January's Book Reads

Rather than wait for the end of the year and try and remember everything I read, I am approaching it on a monthly basis this year. Here are the books I read in January:



Rite of Passage
This was the book that started it all for me—"all" being my life-long love affair with science fiction. I read this in Middle School, one of the 70's "open schools," hiding out in the attic where I used to go to escape the hustle and overwhelm of classes without walls, teachers without attendance lists, and Becky without friends. The story is about a 14 year old girl who is smarter than average and finds her way through a very grueling rite of passage on a far future ship where the coming of age ritual is one of the ways population is kept trim. I think I really related to this girl and to a society that figures out what your special skills are and cultivates them, at a time when I felt very much lost in the mob and undervalued because of my non-cute cheerleader status.

It is the third time I have reread it and it still holds together as a very good book. Notice that it is still in print! However, I don't recall comprehending the terrible power of the ship and the questionable morality of its rule. Just the story of the girl...

I'm not sure if I read this or Asimov's  I, Robot first, but either way I was hooked. However, I Robot does not work as a re-read. How did we ever swallow that level of sexism and stereotyping?



The next book I read was for the Book Club, and it was an author whose work I had read in the 80's and loved and admired. Andrea Barrett has an enormous gift for bringing to life the powerful passion of natural scientists in eras gone by, just skirting historical luminaries with secondary fictional characters whose stories illuminate the wonder and genius of scientific investigation. Archangel: Fiction did indeed uphold this premise, but the stories were darker, even grim, and leave the reader with a feeling of having just glimpsed a life that has somehow gone amiss. And sometimes even that is not conclusive. The other readers in my group similarly felt let down by the stories, and some even suffered through them.



As I mentioned in my year-end-books post, I am always searching for the eminently readable yet literary detective novel that will take me through at least 20 books of page-turning enjoyment. And, friends (if you are out there), I think I've found it for 2014. Not new at all, just new to me, I discovered Patricia Cornwell's Dr. Kay Scarpetta detective novels, starting with Postmortem (Kay Scarpetta Mysteries). Grisly, gripping, compelling—they are excellent and rife with really interesting scientific and medical data as well as great characters. Not for the faint of heart, I even reached a point in the book where I wasn't sure I really wanted to be reading this level of gruesome detail, but a quick look at the reviews, including the fact that Postmortem won the the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony and Macavity Awards and the French Prix du Roman d'Adventure,  convinced me to keep going and I am now 5 books into the series with Body of Evidence, All That Remains: A Scarpetta Novel (Kay Scarpetta), and Cruel and Unusual also behind me and the series hasn't disappointed yet.



On a much lighter note in the detective genre, the next book in the Flavia De Luce series, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches: A Flavia de Luce Novel is out, and as promised Amazon delivered it right after publication from our pre-order. My daughter "Fat Rabbit" and I traded it back and forth and were both delighted to continue the adventures of Flavia, though we agreed this one had some flaws that earlier ones did not, jumping around all over the grounds for no apparent reason, cutting of certain apparent plot lines, but eventually resolving in a very satisfying way that leaves us to await the further adventures of Flavia, girl chemist and private detective.


And just for fun I indulged in the latest escapades of Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy who to my delight managed to maintain her youthful personality and madcap-ness into her, gasp, 50's! Helen Fielding manages to pull off another plot variation of the age old Darcy gets girl, wiht a few oops along the way and lots of fun and I did actually catch myself laughing out loud while reading it waiting in line somewhere.



Because I am a great fan of Ann Patchett's after hearing her speak at Writers Center Stage last year,  I went out and got her new collection of essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Well the girl can write, and each essay is really a perfect gem. However the whole book en masse starts feeling like a little too much of the perfect point of view. They say every Rabbi has one sermon and every writer has one story, and when the essays are strung together in this way, I started feeling that one-story repetition, just because it is the SAME person telling each (wonderful) story. I am sure it is just me because the reviews are insanely wonderful. But I would recommend reading one of these each month, to be brought into the freshness, humor and clarity of Patchett's world anew, rather than over and over again, and then it would be fun each time.

I shout out to "Fat Rabbit," (as always, names changed to protect the innocent) my daughter and fellow book worm, who reads on the bus, at the dinner table and even while walking to school—for helping me sort my reading pile. We both are always ordering books at the library, going to pick them up and returning with everything we ordered plus an additional pile. And we both wind up having several piles that we circle in confusion, wasting precious reading time trying to figure out which book we are actually reading. In a moment of inspiration, during one recent snow day, she suggested we sort our piles and decide IN ADVANCE what we are reading next. It has served us both very well. Here are our piles—white slips of paper are stand ins for books we have in our Kindles so that they are in the queue as well. Thank you Fat Rabbit!