Summer is well done and over with, and I’ve been meaning to get these up here for a while now. These are not full reviews (because I don’t do real reviews, lol!), but just a few words on my five favorite reads from the first half of the year. Click through for the full GoodReads pages for each of these. And happy reading!

Paint it Black by Janet Fitch:

A young woman searches for meaning and closure in the months following her lover’s suicide, as she becomes involved with his mother and explores the complicated relationship they had.

Paint it Black was twisted, brilliant, disturbing, and memorizing, like watching a car crash. I read this book SO slowly, because it was so rich with detail and emotion. Expertly written. A very intense and darkly beautiful story. This was my first from Janet Fitch (I know, everybody else reads White Oleander first, lol!), and I have to say she’s a brand new favorite of mine!

You’ll enjoy this one if you like lavishly beautiful prose and complex family dramas.

Hungry for You by A.M. Harte:

From Goodreads: “Love is horrible. It’s ruthless, messy, mind-altering, and raw. It takes no prisoners. It chews you up and spits you out and leaves you for dead. Love is, you could say, very much like a zombie.”

A collection of short stories about love, from a world full of zombies!!!

A favorite quote: “They tracked the car’s progress like sunflowers, faces upturned and yearning, all broken bones and gangrene smiles.”

This was a truly unique collection. Delightfully macabre, yet still tender? I’ve never read anything like it, but I was fascinated by every single page.

I’m George, mwm, 52 by George Everyman:

A married man expounds on his twenty-something-year marriage and the “affairs” they both had, as well as his thoughts of the general universe and humanity and a few other dozen things.

I found this book both engrossing and maddening at the same time. First, it’s written as a long, loose ramble, as if you were sitting with a friend in a living room at 4am (drunk and possibly stoned too) listening to his life story for 300 pages. Which is not entirely a bad thing – the narrator is engaging, thoughtful, and funny! And despite it’s loose structure, it still has the (vague) plotting of a story. (Memoir, actually, as the author seems to claim this is a true story.) The ending was just as engrossing and maddening as the rest of the book.

A favorite quote: “I like mixing up serious and frivolous things. Frivolous things like making a living, and serious things like playing games about death with kids.”

Overall, the book is quite profound, engaging to read, and enlightening, even if sometimes frustrating. Definitely an adult read, and an honest, no apologies one at that. If you enjoy rambling stories about life and love and well… everything, you’ll enjoy this.

Ruin, by NM Martinez:

Ruin is a terrifying and savage world where Paula, the Neutral daughter of an activist spy, has been exiled from the only life she knows. Now her only options are to adapt – and fast – or instead perish. The people here are ruthless and powerful, and Paula doesn’t even know if she can trust her own family. She’ll discover who she can trust, as well as who she can’t, and she’ll try to reinvent herself because going back is not an option, and going forward is the only way she’ll ever survive.

With sharp detail and riveting emotion, this debut novel by NM Martinez is moving, shocking, impossible to put down, and impossible to forget. If you like post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a good dose of swoon, humans with mutated powers that have consequences sometimes charming and other times spine-chillingly scary, you will love this!

Bonus – it’s the first of many more to come!

The Boyfriend Thief by Shana Norris:

A supercute, funny, heartfelt, and uplifting read. Avery is a hilarious and heartbroken young lady, fiery and yet so vulnerable at the same time, with a lot of damage to sort through. Lucky for her, the utterly adorable Zac is her polar opposite, and as they’re paired to work on a school project together, she doesn’t even know what’s about to hit her.

A favorite quote: “FILE CABINET! For the love of argyle socks, use the freaking file cabinet!” LOL!

One of the things I love most about Shana’s writing is how she’s able to weave the story between side-spliting humor, and deep emotional depth. The Boyfriend Thief is sweet enough for younger teens, and a refreshing and romantic pick for grown women. The story is packed with laugh-out-loud humor and the intense emotional scenes are perfectly expressed. I enjoyed it a lot!

On the bookshelf this fall: The Naked Gardener by L.B. Gschwandtner, The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris, The Opposite of Love by Julie Buxbaum, Room by Emma Donoghue, Water for Elephants (which everyone has finished by now except me!), and hoping to have time for A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore too. Oh, and I hear I need to read The Help too!

Not to mention Shana and Nina both have new books out or coming soon! Eeek! My to-read list is infinitely long!

(Also, totally not trying to make these into “pimp my friends” posts, but damn, my friends write good books! )

I always feel squeamish about reviewing the books I read. Unless I absolutely loved it, and intend to gush about it, most of the time I’ll just commit to the whole “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” rule.

Last night I read a book that I liked even less than Twilight. (note: by the way, this unnamed book was not the *wonderful* book listed in my “right now” box there on the sidebar!) Or at least, in my opinion. Right, that’s all it is, one opinion?

The premise was canned, the plot was contrived and pushed just the way you’d expect it to go. The dialogue was atrocious. The characters were mostly stock, and the main character was wholly unlikable. Her complaints didn’t have enough grounding, her past traumas were painted thinly, and her decisions seemed to materialize out of air.

But at the same time, if you’d looked up this book, you’d find dozens upon dozens of glowing reviews from women who loved it. They say things like: it was enjoyable, and fun, and it had a good message.

So what is an opinion worth anyway, in either direction? Clearly this book was just not intended for me. I spoil myself on the best writing and storytelling in contemporary literature, so it’s no surprise that a lighter read might feel like a waste of my time. Maybe I should have known better?

But at the same time, I do enjoy “lighter” reads sometimes. And I thought this might be one of them. The premise seemed interesting, and I really thought I might love it. But I didn’t love it, at all! The execution was just badly done. It could have been a great “light” read, but it wasn’t. And as a writer of novels myself, it’s helpful for me to really pin-point *why* I didn’t like something, in real and concrete reasons.

Though at the same time, I am under no obligation to share those reasons. Maybe there should be a sort of kinship between authors? If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all?

So are bad reviews helpful? Not every book is meant for everyone, and maybe my less-than-glowing review might save someone a few hours of her life. A bad review isn’t to flame the author (and I never would, not even Stephanie Meyer! lol!), but to alert readers that in some cases, if you’re spoiled on fine, well-developed literature, then there are certain kinds of books you might not want to waste your money on.

But at the same time, some day soon, my book will be getting less-than-glowing reviews from someone. Perhaps from someone who read it not knowing it wasn’t intended for them. Like this book wasn’t meant for me.

What about you? If you’re an author, hopeful or already published, do you review the books you read? Do you rate and star them? And do you put your name on it?

So after having a bout of cold feet on my 1st person alternating POV narrators, 35% into the second-ish draft of my novel, I decided to look through a few of my all-time favorite books and see how they were done. I was very surprised to find about 90% of the novels I own (as many of my favorites as I can afford, of course) were written in first-person, and a good handful of those used alternating 1st person narrators too.

Kind of telling then why I’m trying to do the same for my own novel – whether I can or can’t has yet to be decided

The list, favorite novels in 1st person:

A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
The Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter (4-5 different narrators)
Kiss Me Judas, by Will Christopher Baer
Lolita, by Vladimir Nobokov
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, by Lorrie Moore
A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides (1st person plural)
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (1st person plural, and one chapter in 3rd person)
My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult (4 different narrators)
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (2 different narrators)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

***

Not counting short stories, and not counting books I loved but don’t own.

Out hiking in the woods. It’s dark and ominous, about to storm, the kind of day that inspires stories… No, really, we’re a mile from home and about to get rained on.

Chapter 5 continues to be this big fat black hole, where I keep putting things into it, and nothing ever comes out.

Reading my first Janet Fitch (Paint it Black), she’s amazing! Every sentence is so nuanced and alive! Oh, *sigh* I want to write like this!

Bought some fresh, organic, local strawberries today from the farmers’ market, and they came with a fresh, still alive and wiggling worm… Cut your strawberries open before eating, people! You know, unless you like the extra protein… :\

Dylan says, “Mommy, I’m getting bigger. I’m almost a man.”

Dylan, on his bug bite medicine, “Like lotion for vampire bites.” – and it even doubles as a good title for a short story too, lol!

Pilot Speed are my new favorite band of the moment! (Remind me a lot of Radiohead, or Muse) Love, love, LOVE!

Note to self: probably not possible to finish both five novel chapters and six LH updates before this trip, in two weeks, just so you know.

Well, at least I accomplished something before the monkey-child started climbing on me. Maybe more later.

I’m a sucker for a good love story, whether that be romantic or platonic love. I don’t consider myself a romance writer, but I do write a heck of a lot of stories about love, whatever form it might manifest itself in. (And I have a theory, that on a very basic level, all stories come back to love in some form.) They’re hard to write though, without dissolving into a syrupy mess.

It seems in the past weeks the world has been thinking and reflecting on the topic of love in writing, and I’ve been collecting a few of the links I’ve found.

First, an interview @ Maud Newton w/ Marlon James: about his novel, the Book of Night Women (which sounds fascinating, by the way!), and writing about love.

I remember calling friends shouting, “I just wrote a love scene! All they do is kiss!” to which they would respond, “. . . and are they then dismembered?” and I’d go, “No, after that they dance!” It was hard. I resisted it for as long as I could because I didn’t believe in it at first, and even when I did, I couldn’t figure out how to write it. Not until Irish novelist Colum McCann gave me permission by giving me the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten from a writer: Risk Sentimentality.

There’s a belief that sex is the hardest thing for a literary novelist but I disagree: love is. We’re so scared of descending into mush that I think we end up with a just-as-bad opposite, love stories devoid of any emotional quality. But love can work in so many ways without having to resort to that word. Someone once scared me by saying that love isn’t saying “I love you” but calling to say “did you eat?” (And then proceeded to ask me this for the next 6 months). My point being that, in this novel at least, relationships come not through words, but gestures like the overseer wanting to cuddle. Or rubbing his belly and hollering about her cooking, or teaching her how to dance or ride a horse — things reserved for white women…

…I think, as a writer, the important thing was to layer the relationship with complexity and contradiction. There were situations where I could have left certain storylines one-dimensional and gotten away with it. I think the relationship is gripping not because they love each other, or think they do (or not) but because even with such a horribly skewed dynamic, hearts do what they want. And people don’t always fit in the roles that have been assigned to them. But of course the relationship is doomed; any slavery love writes its end in its very beginning.

On a similar tangent, I certainly don’t consider myself an erotica writer either, but I can’t seem to write a story that doesn’t involve or at least elude to sex in some form.

Here, an article on how writing about sex in fiction is almost never really about the sex.

More on writing sex here, from Storytellers Unplugged.

And finally, a must-see movie – film, I guess, we call them films when they’re artsy and thoughtful Good Dick: I suck at writing reviews, and there are plenty of good ones on IMDB, but really, it’s a hilarious, twisted love-story, but at the same time surprisingly sweet. Emotionally taxing, but so worth it! Movie trailer here. (Oh, rated R and not for the kiddies though!) Enjoy!

not a reader:

These links aren’t exactly new or anything. I think I’ve had this post in my drafts for two weeks.

A good story, in The New Yorker – not a new story, I clicked through to read one by Lorrie Moore, but ended up reading this older one instead: “Brother on Sunday,” by A.M. Homes. Love her! Just revel in this line for a moment. Has anyone ever written a better line than this?

“My brother is coming, after all,” he says. His brother, Roger, visits the beach once a year, like a tropical storm that changes everything.

Have to buy this issue of Tin House! (Issue #40) Charles Baxter! Amy Hempel! Joshua Ferris! Stuart Dybek! And poetry by Stephen King? OMG, get me one of these right now!!! Seriously, I might even brave taking Dylan to a bookstore to get one of these! (Dylan gets traumatic in bookstores for some reason – toy stores, fine; bookstores, meltdown!)

not a writer:

My novel isn’t dead, but in hibernation, still. It is not technically dead, no one checked their watch and said, “Time of death, 10:53 a.m.” Is it on life support, maybe? Or in cryogenics, to be revived at a later date, when its medical condition might be helped by future breakthroughs we have not discovered yet?

I started working on new a short story, actually. I never thought I would write one again, but I suppose “never again” is a pretty big statement to stand by. The penultimate short story I wrote was one that turned into the first version of my attempted novel. Then my last short story was the one that turned into my current version of my novel, which isn’t technically dead, yet. I totally need to stop doing that! This short story, I’m pretty sure, has no chance of turning into a novel. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.

But I started that story last week, and have not actually written anything “valid” this week. No, not a word. Did you ever have those kind of weeks where it ends up being Friday, and you’re like, wasn’t it just Monday a minute ago, and what have I actually done with these last five days of my existence? I’ve been writing the usual things, as well as some rants, some snark, some comments on facebook.

But “valid” fiction (“valid” = stories that might be sold and/or published to further my professional writing career), no, not really. Not this week. Maybe next.

I finished reading Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (500 pages) in less than 24 hours, lol. Yes, it was that simple. I was skeptical about all the hype, and it turned out to be just that – hype. Simple is a good summary of it. Nothing to sink your teeth into (pardon the pun, lol!). There was no language to slow down and savor, no depth, nothing to think about. I can imagine exactly why thirteen year-old girls adore it though… just not so sure why all the grown-up girls are raving about it?

Regardless, even bad writing can serve as a lesson in how not to write, I think. And it can be a good exercise in knowing what not to do, for writers who already know the difference. No need to mention over and over again how beautiful and statuesque your main character’s love interest is. We got it the first dozen times. And the main character, Bella, is just annoying. I hate main characters who are supposedly beautiful but just don’t know it. She is supposedly so socially inept, but the second she sets foot in her new school, she has hoards of admirers, including the most elusive clique of kids (the vampires) in the school.

The love between the main characters has no base – other than that he’s beautiful? I don’t know why he likes her, as annoying as she is, except for the fact that she has especially delicious blood he wants to drink (eeek! how about that for a come-on line?). And he’s not even nice to her most of the time. She should have just left him alone, when he told her so many times that he was bad for her. I kept thinking she should date that other dude who liked her (Mike?). He seemed nice, cute, doting, friendly, warm-blooded, no sharp blood-thirsty teeth. But then, I guess some girls are just into that bad-boy type.

And speaking of love stories, lol, the couple in my novel are seventeen, going on eighteen, at the start of my novel, and my novel looks damn-near pornographic next to Twilight. I am SO not writing YA, I guess. I mean, chastity is fine and all. It’s admirable to wait, save yourself for marriage if that’s your thing. (One of my almost eighteen year-old main characters is a virgin still, at the start of the novel – she loses it by about chapter five, lol). But to think that none of Twilight’s almost eighteen-year-old characters are doing anything more than having first kisses and hand-holding? A whole high school full of eighteen year-old virgins? No boob-groping? No BJ’s in their cars? They have an unsupervised camp-out on the beach, and none of those couples sneak off into the woods together? Not even hour-long first-base back massages??? (Do you remember those? Those were nice, actually.)

So it’s all a bit far-fetched. I’m sorry, but it just is. I know, it’s YA. Don’t they usually throw in a couple kids who do have sex as a bad example or something? And then there’s the excuse that he’s a vampire, he’s too strong and could hurt her, but the whole time I’m thinking, “Girl, just climb on up there, he doesn’t have to move, he doesn’t have to do anything.”

I can feel my devil horns growing…

Anyway, what I’m taking from this experience, I guess, is that it was a decent example of suspense and pacing and tension. It was a page turner, after all, I did finish it in less than 24 hours, didn’t I? And all stories, even the well-written ones I prefer to read (and hopefully someday write), should make the reader intrigued enough to keep reading.

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 23
30915 words (on track = 38333)

I am hopelessly behind after taking a couple much needed days off, indulging myself in Weeds and Twilight. I am okay with this

Amazon gift certificate time! I love debit card points

Hubby and I got about 20 books, and it only cost us about $40. There are too many to list, but I’m most looking forward to:

Self-Help, by Lorrie Moore
Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer (just have to see what all the hype is about!)
Men in Love, by Nancy Friday (part novel research, part horny curiosity
Veronica, and Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill
and I also bought copies of already-read books I borrowed from the library:
The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris
and Billions & Billions, by Carl Sagan

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 21
30079 words (on track = 35000)

I haven’t exactly given up on NaNoWriMo, but am taking a slower pace. I took an entire day off yesterday, and spent it watching the entire second season of Weeds

Now I’m going to see what all this Twilight hype is about. I’m skeptical, and wasn’t too impressed with either the reviews, or the Amazon sneak-peak. But you know, there must be something I can learn from it, since everybody alive has read it but me! It’s all anybody talks about anymore. Teenage vampire romance, lol.