managed to actually finish a book! A big one, in fact: The Diviners by Libba Bray.

Bray is a popular YA writer and The Diviners is the first in her new series about teenagers with special power living in Jazz-age New York. And even after reading all 500+ pages, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. As I was reading, I kept just coming up with a continual list of pluses and minuses that seemed to balance each other out.

Plus: It was a fun look into 1920s New York! Remember way back in the summer when I mentioned The Rules of Civility, and how I was still looking for a better book about the glittering 30s? Okay, the 20s are not the same as the 30s, but this met my needs. Bray did a great job creating a past-New York that felt real and alive.

Minus: The main character was weirdly flat. The reader was clearly supposed to identify with this young girl who comes to New York from small-town Ohio, ready to have fun and make her mark, but she came across as a brat with no depth or internal monologue. I got tired of her very quickly, and she felt like a character in a middle-reader or kids book.

Plus: While the main character left me cold, the supporting characters were really interesting and much more complex. Specifically, a showgirl with a history and a numbers runner in Harlem.

Minus: It was dark. Like, really, really, creepy Criminal Minds kind of dark. I generally don’t get too up in arms about kids reading adult material and I’m not easily spooked myself, but I am not sure I was old enough to read this. That, combined with the weird flatness of the main character, made me wonder who the audience for this was supposed to be.

Plus: This initial story in the series was wrapped up quite neatly and there was a good sense of closure.

Minus: Despite being a long, looong book, character reveals were made super-slowly and a few really major pieces of information were tossed out at the end and not really followed up on. I’m assuming these threads will get picked up in future installments, but it still felt like I had made a pretty sizable investment of my time to end up with so many unanswered questions.

Final verdict? I’m still in. I wouldn’t recommend it to younger readers (super creepy!), but I was intrigued enough by the setting and some of the side characters that I’ll read at least one more to see where this is going. I’m just going to hope that the next book focuses on the showgirl, because she was aces.

The Rest of 2012

by Kinsey

When I read a really good book I almost always write it up on the blog, generally because I’m so excited I want to make everyone I know read it. However, when I looked back over the list of books I read in 2012 (yes, I keep a list, otherwise I can never remember) I realized that I read some awfully good things that never made it here. So, to wrap up 2012, here are the five best books I read this year that I never got around to mentioning.

1) How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran. This is such a fabulous memoir. Moran uses her own life story to make a lot of points about feminism, beauty, generally living life as a woman in this society. But she’s funny, while also being radical! She’s also hilarious on Twitter.

2) The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson. I feel like this book sells itself as story about family, yet at the end of the book I felt sort of repulsed by the whole idea of families. But it’s a fascinating book.

3) Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. This is on everyone’s best of the year lists, for good reason. This one moved a lot faster than Wolf Hall, Mantel’s first book about Thomas Cromwell, but you need to read them both to make sense of it. I admit that Tudor history is an interest of mine, but the beauty of these books is that the characters are so well-drawn that the historical details are just a backdrop for Thomas’s story.

4) Angelfall by Susan Ee. The first in another series of YA post-apocalyptic novels. There is no shortage of these books out there, but I liked this one a lot. Dark, but an interesting premise in which angels are the cause of the destruction. It also takes an unexpected position on religion, and I’m intrigued with how future books will play that out.

5) Broken Harbor by Tana French. The fourth in French’s of mystery novels set in modern-day Dublin is actually less a mystery and more the portrait of a family falling apart. My favorite of her books is still The Likeness, the second book, but they are all completely compelling and very, very well-written. There are connections between the books, but they are not a series, really, and they can all stand alone. Feel free to start with whichever one sounds most interesting.

Sequels, Follow Ups, Trailers, and Recommendations

by Kinsey

As the holidays come barreling towards us, I first want to point you toward my entry last year on good Christmas books. I haven’t started my annual rereads yet, but I need to get on that. It doesn’t feel like Christmas to me until I’ve read a few Connie Willis short stories.

https://biblio-therapy.com/2011/11/27/christmas-reads/

But if you don’t want to create an entire holiday reading plan, here a few other things that have come up lately that relate to some of my past posts.

Remember when I raved about The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson? And said that I wasn’t sure whether it was going to be part of a series? It is! The second book, The Crown of Embers, is out now and it might be even better. I’m not going to go into any detail, since talking about this one would spoil the first one, but I loved it and it reminded me a lot of Bitterblue. The only downside is that it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger–Elisa’s story is clearly going to be a trilogy.

Now remember when I, and everyone else in the world, raved about Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn? I recently read one of the books she wrote before that, Sharp Objects, and it was equally compelling and creepy. In fact, if anything I felt even ickier after reading that one. So if you liked Gone Girl and want to read a disturbing mystery novel, Sharp Objects is perfect. (Also, we get a surprising number of Google hits on things like “gone girl linda holmes hugged the book.” So for the record, future Google searchers, I feel confident that she hugged the book at the point where Amy’s journal ends, and that next section of the book starts. Is that clear without being too spoiler-y?)

One of the best things about seeing the last Twilight movie in the theater (oh yes, I did), was that they showed about 10 different awesome previews. My sister was thrilled about the Catching Fire trailer, but I was most excited about City of Bones. I’ve already explained how much I like those books and, at least in the previews, it seemed like they had the look of everything right. I am too old to recognize any of the teenagers playing the leads in the movie, but I am excited about the parental-level casting. Aidan Turner, who was a vampire in the Being Human series (the BBC one, not the Scyfy remake), is Luke and Jonathan Rhys Myers is absolutely perfect as evil, creepy Valentine.

Finally, if you’re not already reading Tomato Nation, well, I don’t see what you’re even doing on the Internet. But just in case, one of the recent entries in her advice column, the Vine, asked readers for book suggestions for preteen/teenage readers. The comments on the entry are great, reminding me of YA books I loved and introducing me to some new ones. The comments to Anna’s recent Sunshine post included some discussion about what ages that book would be appropriate–the comments on that Vine post might provide some other great options.

Twilight, An Argument For

by Kinsey

Last week, Rebecca wrote quite a scathing review of the Twilight series, identifying a whole range of problems, from bad writing to bad gender models. However, we also wanted to offer another perspective on the whole phenomenon, and since I am the one here who has read all the books, saw all the movies in the theater, and say in my own bio that I like the books, the favorable review fell to me. But this is a challenging assignment, because it’s not that I actually disagree with anything Rebecca said. I think she’s right about all of it. On the continuum of me, Anna, and Rebecca, I am clearly the most pro-Twilight among us, but I will freely admit that these are Not Good books. Nonetheless, I like them, and I’m going to try to explain why.

First, let’s quickly run through some of the key problems with the books, just so that you know I’m aware of them:

1) The Twilight books are not-well written. The Host, Meyer’s non-vampire sci-fi novel, is actually kind of interesting, giving me hope that she might be able to turn out okay material. The Twilight series is not that okay material.

2) Bella is completely uninteresting. Seriously, totally blah. Say what you will about Kristen Stewart, she makes that more character more interesting than the source material. Which leads into the biggest issue . . .

3) Wow are these not feminist at all. Like, let’s make sure that the female characters have no agency whatsoever, and are completely at the whim of stalker-y, creepy, borderline-abusive men!

NONETHELESS, I like these books! They’re like Cheetos–you know they’re not good for you and you know you will feel a little ill when you’re done, but in the moment you enjoy yourself. I don’t want a relationship like Bella and Edward’s, but I sure wanted to find out what happened to them. The characters didn’t feel like real high school kids, but I enjoyed thinking about how much more interesting high school would have been if there had been vampires around. I also found that I enjoyed the books and the movies more when I had placed them in the proper context. These aren’t sci-fi books featuring teenagers, or coming of age stories with a supernatural twist. These are teenage romances that happen to feature vampires. When you read a Harlequin romance novel, you know that there’s a formula involved and that you’re going to get a certain set of ideas and characters. A romance novel may not lead to any epiphanies, but it will entertain you. The Twilight books aren’t trying to create an intricate vampire mythology, but once I read them as romance novels telling sort of fantastical love stories, it made more sense.

Plus, I am fascinated by Mormonism, and I love how you can SEE Stephenie Meyer’s Mormon worldview coming out in crazy vampire plot points.

Look, sometimes when I read I want to be challenged or to learn something or to be comforted. And sometimes I want to shut my brain off so that I forget the world around me. I wouldn’t want this to be the only thing I read, and I wouldn’t want for young women to read these without having taken the number of feminist theory courses I have. But I have read a whole lot of crappy Dan Brown and Michael Critchon books in my day, and if I’m going to pass the time on an airplane or at the end of a stressful day with something, I’m happy to pass it with sparkly vampires.

The Uninvited Guests

by Kinsey

A couple of weeks ago Anna posted about A City of Ghosts for Halloween, and I wished I had read something spooky so I would have a seasonal recommendation, too. If I had just finished The Uninvited Guests a bit earlier, I could have told you all to go read the creepiest thing I have come across in quite a while.

The book starts off as a fairly typical English house party story–an upper-class family has guests for the weekend, and everyone is very concerned with dressing for dinner and who will marry who, etc. But then things take . . . a turn. I don’t want to talk about the plot too much, because I don’t want to give anything away, so instead I’m going to talk about how the book made me feel. Which was waaay creeped out. I was initially reading this before I went to bed at night, but I started feeling such a sense of dread after each chapter that I had to start reading it only during daylight hours. Even when nothing obviously bad was happening, things still felt so ominous that at times I wasn’t sure I could finish the book. But I kept going and I was glad I did–the author did a beautiful job of building up to a very eerie climax, raising the tension so slowly that I almost didn’t notice at first.

And now I am going to go read Anne of Green Gables or The Railway Children or something else wholesome and happy so that I can sleep at night again.

Liar and Spy, Sort Of

by Kinsey

As Anna said in her last post, all of us here at the blog were awfully worried about Hurricane Sandy, but we were fortunate enough to have made it through the storm with power and without major damage (and of course our thoughts are with the folks further North who were not so lucky). But I did end up spending a couple of random days trapped in my apartment–an excellent opportunity to finish up some library books. Some of my reading was grown-up (Capital by John Lanchester, which was just fine), but I also raced through a sweet middle-reader book by Rebecca Stead called Liar and Spy.     

This super-quick read was a charming story about a Brooklyn middle-school kid whose family is forced to sell their house and move to an apartment, and how he makes some friends and learns some lessons in the process. Like I said, sweet and charming, but I’m really talking about Liar and Spy so that I can tell everyone to go read Stead’s last book, When You Reach Me, which won her the Newbery Medal in 2010. It’s another middle-reader about New York City kids, but this one has a sci-fi twist and a major plot point turns on one of the characters reading Madeleine L’Engle classic children’s book A Wrinkle in Time.
Now, I have a particular soft spot for Madeleine L’Engle (I actually named my litter sister after her!), so this was an automatic hook for me. I’ve seen some criticism of When You Reach Me arguing that using L’Engle’s book makes it somehow less original, almost like fanfic. I think that A Wrinkle in Time is such a classic at this point, such a familiar institution to some many kids, that it’s a smart way to connect with readers. Particularly since the book is set in the 1970s–young readers might find some 70s elements strange, but A Wrinkle in Time might be familiar. As an older reader, I found it nostalgic. I also got completely sucked into trying to figure out the plot and worrying about the character–Stead takes things in a really interesting direction and uses the ideas in L’Engle’s book to tell a completely different kind of story.
As much as I love YA books, I usually find middle readers a little lightweight. Liar and Spy was lovely and I would happily recommend it to kids I know, but When You Reach Me was something else–clever and touching and powerful. It’s only going to last you an afternoon, but it’s well worth a library visit.