This is the 3rd update to the Two-Thirds book Challenge.
Sara
Themes are the structure to Sara’s Challenge so we’ll honor those here. Her comments on the following four books can be seen here: Books of 2011
Writing:
The Late American Novel, edited by Jeff Martin, “was an excellent choice.”
“Dozens of writers of various genres put in their two cents about the future of writing, reading and books. The reactions are all over the place, the styles vary dramatically, and the different voices are very strong. Out of all these essays, there were only a couple I found myself skimming through rather than reading carefully and soaking up. I took many notes and in some places laughed out loud. Ironically, I read the book in the Kindle app on my iPad. I would love to get a paper copy and read it again in a year to see how the predictions are faring. Highly recommended for personal collections and gift giving.”
I am hoping to read this so I sure hope lending is enabled on this title.
Fiction:
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
“Gaiman takes Kipling’s classic The Jungle Book and changes the setting to a graveyard. He pulls it off in a wonderful way, and without a tacky ending. I would love to see more stories with these characters.”
Perhaps this can be my entrée to Gaiman.
The Magicians AND The Magician King by Lev Grossman
“When Magician King came out, I saw all sorts of interviews and reviews on book blogs discussing the allusions and references to writers like C. S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, Neal Stephenson, and many others. Just like my fascination with retold myths, I was intrigued by this series that admitted to so many influences. It took me a couple times to start The Magicians — Quentin is not the most sympathetic character, after all. But once I pushed through the first few chapters, the book really took off for me and the second book was even better.”
E
E found Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End “an enjoyable, engaging read” that she “zipped through” in a couple of days for her book club. She found several aspects well done: “the first person plural narration, the sense of futile frenetic energy in a workplace trying to justify its existence, the disconnect between real life and work life. I loved the bits and pieces of Chicago that emerged throughout the story. The interlude at the center of the book – a meditation on a woman’s cancer diagnosis – was moving and effective.” But she also felt that on occasion it fell flat and was clichéd.
Part of the problem for her might be that it reminded her of Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, one of her favorite books. If you are not overexposed to the workplace novel, or simply love them, then check out E’s review in its entirety and consider Then We Came to the End.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Another book club selection for Miss E, and a Kindle read. She thinks she may have gotten through it primarily by being stuck in a lengthy blood drive line, which gave her “time to really get hooked on the story, if not on the characters themselves.”
“I can say definitively that Egan is a master storyteller. A Visit from the Goon Squad weaves in and out of time, with a number of stories told in layers, folding and unfolding onto themselves. The reader encounters characters at different points in their lives. … Each of these stories – episodes – windows of time is deftly, though not always gracefully, presented, surrounded by music and an indelible scene, whether it is the Bay area in the 70s, New York in the early 90s, full of optimism, or New York in the near future, recovering but not recovered from 9/11.”
She certainly has some more to say so check out her review if the above intrigues you.
Jen
Jen has been ripping through books!
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. Jen almost beat the buzz around this by starting on it with her son a few years ago. He finished it but she did not.
With the family slated to see the new movie (Hugo) and a bit of peer pressure she read it.
Her bottom line, post-movie: “To sum up: great book, great movie, just see the movie first.”
Sara and I both also read this recently. We loved it! It is a ~530-page book but with so many beautiful illustrations I read it in under 2 hours. It isn’t a graphic novel but it isn’t simply a text novel either. It is something else and, whatever that something is, it is wonderful.
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
Jen didn’t have a lot to say about this one directly, but we’ll chalk that up to her being under the weather. It sounds like this is a book to focus on, unlike how many of us read sometimes.
“Most books I can easily drop in and out of and not lose my place, as it were, but I had trouble with this book. That aside, the book is both as fantastical in parts as it is earthbound and realistic in others. Since the voice changes between characters, I was sometimes lost if I went too long without reading or was waiting to hear the voice from someone in another book (the problem mentioned above). I don’t think that these characters will haunt me in the ways that other ones do, but I will carry with me some of the observations they made along the way. I wish I had marked pages and passages that touched me, but I didn’t.”
Between Jen’s comments and looking at the book at amazon (gorgeous covers on her books!) this one sounds intriguing as hell.
Black Like Me (50th anniversary ed.) by John Howard Griffin
“This is a wonderful book about racial inequalities, laid about as bare as possible. While the writing isn’t eloquent, it doesn’t need to be. The author used medicine to change the color of his skin from white to black and lived for ~6 weeks as a black man. Nothing else changed about him–he kept his name, profession, history, etc. While I found the whole of the book to be enlightening in many unexpected ways, I found the last part and the afterward the most intriguing.”
This is one of those books I need to read. Many others, I suspect, do to.
My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business: A Memoir by Dick Van Dyke
A memoir in the man’s own words. Nothing shocking here, Jen says. But would one expect shocking from Dick Van Dyke?
“He did smoke for a long time, and was an alcoholic and that’s as scandalous as it gets. If you’re looking for something disreputable, stay away from this book. Instead, it’s a happy walk down a fantastic memory lane.”
Mark (me)
I called Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov an “odd text” and that it is. Nowadays there are more things like it but for its time it was pretty groundbreaking. I had a fair bit to say about it in my post but the gist is that:
“I did enjoy Pale Fire although I doubt that I yet appreciate it as much as a few trusted recommenders do. I will need to reread it some day to better appreciate it in all its nuances: hidden, overt, and otherwise. Nabokov is a master of indirection as Rorty points out in his introduction.”
Transformations by Anne Sexton
“Brutal. Unflinching. Caustic. Anne Sexton let loose on fairy tales.”
“Sex and death. The never-ending story. Incest. (Real or contrived.) Old aunt. Father. Mixed in with the typical fare of lust, greed, hate, pride, and all of the other human foibles.”
Not, as I say, for the uninitiated. Sexton is quite powerful: pulls no punches, spares no sacred cows.
Beware.
That does it for this installment in the Two-Thirds Book Challenge. Stay tuned.



