The Magicians :: Lev Grossman

Quentin Coldwater is a high school genius and totally miserable. Out of nowhere, he finds himself suddenly admitted to Brakebills college of magic. Aside from his magical education, he has the usual college experience – sex, drinking, and general ennui.

I really wanted to love this book, and but I feel like it fell just a bit short. Overall, it felt like the author had just too many ideas, and tried to pack it all in all at once.  I feel like the author read The Secret History, really loved it, and recreated it in a present day magician’s school. Obviously, there are Harry Potter references scattered throughout, but at least it had a good humor about that.

There’s a sequel out that furthers the adventures of the characters, but I’m in no rush to check it out of the library.

Cosmopolitan : A Bartender’s Life :: Tony Cecchini 

Anyone that has ever made their living tending bar should read this book.

Anyone else, tip us hard working folks behind the bar appropriately and don’t act like a dummy when you’re out and about. If you haven’t tended bar, you should read this anyway.

Try not to get too caught up in the author’s sometimes overly florid language, and the bit of an ego he has.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret :: Brian Selznick

How could anyone not enjoy an illustrated story of an orphaned boy living inside the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930′s, where he tends clocks and steals to survive? Within his secret home, he is slowly repairing an automated man his father found in a museum attic, using bits and pieces he has stolen from the station’s toy vendor.

This book was absolutely lovely, and I need to watch the movie soon! The Netflix has been sitting on my TV stand for nearly a month and I haven’t gotten around to it.

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 This past month I’ve also FINALLY gotten into the Game of Thrones books. When the HBO series started last year, I decided to not watch the show until after I read it. I started the first about a year ago, and it never really grabbed me. I never really invested the energy in the story, and put it down about two thirds of the way through and forgot about it. Ryan got the series box set when it was released last month, and I watched the entire series in two days. I immediately finished reading A Game of Thrones (as an e-book on my phone, as I had packed the copy away in storage), and have been working through the others. I plowed through A Clash of Kings in a few days, and am about halfway through A Storm of Swords right now. Loving the series, although Martin’s writing can be as dry as the desert at times. I know that it’s necessary, since he’s building a very detailed history of the world, but there have been plenty of times where I have to stop and refresh myself as to which character is doing what now.

Has everyone been keeping up with Buffy Season 9? It’s getting damn good! I don’t want to give anything away for anyone that’s waiting for the trade backs (first one is out this summer, I think), but I can’t wait for the next issue. I was not expecting what happened at the end of #7.

Saga is a new series by Brian Vaughan (one of the Lost writers) and illustrated by Fiona Staples that Ryan picked up on a whim and we both loved. The foundation was strong, the art was gorgeous, and it seems like it will have a really rich storyline. I’ve heard great things about Staples’ other work, especially Mystery Society, so that’s on the list for this Wednesday’s comic book store date!

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• Watched Mad Men from start to finish. Oh, that Don Draper. I sometimes get irrationally angry at my husband for things that Don does.
• Re-watched the end of Buffy season six last week. Evil Willow is still, and always will be, my favorite Big Bad.
• Saw The Hunger Games, and was totally disappointed. The never ending extreme close-ups started annoying me within the first fifteen minutes, and just kept on going.
• I haven’t started the new seasons of anything that is airing right now! We decided not to get cable in our new place, and I also hate waiting in between episodes, so I’m not watching anything until the season is over. NO SPOILERS.

What have you read & watched this month?

Related posts:

1. Stacked : January
2. stacked :: 2011
3. Stacked : February

Knockemstiff :: Donald Ray Pollock 

Not since Palahniuk first hit the shelves has a writer captured hitting bottom without any sort of idealistic glamour. Donald Ray Pollock worked in a paper mill in Ohio for over 30 years before before publishing his first book, Knockemstiff, named so for the holler in Southern Ohio he was born in.

Spanning from the nineteen sixties to the mid-nineties, Knockemstiff tells the stories of the town residents in gruesome detail. The stories intertwine one another, and the characters reappear on the periphery of one another’s lives, often lewdly and violently.

The Devil All The Time :: Donald Ray Pollock

Pollock’s first full length novel follows the same path as Knockemstiff – the characters and their lives are separate stories intertwined, and gritty and obscene. Set earlier in the century, starting with a soldier returning home from battles in the South Pacific during WWII, it follows a cast of religious fanatics, rapists, addicts, and serial killers, with one man caught in the middle.

I wholly recommend reading Donald Ray Pollock’s work. He’s hit the mark that Palahniuk has been missing the last few years.

Voodoo Queen : The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau

Now that I’m living in New Orleans, and working in the French Quarter, I wanted to get a bit more educated on its fringe spirituality. I picked up this book in shop around the corner’s local interest section, and I can say that I enjoyed it, even though it wasn’t really what I expected it to be. It was an interesting biographical account of the two Laveau women (mother and daughter, both named Marie), but less of the spooky mojo than I was hoping for. Instead, it was an incredibly interesting account of the racial and caste system of New Orleans in the 1800s, with accounts of events on streets that I now walk every day.

In retrospect, I feel a little silly expecting some sort of historical account of a magical woman.

What did you read this month?

Related posts:

1. Stacked : January
2. stacked :: 2011

Despite The Move, I managed to get a good amount of reading done in January, although I still haven’t gotten to 1Q84. It keeps looking down at me from its shelf, and to be honest, it’s a little intimidating. I’ve read a few of Murakami’s novels, and they all demand so much attention that I wasn’t sure I had to devote.

The Night Eternal : Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan 
The Night Eternal is the third novel in vampire apocalypse Strain Trilogy. The series started off really strong with The Strain, and built a solid midway foundation with The Fall.  This novel takes place two years after the outbreak of the vampiric virus, and the world is now under the control of The Master and his vampire drones. Most surviving humans are interred in camps, but a small group of fighters remain free, with the weight of saving the world on their shoulders.

Despite The Night Eternal being well paced, and providing a solid backstory to the vampire origin, something felt a bit lackluster about it. I may have had my hopes too high, since I had been waiting to read it for about six months, and let myself get too hyped up about it. I may have enjoyed it much more had I read them all back to back, rather than having to wait for each release.  The series didn’t make our new shelf cut, so it isn’t pictured above.

The Hunger Games Trilogy : Suzanne Collins

It took me quite some time to jump on this bandwagon, but I honestly could not put these books down once I started them. I went in blind, with only a very vague sense of what the plot was about. I found myself completely engaged by all of these, and flew through the entire series in just about a week and a half.  I’ve heard some people compare it to Battle Royale, which it does have some similarities to, but they are two very separate stories.  I loved these books, and can’t wait to see the movie(s).

Swamplandia! : Karen Russell
There really aren’t enough wonderful things I can say about this novel.  Narrated by Ava Bigtree, a thirteen year old alligator wrestler on her family’s gator theme park island, is left to save the family business on her own. Her main attraction mother has just passed away, her father has withdrawn, her brother has defected to the mainland, and her sister is dating a ghost. Based off of one of the short stories in St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves (one of my favorite reads of 2011), Swamplandia! is Karen Russell’s first novel, and I can’t wait for more from her.

What have you read recently? 

Related posts:

1. January Reads
2. stacked : march
3. stacked :: 2011

No related posts.

I set a goal to read 50 books in 2011, and I actually did it.  Some were fantastic new reads, some were re-visits, and some were not so great.  Some were accidentally packed for the big move before taking this photo, and some others were diet and nutrition books that I will start adhering to again (soon-ish).

The Night Circus was, by far, my absolute favorite read this year, and will definitely be re-read in the future.  It was well crafted and beautifully descriptive, especially for a debut novel.  Open only from sundown to sunrise, the black and white tents appear out of nowhere.  Le Cirque des Rêves is a world of illusion and magic, and also a secret stage for a competition between two young magicians.  They have been trained since childhood for this, and were not meant to fall in love.  The duel will leave only one standing, and will affect the fates of both performer and patron of the circus.

Not since the first time I read my top two favorites, A Trip to the Stars and Veronica, have I loved a book so dearly.

Aside from The Night Circus, my other five favorites from the year were :

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children : As I just finished this late last night, the love love love for this story is still fresh. The title says plenty, and spotted throughout the book are photographs of the children and their many talents.  Totally devastated by the death of his grandfather, Jacob sets off to a small island off the coast of Wales to find out if the fantastical tales the old man told him of his childhood in World War II Europe were true.  Jacob finds the house of what he believed was a sanctuary for refugees of war, but was actually (still) the home to so much more.

The Secret History : Despite this being published in the 1990s, it had slipped by me over the years.  Recommended to me by my friend Eboni after I read The Likeness (the similarities were quite striking), I’m very glad I got to this one.  In retrospect, there is nothing specifically outstanding about this book other than its absolute construction of the very isolated world of the characters.  At times, you almost forget that the main story is that of a conspiracy to cover a murder within their group because of how intricate the dynamic is.

Just Kids : Patti Smith wrote this so casually that it felt like you were having a conversation with her.  It was warm and welcoming, honest and innocent, almost making me nostalgic for an era that I wasn’t even alive during.  It’s a prequel to her fame, telling the story of her relationship with Robert Maplethorppe, and mostly set in the Chelsea Hotel in the late 1960s. I’ve worked in a bar down the street from there for the past year and a half, and it made me appreciate the history of the neighborhood in a way I hadn’t before.  Reading this made you feel like she was an old friend, aside from being a cultural icon.

St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised by Wolves : Each story in this collection of shorts was charming.  I was totally surprised at how much I enjoyed this, as I had picked it up and set it down in the bookstore a few times before finally buying a copy.  Mostly set in swamplands, the stories have reminded me that I need to visit the bayou with my Holga.  My favorite story in it was “Haunting Olivia”, in which two brothers search each night for their drowned sister’s ghost.

Blood, Bones, and Butter : Although I’ve only been eating meat for a year, and still haven’t had the chance to have a meal at Prune, I loved this book.  The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef was not only the story of Gabrielle Hamilton becoming a renowned chef, but was the story of all the years beforehand when she didn’t know what the hell to do with her life, but knew and loved food.

Honorable Mentions :

•  Stories for the Nighttime and Some for the Day
• Bossypants
• The Dublin Murder Squad Series (although In the Woods was definitely the best of the three)
• The Strain Trilogy

Disclaimers :

*I haven’t finished A Game of Thrones, The Rum Diary, or The French Quarter history book.  I didn’t count them towards the 50 mark, but did count the graphic novels.  My husband said that was cheating, but a book is a book, right?
*I have a copy of the third book in The Strain Trilogy but haven’t gotten to it yet. I’m just going to assume I’ll like it as much as the first two.
*I love Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs mysteries. I love them a lot. Don’t judge me.

What was your favorite read in 2011?

Related posts:

1. stacked : march
2. Stacked : February
3. Stacked : January