I Can Read Good

Summers have always been a time for me to keep up with reading all those books that everyone else has read but I haven't. Periodically, I'll post the books I've read, mostly so I don't forget the titles and what I thought of them.

Now I know why everyone told me to read this book! This was one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's about a group of friends at a tiny liberal art college on the East Coast. Inter-personal relations rule in this book, as do personal quirks, but even though the main characters seem far-fetched at times, the way Tartt constructs her characters is down right breathtaking. I was hooked on this book after the first chapter. I almost didn't pack for England because of it! Now Kevin just finished with it, and he also loves it. It takes a while to get used to Tartt's prose, but once you do, it's almost impossible to stop reading.
4.5/5: Shanti!

I read this book on the plane. It's about a working-class teen-aged boy in West Pennsylvania who has to take care of his family after a tragedy. It was a very quick and easy read -- good plane reading. O'Dell actually grew up in a small Western Pennsylvania town, and you could feel her love and angst about her own past circulating throughout this book. It was a very fatalistic book, especially about the opportunities in a once-big mining town, but it had really good character development and kept me turning the pages.
3.5/5: Me Likey

This book reminds me a lot of Marc Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. This book also takes on an autistic boy as its subject, but it isn't told from his eyes, but rather his mother's. It's also a character-driven mystery, and the author did a great job at stringing together pretty complicated plot lines. The author has an autistic child, and the book dealt with a lot of the emotions involved at having someone so close to you be different. I really liked this book a lot. It was a quick book to get through, the author dealt with her topic really well, and I learned a lot in the process.
4/5: Really Enjoyable

I love me some non fiction, and a lot of my friends enjoyed this book, so I thought I'd really dig it. Eh. The stories are pretty fascinating. Sacks talks about different patients and they're neurological issues. And yes, one story is about a man who looked at his wife and saw a hat in her place. The sheer oddity of the stories keeps one reading this book, but for me the book is too episodic. The vignettes are too small for me to really get involved with Sacks' story. Right now I'm reading one of the stories before bed every night, and in that way it's a fine book, it's just not good for sustained reading.
3/5: good

Right now I'm reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, of fatwa fame. I'm only a little way in, but right now I'm completely hooked.