I've lately been taking advantage of my local library's ebook loans. I like the convenience of the ebooks, and the freeness of the library. Yet browsing the selection of offerings that Overdrive provides is not the most optimal of processes, to be honest; you'd think that a library would be more on top of providing its patrons ways of investigating what books they have to lend electronically.
Oh, it's simple enough to investigate what they have by flipping through a list of books by topic. Adding a book to your checkout list, however, is a multi-click process that, when you're done, takes you back to the library's main page. So if you were originally ten pages deep in the biography section, well, that's tough luck. You'll have to navigate back to where you left off, if you remember.
The selection at my local library is pretty horrid, too. I'd be in luck if I liked vampire novels (I don't), or very long young adult Harry Potter knockoff series. So usually I have to make do with what I find in the biographies or nonfiction areas, with the occasional novel tossed my way.
My biggest complaint—or perhaps it's the source of a lot of excitement, it's difficult to tell—is the delivery method. I've never once been able to download a book immediately. Even for the most obscure titles I've been placed on a waiting list. I never know exactly when I might be notified that my book's ready for checkout. All I can do is wait, and then one morning I'll fire up my email client and receive a notice to rush! rush! rush! and download my book as quickly as I can before the privilege is taken away from me. I leap into action, and then watch the countdown timer slowly start to tick away on my two weeks to finish the darned thing.
For someone whose library experience has typically been walking in and coming away with an armful of books right there and then (maybe not always my first choice, but definitely there's some immediate gratification involved), it's a disappointment not to know exactly when I'll be getting my choices. Worse was when I got three of them, which I'd requested at various times over the course of maybe four months, all within three days. One of them was an extra-large tome that I didn't even get a portion of the way through before my time ran out. And who knows when I'll get it again?
Anyway, I thought I'd share some of my Goodreads reviews of some of my recent reads, for those of you who aren't on Goodreads.
Water for Elephantw
by Sara Gruen
2 out of 5 stars
Everything I Learned in Water for Elephants: A Book Report by V. Briceland
1. Growing old sucks.
2. Men who are mean to elephants and women, but mostly elephants, deserve their grisly deaths.
3. A pageant of cardboard characters is totally okay as long as someone gets thrown off a moving train every 20-30 pages.
The End.
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
by Mike Brown
4 out of 5 stars
Short and eminently readable, Brown's account of his race to discover the solar system's tenth planet—and the subsequent change of heart that led him to recommend that neither it nor Pluto be considered planets at all—has two distinct plusses. First, he makes a lot of difficult material extremely approachable for non-astronomists. Second, it contains a ripping cast of villains, from evil internet chat room folk to disreputable scientists scheming to steal the work of others . . . and more importantly, Brown faces off against the two great antagonists of all astronomers, the too-slow passage of time and light itself.
If Brown tends to go a little overboard for my tastes in his passages devoted to his daughter, it's still refreshing to see a man of science who's even more passionate about his parenting. Otherwise, the work is an informative, quick, and fun read that's suited for just about anyone who's gazed at the sky and wondered what else could be out there.
Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
by Gabrielle Hamilton
2 out of 5 stars
Toward the end of Hamilton's interminable chef memoir, she admits to having a certain sense of Gallic superiority to the rest of the world. Hoo boy, is that an understatement. While Hamilton's recollections of her unconventional childhood and rise to celebrity as the owner of Prune offer up a credible pastiche of MFA-style literary writing, the author's personality is so off-putting that I found the book nearly unreadable.
When Hamilton is talking about cooking, or about the restaurant industry and its quirks, she's very nearly engaging--that is, if one can overlook her arty tendency to switch between first-person-past and second-person-present-tense narrative on the turn of a very thinly-sliced wafer of pancetta.
Hamilton's narrative style rests on the piling-on of rich layers of detail, however, yet throughout long passages of the book I found myself distrusting the accuracy of those details. I raised an eyebrow, for example, when she described driving down from Ann Arbor, Michigan, across 8 Mile Road into downtown Detroit--a nice shout-out to one of Detroit's more infamous landmarks, but a geographically-dubious route into the city. And it's outright disingenuous of her to spout foodie nonsense about how her childhood once-a-week dessert was a single square of really good imported chocolate or a lightly-sweetened slice of buttered bread, when she's mentioned, only a few pages before, gorging on Tastykakes. If one can't trust the details, what, exactly, can one relate to in a memoir like this?
Certainly not the thorn-skinned author, herself. A similar tone of superiority mars a good deal of the narrative. Hamilton dislikes children and their preference for French fries and macaroni and cheese over that single square of really good chocolate, or any of the more exotic fares she serves in Prune; she's dismissive of their parents and indeed, of anyone who will eat less-than-gourmet fare instead of skipping a meal altogether. She spends a large portion of the book secretly mocking and sniggering at her graduate school comrades only to turn around and justify the behavior by accusing them of condescending to her. And the meandering last third of her book turns on the cold fury she experiences, and the subsequent two-week silent treatment she gives to her (long-suffering) husband when he mentions that he'd like to buy a new iPhone.
There really is some minutiae that probably should be left out of a memoir, apparently.
American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee
by Karen Abbott
3 out of 5 stars
Gypsy Rose Lee's rise to fame rested upon a strip-tease act in which she removed very little and left her audience hanging. Karen Abbott's biography of the forceful personality manages to do very much the same.
Half straightforward biography and half social history of the rise and fall of the American burlesque theater, Abbott uneasily alternates between a historian's documentary approach to her subjects and third-person present-tense narrations of Lee's thoughts and inner turmoils. She further muddies the waters by jumping backward and forward in time, between Lee's successful career after the events narrated in the musical and movie Gypsy, and the actual events that went into the heavily fictionalized and sanitized account of Lee's upbringing. Toss in the alternate narrative of the Minsky brothers and the burlesque stages of New York City, and it's a confusing, if amiable, mess.
What's disappointing about the book is that it promises to expose many of the scandals involving Lee and her domineering, force-of-nature mother. It does not. It hints heavily at murders, mob involvement, and family betrayal, but never makes good on the promise to explain any of them—not well, at any rate. Like Lee's act itself, Abbott teases at the evidence, then backs away, leaving readers uncertain how much (if anything) they might actually have glimpsed.
American Rose is highly readable, but that seems to be more a function of Gypsy Rose Lee's outsized personality than Abbott's leap-frogging narrative. And that's a shame, because instead of a nation or even a strip-tease artist laid bare, I felt like a spectator in the front row of the Minsky's Republic after one of Lee's specialty numbers—highly entertained, but aware that the artist had done little but rearrange the draperies.
Lips Unsealed: A Memoir
by Belinda Carlisle
3 out of 5 stars
When it comes to celebrity memoirs, I can't think of any I've read that have quite as many eye-popping drug-related revelations as Carlisle's tell-all. In fact, I'm not sure how any of them are going to top Carlisle's confession about taking a large opium ball as a suppository. And I'm not sure I'm really want to find out.
Carlisle's memoir is a fairly absorbing read about her outsider childhood and adolescence and the founding, flare-ups, and eventual reconciliations between the Go-Go's, mostly set against a background of drug and alcohol abuse that continued for the vast majority of Carlisle's career. Her frank confessions of repeatedly lying in public and to the press about having kicked her habit while still hitting the hard stuff, however, leaves the reader unsettled and uncertain about the reliability of this particular narrator. And that's a shame, because like the best of the Go-Go's output, I want this particular song to end with a jangling major chord.
The Murder of King Tut
by James Patterson & Martin Dugard
1 out of 5 stars and I wish it could've been less than that
I have never read any of Mr. Patterson's other books, and therefore can't state with certainty that they're all written as if for developmentally-challenged seventh graders. But this one certainly made me feel as if I were reading while riding on the short bus.
Mr. Patterson's begins his investigation into the death of everyone's favorite ancient boy king with a prologue reminding readers (in all capital letters) that the role of the historian is never to embellish, but only to illuminate fact. He then follows up his decree with dozens of chapters filled with made-up dialogue and awkward, imagined sex scenes.
As for the mystery itself, well, apparently this book need be the only last word on the cause of Tutankhamen's death. His solution must be correct because, as Mr. Patterson reminds us in a late chapter, Time Magazine called him "the man who can't miss!" It's tough to beat so sound and circular a logic.
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