Half-Resurrection Blues: A Bone Street Rumba Novel by Daniel José Older (Read 11/11/15 to 11/12/15)

This was a book I received in one of my Book Riot boxes.  The description is "Carlos Delacruz is one of the New York Council of the Dead’s most unusual agents—an inbetweener, partially resurrected from a death he barely recalls suffering, after a life that’s missing from his memory. He thinks he is one of a kind—until he encounters other entities walking the fine line between life and death.   One inbetweener is a sorcerer. He’s summoned a horde of implike ngks capable of eliminating spirits, and they’re spreading through the city like a plague. They’ve already taken out some of NYCOD’s finest, leaving Carlos desperate to stop their master before he opens up the entrada to the Underworld—which would destroy the balance between the living and the dead.  But in uncovering this man’s identity, Carlos confronts the truth of his own life—and death.…"
I really liked this book, in fact about halfway through the I pre-ordered the second book from Amazon.com, which is coming out in January!  Carlos reminded me of a wonderful mix of Odd Thomas and Harry Dresden.  So good!  The bad guys seemed a little day to defeat and I didn't really care for the ending, but I saw it coming.   My only other comment is that sometimes the language felt a little rough, it just didn't have a smoothness to it I was expecting, and the storyline jumped around some.  Thankfully this is a series so there is a chance the next one can do it a little better.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (Read 11/3/15 to 11/25/15)

This is BOTM for November.  This is the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and sister of Joseph from the bible. This was told from Dinah's point of view, and it tells of her many brothers and her father's journey from Paddan Aram to Canaan,  and eventually Shechem and the events surrounding her rape.
I really enjoyed this book.  Diamant's writing was smooth and really drew me into the story.  It was a wonderful perspective from the women's side of things, and I really had a hard time putting it down.
Diamant's writing was so enthralling, she was really able to draw me into the characters lives, I was very invested in what happened both to them and with them.  I NEEDED to know how they were going to evolve to meet the needs of the bible story and how the bible story was the bare bones and not the whole truth.The book made me sad in so many ways, Dinah had a hard life and there were many tragedies in it, but even with the sadness she never gave up and she continued, she was a strength unto herself.

The Beekeepers Apprentice by Laurie R. King (Read 10/18/15 to 11/1/15)

This is NNCC book for November.   Sherlock Holmes has long ago retired, and is studying honeybees in Sussex Downs.  It is here that he stumble, literally across Mary Russell.  She is an orphan that has intellect to match his own.  Sherlock sees her potential and she quickly becomes his apprentice and partner in a way Watson never could.  Then an elusive villain enters the picture and their partnership is truly put to the test.
I like this book a lot.  I loved the introduction and the story behind how the story came to be.  Mary Russell is a strong smart woman and Sherlock sees that from the start.  The writing really drew me in and I had a hard time putting it down.  The book is thicker and more complex than it looks and it made me happy.  I wanted to immediately pick up the next one in the series.  I really enjoy how much independence Mary gets and how much Holmes trusts her.

SPOILER ALERT

I do feel the morarity storyline and the suicide were a bit redundant.  Mainly because I recently re-watched Sherlock and since essentially the same storyline was used there, it felt overplayed.  But maybe Sherlock stole the idea from Laurie R. King.

Q: A Novel by Evan Mandery (Read 10/6/15 to 10/18/15)

This is my October book for BOTM.  This is the story of time travel.  The protagonist is met by his future self and is told not to marry the love of his life.  It takes some convincing, but after much sou searching he listens to his future self.  But of course the future is never what we expect it to be.  So the man is constantly visited by different versions of his future self giving him advice on what he should do to be happy.
I didn't really like this book.  It was an ok read, by that I mean it was readable, I didn't dread my weeks reading so it wasn't all bad.  I feel like the writer, i.e. the man, was pretentious and Q was perfectly bohemian.  I just didn't connect to the characters.  I felt the man was jerked around by his future selves quite a bit, they kept changing what would make him happy.
There were these were these awful parts were Mandery inserted whole chapters of the Man's writing and it was just tedious, it really annoyed me.  I wanted it to stick to the story.  It felt lazy and as storyline filler to me.
SPOILER ALERT
So in the end the old man, goes back to tell his original self not to leave Q.  There he meets old Q and they go off into the sunset.  The ending really pissed me off.  It was a pointless story, they end up together in the end and wasted all their youth and missed so much time with each other.  In my mind after the book ends, like within a week or so one or both is hit by a bus, because that seems fair for wasting the life they could have had even with the tragedy.  The whole reason the man didn't marry Q is their son has a horrible genetic disease and it destroys both the man and Q.  I'm sorry, but the solution is called birth control, and if Q doesn't want to agree to that a vasectomy could easily be obtained and the whole problem avoided, then they could adopt!   I was just a annoyed at the stupidity of the main character.

Harness the Sun: America's Quest for a Solar-Powered Future by Philip Warburb (read 9/30/15 to 10/28/15)

This is an early review book I received through Librarything.com Early Reviewers. The description says that it is a book about America's solar revolution. The early reviewer blurb said"Solar power was once the domain of futurists and environmentally minded suburbanites. Today it is part of mainstream America—and the solar industry is absolutely booming, as it adds workers almost twenty times faster than the overall US economy. Beginning in his Boston-area home, where a rooftop solar array meets most of his family’s power needs, Philip Warburg travels the country and introduces readers to a surprising array of pioneers who are spearheading America’s solar revolution, from conservative business leaders and politicians to students and professors committed to greening their campuses. Pollution-ravaged urban industrial areas and Native American groups alike are finding that solar offers the key to revitalizing their communities—all while weaning the country off of fossil fuels. In Harness the Sun, Warburg argues that solar offers a realistic solution to the urgent problem of transforming our energy sector in a way that meets demand and is technically and economically viable."  It sounded so fascinating and when I realized I won it, I was really exciting.  The same week it came we had a scheduled appointment with a representative from SolarCity to look into putting solar panels on our own home, it seemed very timely and relevant to my own life at the time.  Then I began to read the book and I was disappointed.
The first three chapters were very tedious for me to get through, and took me almost two weeks to read. There were so many facts about business using solar, which was great to know.   But the facts were not really about the company's journey to solar as much as it was about the cost benefit and the details of the business themselves.  It felt like a sales pitch to me, look we are using solar because it is cheaper, and it is great PR that we are going green, buy from us.  I was dreading the thought of reading 7 more chapters of this.
Then in Chapter 4, it finally got interesting. Warburg began talking about the politics and controversies behind building solar fields on brown fields. Brownfield is a term used in urban planning to describe land previously used for industrial purposes or some commercial uses. Such land may have been contaminated with hazardous waste or pollution or is feared to be so. Once cleaned up, such an area can become host to a business development such as a retail park. It made a lot of sense to me to re-use this land in a positive way.  Finally here was some meat and some interesting controversies and benefits of solar energy.  I began to enjoy the reading.  But then it petered out again, and I couldn't finish i.   I wanted to, but I just couldn't do it.  It was too dry and it just couldn't keep my attention.   I found myself resenting it for the time it was taking away from books I could be enjoying.  I left my bookmark it, but I just wasn't willing to force myself to slog through it anymore.

The Dinner by Herman Koch (read 10/8/15 to 10/12/15)

This was the NNCC book for October, and joy of joy's it was my suggestion.  Hooray.  I first heard about this book both BBC world book club and listening to the author speak about it really made me want to read it.  Koch states in the BBC world book club that the theme is really that violence lurking inside all of us given the correct circumstances and it intrigued me.
This is the story of two couples, actually two brothers and their wives who are meeting for dinner to discuss something horrible their sons have done together.  The first third of the book we don't know what the boys have done.  The repercussions of this act by the boys is far reaching and potentially devastating for both themselves and their parent's futures.
I really liked this book.  I was so happy I selected it.  At the end of the there were still unanswered questions and mysteries that keep me up at night wondering about.  I really like the character, even the unlivable ones, Koch did a great job writing and developing them.  The mystery of the boys deeds and what their parents are going to do about it was doled out the right speed.  Koch suckered us in and kept us asking what is going on?  The characters find themselves in a very complicated situation and are very complicated characters, it all feeds into a well written and suspenseful novel that I couldn't put down once I picked it up, all other books fell to the wayside, because I had to KNOW what was going on.
It seems that at my book club I was the only person who actually liked the book, three others had mixed feelings, and the remaining four didn't like it. I understood their feelings and their reasoning, and it was actually mostly those reasonings that I liked it.
One of the big reasons the book was unlike was that the story got turned upside down, what you expected at the beginning of the book isn't what happened at the end.  I liked that Koch took us down a twisty rabbit hole, that where we thought we knew what was happening and what would happen was wrong, I like when a book proves my preconceived plot notions wrong.
Two, the characters are unlikable, they don't make you want to invest in them.  As I said earlier, I did like the characters and I did invest in them, so I didn't have this issue at all.  I think it is refreshing to sometimes read about unlikable characters, to love to hate them almost.  I didn't hate any of the characters, did I think some were schmucks, yes, did I hate them for it no.  Were some of the characters morally corrupt and not nice people, did I hate them for that, nope.  I viewed them as complicated and layered, the first layer is oh yes look as this nice family and this not so nice family, start peeling away the layers and you start seeing that things are not as cut and dry as they seem.  If felt that Koch did a great job of peeling away the layers and showing us a more complicated family dynamic than at first appeared.
Three, Koch was a lazy writer who left lots of details out because it was too much work.  I don't think he did it because he was lazy, I think he did it to reach a goal, to force his reader to wonder.  That Koch wanted us to come to conclusions.  The disease the father and mother have are never stated.  Names of people and places are often left out.
Four, why was it set in a restaurant.  Koch says in the BBC interview it was set on a restaurant in his neighborhood, and the point was to have the discussion in a public place to avoid violence.
Again I still really liked the book, I thought it was well written.  I recommend it, but I think the caveat is that you might walk away from it with mixed feelings.

What I Made!

So I have been searching for a good reading journal.
For a while I had been using this beautiful notebook I had picked up from amazon for $13.45 back in January of 2013.   I loved the cover and the feel of it in my hands.  It made me happy to just hold it.

Then I started using it and I discovered there were some issues.  First of all it is blank inside, which I knew it would be when I bought it.

So that meant that I needed to write in all my own entries about my reading. Which I did for about 8 months before I said screw it!  It was a major pain in the butt for me for some reason, probably just that I am lazy.  

I still loved the book but it  just wasn't meeting my needs, I then put the journal in a drawer and began taking book notes on my phone, easier to transfer to my blog sometimes, but it didn't have the feel I wanted.  I wanted a book journal. I knew there had to be a way to revive my little beauty.  So I began searching the internet and Etsy for something I could use.   On Pinterest I stumbled across a free journal by the Modern Mrs. Darcy.  I joined her mailing list and was emailed a PDF of the journal.  I did not use most of it, I admit that.  But the parts I did use were PERFECT!!

There are 5 pages near the back of the journal that were just what I wanted as headers for my journal pages.  Each page had 6 copies of the box I wanted, so I printed the pages 3 times to get enough to fill out my journal and pasted them into it.  There were also these great literary quotes at the bottom of pages, 18 each so I pasted them into my journal on every 5th page, just to give me something to look forward to reading.

I had this small close pin that I am sign a place marker.  

I also used the front quote from her journal and pasted onto the front of mine. That way anyone who looks at it will know exactly what it is.

And Viola, a wonderful custom reading journal that makes me smile every time I pick it up!