The novel is well written and ends on a good note.  Forstchen’s characters serve as a cautionary tale, but he also imbues the idea that, ultimately, humanity will be okay if we all just pull together in times of need.  His characters are well developed and I cared about what happened to them. Despite the author’s somewhat obvious right wing political leanings, I feel that this is a story that anyone would enjoy.

When I tell them my father has five wives, and I was raised to believe plural marriage is the will of God, these sincere people often ask, But Mrs. Young-how could you believe such a claim?
Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.

I had high hopes for this book.  I’ve read other books about the polygamist lifestyle and always found them fascinating, in a disturbing way.  The story switches back and forth between the past with Eliza and the present with Jordan.  At first I enjoyed the comparison of the two, but near the half way point I felt like Ebershoff really would have liked to write a book solely about Jordan, but couldn’t flesh it out enough so he wound Eliza in to make up for the lack of content.  Jordan’s story line had possibility, but I felt that the wrapping up of his plot line was too sudden and convenient.  Eliza Young is a historical character and I felt that Ebershoff remained true to her and her tale, but in the end I would have enjoyed one book about her and one book about Jordan better.  The two of them both deserve an entire novel to tell their stories.  This is my only complaint about the book, because Ebershoff is a talented writer, but it was a big enough complaint to make me think twice about reading it again.

Thomas Mullen depicts a town in Washington that in all out effort to protect itself from the pandemic that had been sweeping the nation, shut itself off from the rest of the world. Initially the plan seems to work, but soon a solider fresh from the battlefields of World War I comes to the town and demands to be let it. This is where the basis of the conflict in the book begins as the people in the town struggle morally with their desire to save themselves and help the veteran at the same time.

“He’s still coming,” Philip said helplessly, trying not to panic. He hurriedly rolled up the sleeves of Graham’s coat, wondering why he felt fid-gety and nervous when Graham seemed to become even more still than usual.

Mullen manages to skillfully stitch together real events like the massacre in Everett into the background of the tale without exposing the fictional world that he has created.  Despite the subject matter, the story is not depressing.  Instead, it manages to instill hope that humanity will do the right thing when presented with a moral conflict.  Each character seems real and and the reader can easily sympathize with the decisions that are being wrestled with and encourages the reader to mull over how they would react in a similar situation (such as the recent swine flu panic).

The only criticism I can offer is that the writing style can be difficult.  This is Mullen’s first book and his lack of experience is evident.  The writing can be stilted and is riddled with cliches-but not so horrible as to be a deterrent.  The character development and his ability to create a intriguing story line more than make up for his lack of polish, something that could be easily fixed by a strong editor.

Blind Assassin has multiple plot lines.  One follows two sisters, one who dies within the first couple of pages from a car accident.  Iris, the remaining sister, slowly reveals more and more detail about her past lives in first person narration. The second plot line is a book within Blind Assassin, which is told by two unnamed lovers during one of their trysts.  The tale is science fiction and intriguing. I wish Atwood would devote an entire novel to completely flesh out the story line.  The last plot line is set in the present and is narrated by Iris, now an old woman and about to die.  Atwood has a gift for language and Blind Assassin is no exception.

But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.

Normally, I don’t go for the novel in a novel thing, but Atwood blends all the story lines together seamlessly. The switch from plot line to plot line is not jarring or confusing, I never had to page back to see who or when I was at the time.  Both the younger Iris and the older Iris are developed and thoughtfully, and the elder Iris is especially charming and witty.  The novel leaves a lot unsaid, but I think that Atwood is a master of leaving information out without leaving the reader feeling cheated or confused.  The story is engrossing and it’s hard to put the book down once you pick it up.  I had every intention of doing laundry while I was reading, but the laundry lay cold and wrinkled in the dryer for a long time once I started to read.

Oh, Tom Perrota!  I wanted to like this book, but I didn’t.  I loved Little Children, but maybe I just don’t get The Abstinence Teacher.  I kept waiting for the real book to begin, or the characters to evolve–or even just become realistic.  Perrota is a master of suburbia fiction, but he fell short with The Abstinence Teacher.  Little Children really delved into each character and their way of life, The Abstinence Teacher simply skimmed the surface of the incredibly timely issue of sexual education and the skirmishes between the political right and left.  The basis of the book, which focuses on the controversy between sexual education and religion faith would appear to be chock full of tension and conflict, but Perrota somehow manages to negate most of it by never really fleshing out the arguments for either side of the issues.  The reader is left with a glimmer of what the book could have been, and I was left disappointed by a author who is talented enough to truly write a thoughtful book on the subject.  Read it, but don’t expect to be impressed.

My Wolfhound, Fiona

The story is based around Dante, a three-legged Irish Wolfhound, and his owner Rae (who is incredibly self absorbed-except when it comes to her dog).  Rae is hoping to find love, and Dante wants nothing more than to see her happy and see her find love.  The novel, written by Pam Houston, chronicles the bond between dog and owner and this is where the story gains its power and momentum.  The touching moments between Rae and Dante make you want to reach down and stroke your dog between the ears a little bit longer.  Houston describes Wolfhounds perfectly and really captures the essence of the breed.  Despite all this, I still don’t recommend the book.  It’s heartbreaking, and the human characters make it hard to like them, or care about them at all.  If you’re going to read it, flip through and just try to get to the good parts.  Houston can write, but the brief glimpses of her talents weren’t enough and left me ultimately unfulfilled.

Look at the list and:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (I want to read it, I started and stopped.  I really want to read the zombie version, so maybe I’ll read that and then go back to Pride and Prejudice).
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I’ve read a lot of it due to English classes and having gone to a Catholic elementary school)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (I read this against my will in school.  I dislike Charles Dickens immensely)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 [Catch-22 - Joseph Heller]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Thanks to high school and classes in college)
15 [Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier]
16 [The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien]
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 [Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger]
19 [The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger]
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens- Once again, against my will.  Damn you required reading!  Damn you!
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 [Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck]
29 [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland] – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 [Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy]
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens-  I escaped the clutches of this one
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 [The Kite Runner] – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh – AA Milne
41 [Animal Farm] – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 [The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood] (Love, love, love this book)
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 [Atonement]– Ian McEwan
51 High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (Really?  I wouldn’t put this book in this list).
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 [The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery]
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Although the book jumps around a lot in the time frame of Henry and Clare’s life, it isn’t difficult to follow the progression of their relationship and how they grow and evolve as people.  It did take a little willingness to accept time traveling based on how it was explained in the novel, but it wasn’t too much of an effort.  It also switches back and forth between Henry and Clare’s point of view and narration, which really provides the reader with the realization how the time traveling effects both Henry and Clare- but it can be differentiate between the two characters as their voices seem the same sometimes.  Henry is in a constant struggle to stay in the here and now, completely unable to control his body when it is most important to him.  Clare deals with being the one left behind and struggle to accept the life she has with a man she loves so much.

The book is beautifully written. The characters are realistic (despite Henry’s time traveling) and neither is perfect, both are flawed in a way that makes them seem even easier to relate to.  There is a lot of swearing and graphic sex scenes, but no worse than what you would hear or see on HBO.  Give the book a chance and see if it sucks you in, time traveling and all.

I’m not usually a fan of short stories. I like long novels where I can get to know the characters intimately. Short stories leave me feeling unfulfilled sometimes, like I was cheated out of something better and richer. This isn’t always the case. I love O. Henry and John Updike, just to name a few. Short stories are something that are becoming lost in our culture, and I think it’s a tragedy. Joe Hill has managed to jump the hurdles of the present and execute little gems that are a true pleasure to read.

While, technically, the stories are supposed to be horror, they go far beyond that genre. They are bizarre and touching at the same. The tales are often gruesome, but not overtly so. Pop Art, probably my favorite, is about an inflatable boy with a tragic wish and is truly a beautiful story about friendship. Some of then endings of the stories aren’t what you would expect, but to me that’s what makes good short stories so wonderful, you should be surprised and maybe a little angry. There is a definite old school vibe to the stories and they all make for a good read. A lot of short story anthologies have a lot of hit or miss stories that I often end up paging through, but not Joe Hill. He’s all hit.

On the Beach is set in Australia, and it becomes clear quite quickly that something horrible has happened. And that horrible thing is a full out nuclear war in the northern hemisphere of the Earth. Those left in the southern hemisphere are either dead or waiting to meet their end from the slow drift of radiation heading their way. The story follows several characters through to their respective ends: Dwight, a submariner from the US, Moira, a young woman who is bitter about her life being cut short, a young couple with a baby and a scientist who chooses to spend his last few months racing a car he probably shouldn’t be driving. The way that the characters choose to live their lives, even after being handed a death sentence, provides you with a little faith in the general goodness of human nature. The dignity with which they carry themselves is a nice respite on the generally inevitable bad behavior that usually takes place in post apocalyptic novels They don’t start rioting and destroying things around them, they just…go on. You get to know the characters and that’s what makes the ending heartbreaking, their realness really drives home that this kind of thing could happen to normal people if we aren’t careful. If this book doesn’t affect you, well, there’s something wrong with you.

Shute’s style in this book is a little wonky and some of the prose seems a little stilted. Since he wrote it in the 50′s there are some words that don’t ring true today, but that doesn’t detract from the book at all. I watched the movie right after I read the book because I was so enamored with it, but I ended up being disappointed with it because it didn’t carry the same impact. Read the book, it makes you want to be a little bit kinder to everyone in the world.