Rax Libraris Volume One   
by James Turner (2007)

read: 10 May 2012
rating: [+]

I got a phone call from the guy who is making this graphic novel into a screenplay soon to be a major motion picture, we hope. I had heard a lot about it and hadn’t read it, so I ILLed it from my local library, expecting great things. And while I am still looking forward to the movie, I can’t say as I enjoyed the comic. The story is great, but the illustration is computer-generated which just isn’t my taste. There’s also a metanarrative running through the entire story that I found sort of confusing and distracting. Plus the type is SMALL and while this has never been a problem for me in any other graphic novel, it was a problem here. So the book gets returned to the library, unread.

Bar Harbor Police Beat   
by Richard Sassaman (1994)

read: 7 May 2012
rating: [+]

Sassaman has combed the pages of his local paper for a decade and assembled a great curated collection of small town police activities and a reflection of the small town itself. Anyone who lives in a small town will recognize the combination of community management and occasional crime-solving that make up the job of a rural police department. Sassaman has picked out the good stuff and arranged and organized it to highlight patterns and trends that he then comments on. A fun collection, especially for people who have been to Bar Harbor or any other small vacation town.

The poet and the murderer   
by Simon Worrall (2003)

read: 3 May 2012
rating: [+]

A really interesting book grabbed from a booksale shelf because it looked quirky. This book starts off telling the tale of an Amherst MA librarian’s quest to buy an unpublished Emily Dickinson poem. Along the way he discovers that the poem is a forgery and not just a forgery but a creation of one of this century’s greatest forgers, Mark Hoffman, the man responsible for creating hundreds if not thousands of documents creating a false history of the Mormon church, a man now in jail for murder. Worrall does a really good job of telling the story without being too precious or twee. There is a lot of good research and interviews with key players. While I think Worrall does seem to have a bit of a distaste for the Mormon church and personal sense of “This is how it went down” that I think colors the story more than it might be with a “just the facts ma’am” approach (concerning Hoffman, Dickinson, people’s feelings about the whole situation after the fact), it remains mostly very readable and a real page turned.

The Best American Short Stories 2011   
by Geraldine Brooks (2011)

read: 18 April 2012
rating: [+]

I love these collections but usually there are at least one or two stories that I find wincingly terrible. Not so this year. Brooks has assembled an interesting assortment of very different stories that don’t all have that “Written for the New Yorker” feeling to them. While there are a lot of the same themes threading throughout--bad marriages, Rome, quirky childhoods, lost loves, the usual--the stories don’t all feel “of a type” the way these collections usually do. I raced through this set and really enjoyed the range and variety of writing.

The Vermont Monster Guide   
by Joe Citro (2009)

read: 9 April 2012
rating: [+]

This was a gift from some friends, totally unexpected and I read it all almost immediately. One of the things that is great about Vermont generally is how the whole state can seem like a small town. Reading about all these real and possibly apocryphal monster reports and sightings in towns I’ve heard of and/or been to was super fun. I like Citro’s work generally and this combination of his research and humor combined with some great illustrations by talented illustrator Stephen Bissette made it a really fun read.

Groovitude: A Get Fuzzy Treasury   
by Darby Conley (2002)

read: 9 April 2012
rating: [+]

What’s almost more amusing than this book, which I enjoyed quite a lot, is seeing the people who are totally ticked off and annoyed by it on Amazon. I can understand how the content -- a mean cat and a dopey well-meaning dog who live with their ad exec owner and have amusing domestic interactions -- aren’t for everyone, but I’d think that would be the sort of thing you’d know before you bought it, maybe? The only gripe people seemed to have that was legit was that this compendium is basically the first two books combined with some Sunday comics. So, if you already have one of the other books, you may not want this one. I’m not sure why I love this collection so much but having had dogs and cats a lot of my life it just makes me smile a lot of the time.

My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere   
by Susan Orleans (2005)

read: 6 April 2012
rating: [+]

This book was great fun. Orleans is the type of person who finds all sorts of random things to talk about and makes it the most fascinating thing you’ve never heard of. She injects herself enough into her essays to make them seem real but not so much that it’s all filtered through her own sensibilities and you wind up annoyed. Every essay makes you feel that it’s about someone or something you’d like to know more about, from the Sunshine Grocery in NYC to the fertility monastery (?) in Bhutan to climbing Mount Fuji. It’s good writing that happens to be about travel. Most of it appeared previously in the New Yorker so if you know her writing there, you may have already seen a lot of it.

read: 5 April 2012
rating: [+]

This was one of those “Oh hey when winter rolls around I will really hunker down and finish this book” situations. But then winter never came and the book was overdue and I had to return it though I am excited to maybe try again next winter.

Internet Fraud Casebook   
by Joseph Wells (2010)

read: 5 April 2012
rating: [0]

Was hoping to be able to finish this but it just wasn’t happening and then I’d already renewed it once and it was overdue. So, this is a neat casebook that talks about the many different ways the internet can be used to defraud people. And it’s fascinating because there are all these different scams. However the writing is really uneven and some of the chapters are ones where you feel like you’ve learned something and others are hard to even figure out what is happening. Ultimately I just couldn’t get excited to keep reading it.

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day   
by Ben Loory (2011)

read: 14 March 2012
rating: [+]

No idea where I get some of these books. This is a great collection of super short stories, most with no named protagonist. They’re magically realistic but not in that usual “then an angel appears” way but more like “here is an octopus, he lives in an apartment” sort of way. I really enjoyed the voice and the tone of these stories, plus the way many of them spoke of the sea.

Ship Fever   
by Andrea Barrett (1996)

read: 14 March 2012
rating: [+]

Someone suggested that if I like Geraldine Brooks I might also like this. It was great! A combination of historical fiction--a genre I thought I didn’t like--and weird science/medicine topics. The title story, saved til last, is a harrowing account of the quarantine at Grosse Isle for the Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine. Enough human interest to be interesting. Enough medical detail to pique one’s interest in the whole topic. And through it all, it’s quite well written and offers a peek into the possible lives of long-dead scientists as well as some nice gender balance which I often find wanting in these sorts of books.

I Killed: True Stories of the Road from America’s Top Comics   
by Ritch Shydner (2006)

read: 5 February 2012
rating: [+]

This book was a belated gift from my boyfriend who knows I love stand-up comedy. This is a great collection of crazy stories from the road, from a wide assortment of people you’ve probably heard of. Some of the stories are jokes in and of themselves and some of them are just weird and unusual things that happened to people, or that they did of their own volition. A well-curated collection of stories, well worth the time of anyone interested in the real world of stand-up comedy.

Here’s Looking at Euclid   
by Alex Bellos (2010)

read: 28 January 2012
rating: [+]

I read these sorts of hobby math books for fun. This was one of my favorite so far. Unlike other books about math that seem to get hung up on stuff like “Let’s talk about VOTING for 50 pages ...” this one is broken down into short chapters about people and things that are slightly more current and slightly more interesting. I found myself going to Wikipedia or other sources to read more about some of the topics that Bellos only touched on. I rarely found my eyes glazing over when his discussion became too abstruse and I think I really understand a few things that I wasn’t clear on before [what slide rules were for, the different sorts of infinities and the history of lottery and gambling gaming situations]. I feel like Bellos' enthusiasm for the subject is infectious and he was able to get complicated subjects across well without seeming too cutesy or jokey. He also went and did first person interviews with some of the famous mathematicians that he mentions and these provide a really humanizing look at some fairly esoteric subjects. If you can read one popular math treatise this year, make it this one.

Fart Powder: Bubble in the Bathtub   
by Jo Nesbo (2011)

read: 15 January 2012
rating: [+]

This book is the second in Nesbo’s Fart Powder series, a romp through time with two young kids Lisa and Nilly and their friend Doctor Proctor the scientist and some good and bad guys along the way. I started with this book but it’s still fully understandable without reading the first book. Along the way the kids encounter historical figures you might have heard of like Napoleon and Joan of Arc. While there’s a time travel aspect to the book [there is special soap you can mix up in the bathtub that allows you to move through time] it’s much less science fiction and much more of a wacky caper book and Amazon categorizes it under “Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths > Norse” for whatever reason. The book is translated from the original Norwegian.

There are funny fart jokes and other goofiness along the lines of Captain Underpants. This is a thick book, over 400 pages, but the text is good sized, the chapters are short and there are lots of illustrations along the way. Ultimately, it’s a story about friendship and creative problem solving. The two young characters each have distinct and enjoyable personalities and I found myself eagerly flipping pages to see what would happen next.

BirdTalk: Conversations with Birds   
by Alan Powers (2002)

read: 14 January 2012
rating: [+]

I’ve listened to the birds in the same place Powers lives, but I’ve never thought to talk to them before. This book is a fun ramble through many different poetic and contemplative perspectives of birdsongs and communication generally. Powers has a way with words and the connections he makes will often make you see and hear things in a new light. I enjoyed his sharing of particularly apt poems or little historical snippets along with his (sometimes apologized for) jokey turns of phrase and other allusions. The book itself is lovely to behold, feels good in your hands and is tastefully designed with lovely illustrations by Powers' wife. A great gift for anyone who has read all the “standard” bird books and who could use encouragement to not just watch and listen but to speak back and dialogue.