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Category: 3 Stars

Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult

The addiction continues.  This one’s about a school shooting.  Only one silly thing happens, and it’s not all that silly.  Definitely not as silly as poisoning the Louisiana priest with antifreeze in his cocoa. …I can’t do this.  I don’t have the heart to continue reviewing this.  I’m too depressed.  I’m about to go directly into a decline.  I’m taking to my bed and I may never rise from it again.  I have several seasons of Gilmore Girls out from the library, my computer is plugged in, I have my cross-stitching, and I can stay lying in this flip chair…

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Miss Wyoming, Douglas Coupland

The fact that I stopped reading All Families Are Psychotic and started reading this is just further proof that I think an enormous lot of thoughts in my brain, and many of them are rather irrational.  In this case, my thinking was that if I was going to be disappointed in Douglas Coupland I’d rather be disappointed sooner than later.  So instead of reading All Families are Psychotic, which Nymeth said was pretty good, I read Miss Wyoming, which I’d heard wasn’t very good at all.  And then I shall read JPod because it looks strange, and then I shall…

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Lux the Poet, Martin Millar

I am afraid that if I keep saying sweet to describe Martin Millar’s book, it will seem to be that I am damning him with faint praise and denying that he has any edge. Because his books contain themes about racism and drugs and sex and whatnot, and these aren’t things generally associated with books that are sweet. On the other hand, if Martin Millar didn’t want his books to be described as sweet, he should not have written such extremely sweet books. So it’s not really my fault. Lux the Poet is about several things. It’s about a poet…

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My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult

My mum told me to read this.  I love my darling mum.  She must never, never, never become sick.  And neither must my father or any of my sisters.  They must stay in perfect health until they are very, very old, and then I will accept that as part of the circle of life they must die peacefully in their sleep after first ringing me up to say a satisfactory goodbye. That is the plan.  Deviance will not be tolerated. I really don’t like thinking about my family members dying.  Because of Jodi Picoult, I thought about it a lot…

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Disturbances in the Field, Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I read about this on this blog here, and I’ve been reading it off and on for the last week and a half.  It’s very sad.  Very, very, very, very sad.  It’s a very woeful book.  It’s all about a woman called Lydia and her life in college and then her married life and her children.  I’ll just go ahead and spoil this for you: Two of them die, the younger two, the two she raised to tothood without massive travail and struggle.  And that’s part of the thing that threads through the entire book – you know from the…

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The Laughter of Dead Kings, Elizabeth Peters

I would say – not her best work.  People are never as interesting once they’re all kissy-face.  Vicky and John have much I&D, as usual, and it was charming how Elizabeth Peters put herself in the book.  I want to be Elizabeth Peters’s friend because she has read all the same trashy novels that I have read (like The Sheik! and she knows the bravest-by-far-in-the-ranks-of-the-Shah-damn-the-girl-she’d-been-laughing-at-him-all-the-time song!).  And Schmidt is the greatest swordsman in Europe.  And that’s about all I have to say about that.

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The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Mary Pearson

Recommended by: Melissa I know that when writing a story is going well, everything seems connected, but it felt a little weird reading The Adoration of Jenna Fox right after spending an hour hunting for titles for my own story.  I was thinking of themes and words and trying to free-associate and when that failed, I went and read The Adoration of Jenna Fox with all the words still whizzing around in my brain.  The three primary ones – family, protection, secrets – as well as agency, actually – were remarkably relevant. The Adoration of Jenna Fox is about a…

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An Unkindness of Ravens, Ruth Rendell

I confess.  I got this one because it has the same title as the book Lucas writes on One Tree Hill.  And you know what I realized when I was composing this review in my head while washing dishes?  I realized that Lucas’s book title?  Ravens is meant to refer to his basketball team, the Tree Hill Ravens.  Which kind of makes me want to gouge out my eyes.  Like, bad enough he’s written a pretentious book full of pretentious sentences and given it a pretentious title, and bad enough they’re pretending that this idiotic autobiographical book about Lucas and…

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Empire of Ivory, Naomi Novik

The Temeraire series continues, hooray! I liked this one much more than I did the last two. It was more pulled together than they’ve been, and Laurence was very, very polite, and Temeraire is still a cutie. I’ve been having ongoing concerns that Laurence will get less polite the more he hangs out with the Aerial Corps people (and Jane, who bores me).  He didn’t though.  He might have been the most polite in this book that he’s been in any of the books.  Ah, courtesy. They flew to Africa, and I felt, of all the places they’ve been, Ms.…

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Matrimony, Joshua Henkin

Recommended by: Books and Cooks, who reads good books and has pictures of pretty food that makes me feel envious. I finished this today, and then I went ahead and read Waiting for Daisy, and I had such a strong reaction to Waiting for Daisy that I’m having a hard time remembering what I thought of Matrimony. This is one of those that doesn’t have a catchy plot. It starts with the main character, Julian, and he meets a friend called Carter in his freshman year writing seminar. Julian meets a girl called Mia and Carter meets a girl called…

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