Matched, by Ally Condie

Pretty excellent YA dystopian futuristic love-triangle. In an oppressive, Big Brotherish society in the future, citizens are carefully matched for ideal genetic potential and similarity in tastes and skills, and when Cassia is Matched with her best friend Xander, she is initially thrilled. A technical error, however, leads her to question all she has known, and issues of freedom and manipulation take over the story. Really solid world building and a sinister vibe set this one above the pack of YA dystopias.

I'll Mature When I'm Dead, by Dave Barry

Absurd and hilarious collection of pieces by Dave Barry, who I truly enjoy. Ranging from somewhat sincere meditations on growing older to a dead funny take off of the Vampire-Book-I-Couldn't-Make-Myself-Read, this was a fun and fast read that had me LOLing alone in the house, and did, unlike the wretched "funny" movie Dance Flick, make me forget my hideous toothache and impending dentist horror-show, which is a hell of a trick!

Scones and Sensibility, by Lindsay Eland

Well, as weary as I am of the Jane-Austen-tribute books, this was well done, and really cute for about a 5th grader. Some very funny bits- the main character,Polly Madassa, worships Anne of Green Gables, Elizabeth Bennet, the whole classic crew, and tries so hard to speak like them, but it makes her almost incomprehensible to everyone around her. I would definitely recommend this to kids at the library who are looking to read up but aren't looking for heavy issue books.

Arcadia Falls, by Carol Goodman

Wonderful, atmospheric, haunting and haunted story. Funny- I seem to have slipped into a trend of reading about haunted trees, which I wasn't expecting, but am enjoying.
Meg Rosenthal is thrilled to be offered a teaching position at exclusive arts-centered boarding school Arcadia, where she and her daughter Sally can recover from the death of her husband. Arcadia has long been a haven for creative women, far north in upstate New York, in forests that have been whispered about since the Dutch feared the White Women slipping through the trees. A tangle of thoughful rivalries and increasingly violent and frightening events come to give the book an almost overwhelming sense of claustrophobia and inevitability, and the well written characters had a unique sensibility.
Wonderfully done gothic horror, with a fabulous sense of history and place, and lots of neatly done slipping back and forth from diaries and manuscripts to the present, as Meg finds out more and more about the history of Arcadia.

The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris

I was so excited to get this ARC yesterday, and read it straight away. It is wildly different from Then We Came to The End, but is is hauntingly sad in that same way, and was a wonderful, if disturbing read.

Tim, a lawyer, suffers from a condition with no name- he walks and walks and walks, without direction or a plan. Doctors and neurologists and psychiatrists and so on try and try to name his problem, while his wife Jane does what she can to support him and his daughter Becka retreats further into her own sadness.

Scenes of climate change (record breaking winter cold, dying bees, seasonal disruption) lend the book an air of inevitable doom but the focus isn't on the world slowly going haywire around the family, it's about the family going quickly mad within the world.

As with Then We Came To The End, surprising gallows humor had me laughing at some incredible inappropriate moments, adding to the sensation of being caught on some demented downward spiral.

Such a good writer and such a good book. Wonderful.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe

This was just impossible to put down! Graduate student Connie Goodwin is looking for a great topic and primary sources for her PhD, and has to spend the summer clearing out her grandmother's house in Marblehead Massachusetts. While there, she finds things that lead her into researching events that took place during the Salem witch trials, and the book weaves back and forth through time, telling the story of Deliverance Dane and the Salem witches.

It wasn't 'literary fiction' or what have you- it was a fun, fast read that I finished in one late night. I had just read The Heretic's Daughter, by Katherine Kent- a much more serious look at the witch trials, so I'm not sure how much of my enthusiasm for this book might have been because of already having Salem on my mind, but I really liked having a female character in this kind of pop-fic quest type thing.

Retail Anarchy, by Sam Pecker (mid-book update) (ARC)

I have NEVER done this before, but this book is so batshit insane, I have to. In the 52 pages I've read so far, he has ranted about everything from George Clinton's bands Parliament and Funkadelic to the "mentally handicapped" who bag groceries, but he's reached a soaring new height of madness here on page 53.

"The never ending shit-sprawl (I know it's crude, but really is there any other word?) of meaningless product, the movement of that product, and the ultimate disposal of the product for no good reason other than human failure is in itself what it means to live in a "consumer driven" economy.

Do people on antidepressants shop less?"

Wow, buddy! Do people on antipsychotics write less? This all gives me great hope for my own (fantasy) writing career. I really wonder what kind of edit job they're doing on this (I'm reading an ARC). If this is published as is, something is truly rotten in the state of Denmark.

(Up to page 58 and ) UNBELIEVABLY, this book has become even more WOW.

"While it's no secret that men's penises are responsible for lots of bad purchases, sometimes it's the need to avoid confrontation that feeds it as well."

Is that even a sentence? I would die if someone wanted me to diagram that. (Ps. It's about a local sandwich shop in his town, where the owner/operator is supposedly a hottie- although he disagrees- "she was not all that attractive, but she flirted with the factory workers".
I bet she didn't flirt with him, the jealous lout.

OMG. Page 61. I am going to make EVERYONE read this book. Dude is out of his mind.

"I don't have statistics on how many Cheesecake Factory hostesses end up working as prostitutes after their illustrious careers are cut short, but I have a feeling it's pretty high."

(page 68!!!) I might be obsessed, but this author certainly is. Damn, what did the hostess at the Cheesecake Factory do to him???

"Alcoholic drama-queen slut-in-dead-end-town hostess, please fetch the 17-year-old part-timer who spends al of his spare time fantasizing about you while masturbating instead of doing his homework so he may bring us an outrageously overpriced slice of your inest previously-frozen shipped-in-from and out-of state-factory namesake desert at once!...

Excuse me, did I call her a slut? I forgot this was a small town what with the big city restautant and all; I meant to say "popular"- thank you. ...

...I venture to say this is the first time that a book about economics has called anyone a slut and that may be the precise problem here with out economy."

Hot diggity damn, man. This guy is all fired up. If he can get published with this racist, able-ist, slut-ist bull, I should be able to get published.

Yee haw.

I cannot put this thing down. And I can't stop typing. His madness has infected me!