Super-belated! Books read in October, November and December 2012!

[lizbee]

...I know I have two days of December left, but I honestly doubt I'm going to finish anything. BECAUSE I SUCK.

Come to that, October was pretty light-on as well. 



October

The Gift of Fear - Gavin de Becker
Petty Treason - Madeleine E Robins
The Kiss Off - Sarah Billington
Courtiers - Lucy Worsley
Bad Debts - Peter Temple
Black Tide - Peter Temple
Dead Point - Peter Temple
White Dog - Peter Temple

November

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab - Fergus Hulme
Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World - Claire Harman
Saint Training - Elizabeth Fixmer
The Annotated Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen with Mark M. Shapard
Across the Universe - Beth Revis
Beaten, Seared and Sauced: on becoming a chef at the Culinary Institute of America - Jonathan Dixon
Behind Jane Austen's Door - Jennifer Forest
Chicks Unravel Time - L M Myles and Deb Stanish (eds.)
Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell
The Old School - P M Newton
What I Saw and How I Lied - Judy Blundell
The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago - Douglas Perry
The Face on the Milk Carton - Caroline B Cooney
Whatever Happened to Janie? - Caroline B Cooney

December

The Voice on the Radio - Caroline B Cooney
What Janie Found - Caroline B Cooney
Mae West: It Ain't No Sin - Simon Louvish
Ban This Filth! Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive - Ben Thompson
And All the Stars - Andrea K Host
Saga vol 1 - Brian K Vaughan
Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire - James Lowder (ed)





I spent a lot of time on planes and in airports in November.  You can tell, right?

Peter Temple is one of Australia's foremost crime writers, but I never read his Jack Irish novels because they looked so ... masculine.  AND THEY ARE.  But I was intrigued enough by the ABC's TV movies to pick up the books, and I enjoyed them far more than I expected.  Mostly because Temple is the king of getting into a character's head, and I really liked the general noirishness of his Melbourne. 

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was another one I picked up because I was watching the ABC's adaptation.  I didn't hugely care for it, but it was a million times better than the TV movie.  Awkward fact: the novel, written in the 1800s, features a consensual relationship between a white woman and a Chinese man.  In the modern adaptation, this is replaced by rape and forced prostitution at the hands of white miners. 

I mean, being written in the 1800s, it was a pretty racist depiction of an interracial relationship, but it could easily have been fixed for the TV movie.  Between that and the Phryne Fisher series terrible treatment of Lin Chung and his family, I'm casting a bit of side-eye at the ABC drama department. 

(I keep seeing Americans praise Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries for their inclusivity and general lack of racism.  It's adorable.  Also kind of stupid.)

Saint Training is a middle grade novel about a Catholic girl in the 1960s who sets out to become a saint, against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, Vatican II and women's lib.  It's adorable.  I bought it because it got a terrible review on a Christian website -- something about the book not ending with the main character becoming Protestant -- and I'm really glad I did.  It was funny, bittersweet and -- having grown up in a family still failing to come to terms with Vatican II -- very familiar. 

Across the Universe by Beth Revis is a YA sci-fi novel about a teenage girl woken prematurely from cryo-sleep on an interstellar generation ship.  I felt pretty mixed about it.  It bordered Save the Pearls territory in parts -- the heroine is white, with red hair and green eyes, while the hero -- along with all the workers manning the ship while the colonists sleep -- is a person of colour (don't worry, he's white on the sequel's cover!), and the villain is concerned that the heroine (totally forgotten her name!  IT WAS A MONTH AGO!) is going to disrupt the homogeneity of his society.  It didn't quite to into unspeakably racist territory, but I kept waiting for it, which I think spoiled my enjoyment. 

(Now I'm remembering that Tumblr post, about how gingers are over-represented in media because they're as exotic as you can get, while still being white.  Which I find hilarious, because I'm about as exotic as a beef sausage, and also I'm Anglo-Celtic, and something like 13% of Scots are ginger.  On the other hand, that post probably has a point.  I'd guess the next-most common colouring in media is light skin, dark hair and light eyes, which is also pretty rare in real life.  Except, again, my family.  Maybe we're just outliers.)

I also found Across the Universe immensely predictable on several levels.  I plan to read the sequel, which I've heard is better, but not right away.  (I've also heard that Beth Revis is the nicest person in YA, and is generally amazing and lovely.  So I really do hope I like the sequel better!)

Chicks Unravel Time: pretty amazing.  Except the season 17 chapter.  Really don't know what went wrong there.

What I Saw and How I Lied is a YA historical novel set shortly after the end of WW2, a coming-of-age triggered by blackmail, murder and scandal in Florida.  It was a really fast, compelling read, and I loved it and wanted more.

The Caroline B Cooney books are a classic YA series from the '80s and '90s about a teenage girl who recognises her own face on the missing child notice on a milk carton.  She spends the next few books basically having a series of breakdowns as she tries to work out how her loving parents could have come to raise a kidnapped child, and building a relationship with her birth family. 

Needless to say, I found huge parts of it improbable (especially that the various families didn't immediately sign up for ALL THE THERAPY), and bits were quite annoying -- the love interest is the WORST -- but there's a new book coming out early in 2013, and I'm totally going to read it.

Finally, the Mae West biography was quite good, but if I had a dollar for every time the author used some variation of "come up and see me sometime", I'd have, like, fifty bucks. 

Comments

[violetisblue]

Strings Attached, Blundell's follow-up book (not a sequel) isn't as good as What I Saw but I still recommend it to anyone who liked that one. Along the same historical YA lines I liked Kathryn Miller Haines' The Girl Is Murder.

[violetisblue]

Oh, and Deborah Wiles' Countdown, the first in a projected MG 1960s-era trilogy. Book one takes place during the Cuban missile crisis.

[melwil]

I second Countdown - excellent book :)

[skygiants]

I also had highly mixed feelings about Across the Universe! (I also found the way that the book Godwin's Law-ed itself to be completely hilarious. ELDEST ALWAYS TAUGHT US THAT HITLER WAS A WISE LEADER FOR HIS PEOPLE!)

I will be curious what you think about the sequel, I still haven't decided if I want to read it or not.

[lizbee]

YES! If I hadn't been on a plane when I read that, I would have flailed a lot on Twitter!

I mean, there's "interesting re/misinterpretation of history that tells us a lot about the people telling it", and then there's "OKAY, PUT YOUR HEAD RIGHT HERE, AND I'LL GO GET MY ANVIL!"

[wolfy_writing]

I tried reading The Face on the Milk Carton way back when, because I loved a different series by Caroline B. Cooney (The Fog, The Snow, and The Fire), but as it turns out, I'm willing to sit through a lot of implausibility in the name of psychological horror, but not for the sake of family drama.