The Fox Inheritance, by Mary Pearson

An interesting but frustrating follow up to the excellent The Adoration of Jenna Fox. In this book, set 260 years after the accident that left only 10% of Jenna's brain, and let her parents re-create her using Bio-Gel, Jenna's friends Kara and Locke, who were 'killed' in the same wreck, have been re-created by a mad scientist from a hair of Kara's and a fingernail of Locke's. It seems that Jenna's parents scanned their brains at the same time they did Jenna's, and a corrupt assistant stole the 'boxes' that imprisoned their 'minds' for all those years. The exploration of AI rights was interesting, but the book didn't settle whether the Fox Standard of 10% was ethically right, and the ending was disappointing and left the essential question unanswered.

Survivors : a novel of the coming collapse, by James Rawles

Whacked out far right near future apocalyptic thing. This had so many plotlines, and so many different characters trying to survive "the crunch" that it was hard to follow, but the main point was definitely buy guns (many), ammo (as much as possible), and hoard metals. In this particular vision of worldwide upheaval, US inflation lead to Weimar-era style worthless paper, and riots and such quickly followed. The rest was pretty standard Ayn Rand-leaning survival stuff, but it did have an interesting and exciting recipe for home-made molotov cocktails, which was a nice touch!

1 pint jar
thickened gasoline- thicken pure gasoline with styrofoam until it is thick like molassas
1/2 cup battery acid

put both in pint jar, seal, and wash carefully.

put 2 rubber bands around jar.

soak sheets of paper in potassium chloride solution, let dry, cut into strips.

put strip of paper through rubber bands.

when ready to use, shake jar and throw- supposedly, once the mixture inside touches the paper, BOOM.

(I am not- repeat- NOT saying anyone should try this or that it works - just that it was highly unusual to find recipes for homemade weaponry in a terrible novel.)

Explosive Eighteen, by Janet Evanovich

Another entry into the endless Stephanie Plum series. This is a fun one, but the love triangle between Stephanie, Ranger, and Morelli is getting tired and almost gross, and the hints that she might be pregnant are very worrisome, as I think that would be a rotten way to end the series. Gah. Its like cheetos, I dont know why I bother.

Legend, by Marie Lu

FANTASTIC dystopian YA. Rebel Day and Agent June are of opposite sides of a battle to control a near future police state California, but they are more alike than they know. When they come into contact with each other, explosive chemistry and an intense clash of ideals create a great tense read, and one with satisfying and memorable characters.

The Burry Man's Day, by Catriona McPherson

Another well done Dandy Gilver between the wars mystery.

The Dead of Winter, by Jane Adams

Not very good locked country house mystery. A group gets together to reenact a sceance that had gone terribly wrong a hundred years ago, and a snowstorm traps all the participants. Too many coincidences, and just not great.

I Want My Hat Back, by Jon Klassen

This was such a funny picture book! The simple but effective illustrations were wonderful, and the cheeky bear was very naughty in the end, but understandably!

Zen Shorts, by Juhn Muth

I took this out because I was curious about the titles that President Obama recently bought on a shopping trip, and thought it might be interesting to see what he would buy as a picture book. I did not like it.
It was basically zen koans, told as childrens' stories, with odd illustrations, and it left me annoyed.

This Beautiful Live, by Helen Schulman

Well done book. Richard and Liz Bergamot's New York world is pretty perfect, and their children's too- private schools, lots of extracurriculars, a warm and loving family with economic secutiry and a stable life. When their 15 year old son Jake is sent a pornographic video by a younger girl he rejected, he forwards it to his best friend, in a mistake that leads to disaster for everyone involved. Reminded me a bit of Anita Shreve's Testimony- teen sexual activities recorded and shared, and the fallout that can ensue, but was much better.

Ed King, by David Guterson

Phenomenal update on Oedipus Rex. I had major doubts about how the classic tragedy could be updated, but the exceptional Guterson did it so well. A 16 year old au pair and her employer seduce each other, and she abandons the baby in a wealthy neighborhood, wishing the baby the best. Ed King grows up not knowing he is adopted. He has teenage years of being reckless - it is hard to not give plot spoilers, so I'm going to stop because the deft way Guterson brought the tale to modern times was really brilliant, and moving the drama into the hubris and grandiose ambitions of software barons was a genius stroke.

Few Eggs and No Oranges, by Vere Hodgson

This was an absolutely incredible diary by a woman living in London throughout WWII- it was astonishing in the courage that people had during unimaginable terror and deprivation, and breathtaking in how seriously wonderful the English spirit was during those times. Long- 624 pages- but I could not put it down. Her daily entries breathed with life, and the detail with which she recorded the progress of the war taught me more about WWII than I have ever known. Stunning. Everyone should read this.

Blueprints for Building Better Girls, by Elissa Schappell

Excellent short story collection, exploring the worlds of women, as lovers and 'sluts', daughters and mothers, wives and mistresses- the interconnections between the stories made it almost novel-like, as each story really built upon previous stories, to create a very vivid and powerful collection.

Miss Buncle Married, by D. E. Stevenson

Sequel to Miss Buncle's Book, and still charming, if a little too sacharine. Miss Buncle (plot spoiler lol!) marries, and moves to a new village, where further match-making and life-changing ensue.

Miss Buncle's Book, by D.E. Stevenson

Lovely, fanciful and warm novel. Miss Buncle, when strapped for cash, decides to write a book- thinly veiled about her village and neighbors. Its publication is a surprise success, and the ramifications of her descriptions of her neighbors and friends lead to upheaval within the village. Charming.

Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, by Joseph Epstein

Unpleasant book about gossip. While Joseph Epstein often writes about topics I am interested in, such as the social implications of gossip, or class structure in America, he seems such a snob and a jerk, and this was the most offensive yet of his name-dropping, nasty books.

MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend

Interesting premise. When Rachel and her husband move to Chicago, she misses her best friends from New York, and makes a concerted effort to try to meet friends. While meeting and making friends outside of college is so much harder, I hate to say the book really turned me off. I wouldn't want to be friends with her, and although the things she treid were interesting, not being able to like the author stopped me from enjoying the book itself.

The Night Eternal, by Guillermo Del Toro

OK ending to the Strain trilogy. The first book was so good, and the second so horrific, but this one left me a little flat.

Shiny Objects : Why We Spend Money We Don't Have in Search of Happiness We Can't Buy, by James Roberts

Excellent book on consumerism, happiness, and how they relate. Full of interesting charts with accessible references to peer reviewed studies, this was a nice new take on a topic I've read a lot on. Would recommend.

After the Armistice Ball, by Catriona McPherson

Well done between the wars mystery. Classic set up- society heroine, missing diamonds, a death, but very neatly done- I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

Twisted, by Sara Shepard

Great new Pretty Little Liars, somehow taking and expanding on the original A premise, and continuing one of my greatest guilty pleasure series reads.

LBD: It's a Girl Thing, by Grace Dent

Funny English YA, but nowhere near as good as Dent's FANTASTIC Diary of a Chav series. This was sweet and well done, but lacked the characterization that really made Diary of a Chav transcend the genre.

Lost In Time, by Melissa De La Cruz

Pretty ludicrous addition to the Blue Bloods series. The mythology at this point is so strained, and Jack and Schulyer's relationship feels unreal, and Mimi's visit to Hell was laugh out loud bad.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever, by Jeff Kinney

Number 6 in the very funny Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Greg and his family are trapped by a blizzard, after the usual shenanigans of a Wimpy Kid book- quick and cute.

Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick, by Joe Schreiber

Fast paced and outlandish but funny and enjoyable YA. Like Carl Hiaasen or such. Perry is reluctant to take his family's visiting Latvian exchange student, Gobija, to the prom, but when she whirls him into NYC for a series of assassinations, he finds there was more to her than he thought. Going to be a movie, and I bet it will be a fun one.

The House on the Cliff, by D.E. Stevenson

Lovely D.E. Stevenson book. Light and cozy romance with a great dose of real-estate porn- struggling actress Elfreda inherits a family estate, and learns to leave Lond'ns bright lights for country pleasures.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, by Jerry Pinkney

Just about the most beautiful childrens' book I have ever seen.

The Velvet Room, by Zilpha Keately Snyder

Just a lovely children's book. Migrant farm family has a car breaksdown near a farm with an abandoned mansion nearby. When her father finds work on the farm, Robin finds her way into the round, velvet curtained turret room, and finds an escape in books. This was just really lovely.

The ABC Murders, by Agatha Christie

My first e-book! I read this on my awesome new Kindle-fire, which I love more than words can say. I chose to read an Agatha Christie first, to combine the familiar with the new, and it was a match made in heaven. Great classic Christie, amazing new format. so cool.

The Scrapbook of Francie Pratt, by Caroline Preston

A moving graphic novel following the protagonist through the roaring 1920’s, from Cornish New Hampshire to Vassar to decadent ex-pat writer’s refuge Paris and back. Frankie is a heroine to remember, and the vintage details in the “scrapbook” add depth and interest to the story.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns, by Rae Carson

Excellent YA fantasy with an unusual heroine and vividly imagined, vaguely Spanish/South American setting. I couldn't put this down.

Across the Universe, by Beth Revis

Well done YA Sc-Fi. Amy is frozen with her parents for a 300 year journey to terraform a new planet, but is woken 75 years early in suspicious circumstances. This was an exciting blend of scifi and romance and philosophical points about what compromises might be necessary for the human race to survive.

The Village that Slept, bu Monique Peyrouton de Ladebat

This was a strangely addictive children's book about 2 children who wake, dazed and amnesiac, high in the Alps after a plane crash. They find a baby among the wreckage, and then take shelter in an abandoned village for 18 months. Strange, dreamlike, and quite haunting.

The Mystery of the Haunted Pool, by Phyllis Whitney

Cool little children's mystery, very reminiscent of Nancy Drew, with hidden gems and pirate treasure and secret hiding places.

Missing Melinda, by Jacqueline Jackson

Really lovely hidden children's gem- twin sisters Cordelia and Ophelia move into a new house, and promptly begin a mystery involving the disappearance of a valuable old doll named Melinda. Delightful .

The Twisted Thread, by Charlotte Bacon

Ok but familiar feeling college girl secret society murder mystery- reminded me much of The Sixes, by Kate White.

Easily Amused, by Karen McQuestion

Light and quick read. After inheriting a house in the suburbs, dizzy girl gets absorbed into the neighborhood and finds Mr. Right, blah blah. Predictable but comforting. Comfort food lite, like Cheetos.

Comfort and Joy, by India Knight

Light and charming Christmas book. Upscale Bridget Jones-y characters, celebrating Christmas over many years. Rather like One Day without the tear-jerkyness.  

Bad Kitty Meets The Baby, by Nick Bruel

Not as delightful as earlier entries in the series, but still fun and charming. I do love Bad Kitty, I'm just not sure about this title.  

Lost Girls, by Alan Moore

Now, usually when I say something is porn on here, I mean food porn, or lifestyle porn, or most often real-estate porn, but this was just straight up hardcore comic drawn porn. Ick.

Martha Stewart Entertaining: A Year of Celebrations

Beautiful, unachievable lifestyle porn. Ugh.

The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Ah.

Quickly making the Top Ten Books of 2011 lists (Publisher’s Weekly and Amazon, so far) Eugenides’ latest is clearly a great read. But is it a great book? That I’m not sure of.

I have to say that The Virgin Suicides is one of my all time favorite books, so my expectations are insanely high, so grain of salt- hell, pillar of salt.

The college and post-college experiences of Brown students Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell rang true, and parts were heartbreakingly real, but I never felt fully absorbed in the story, and the lyricism that defined Virgin Suicides was not present.

What hit me hardest with this book was the heart-panging recognition of first love, all night conversations about philosophy or semantics or religion, how devastatingly accurately Eugenides portrayed those (ludicrous in retrospect) days when it seemed like ideas and ethics and books mattered at all- when friendships and relationships could be broken by reactions to Barthes or Derrida, when it seemed normal and natural for conversation to revolve around theory. That broke my heart, the dreadful mirror he held up to the college experience, but he never took it to the next inevitable point- when all of these people compromise (as they will have to)- when Madeleine finds there are no jobs for Victorianists, when Mitchell realizes that unless he goes Unibomber style, he will be one of the great hypocrites of the earth, and when Leonard will (again, seemingly inevitably) commit suicide.

I might sound bitter.

Ok, this book fucked with me.

But, for all that- the book stayed firmly in lucky, intelligent, mostly wealthy white people territory, and while that is fine, and no necessary detriment to great literature (see, Salinger, Updike, WHARTON, for god’s sake), the characters never bled for me or made me weep.

It was a great read. I don’t think it was a great book.

Fever, by Lauren DeStefano

A fantastic follow-up to the phenomenal Wither.

In this novel, unwilling bride Rhine and house servant Gabriel have escaped the luxurious prison of her husband’s mansion, only to find that the world outside the gilded cage is even darker and more dangerous than it had been inside. With their freedom the only thing they truly have, their struggle to remain free is all the more poignant. After being captured in a surreal and vividly painted brothel/circus, Rhine must use all of her strength to save herself, Gabriel, and a young straggler they pick up along the way. Without giving spoilers, it’s hard to describe more of the plot, but once again, DeStefano’s writing reimagines the familiar ground of YA post-apocalyptic dystopian near-future America, and creates a fully imagined world fraught with danger, but touched by hope. Different in tone from the nearly claustrophobic Wither, Fever is a fantastic sequel that doesn’t feel like “the middle book” at all- while leaving me panting for the next in the series!

A Killer's Christmas in Wales, by Elizabeth Duncan

This was a bit of a dissapointment plot-wise, but I really enjoy the North Wales settings of Duncan's EXTRA-COZY mysteries, and although the characters don't ring to life, and the plots are a wee bit threadbare, still, the thrill to my heart of the murder happeining at Conwy Castle, and the frequent mentions of the train from Chester to Llandudno etc keeps me reading her books. Rhys Bowen's Constable Evan series was better, but seems to have stopped.

A Dark and Stormy Night, by Jeanne Dams

Pretty blah country house mystery. I have no problem with mysteries featuring older protagonists, but some of the characters in this spent more time worrying about slipping on the stairs than about the killer loose in the house, and that kind of put me off. I was hoping to adore this,  as I love a good locked door country house storm-isolated inheritance plot, but I did not, and will not try another by this author.

Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

Amazing take on a classic zombie novel. So many "literary" authors are venturing into post-apocalyptic fiction that its hard to keep them all straight, but this one really stood out. Mark Spitz (the name is a joke you don't get til you're more than halfway through the book) has been, in his own mind, mediocre his entire life, but it turns out he has a hell of a survival instinct. In the blurred days since Last Night, he has managed to keep away from and survive enough skels (the dead) to make it to being a part of a clearing crew, a 3 person team working on buildings under 20 stories in Zone One, lower Manhattan.
In the choas of sweeping the city for stragglers, Mark reflects on what has been lost, and what may be to come, and human nature gets painted in some pretty ugly terms, but parts of the novel are lyrical in mourning what will pass, the chain restaurants, the easy commerce, the abundance of America. I think the resurgence of post-apocalyptic fiction is telling, and have written more about that elsewhere, but this is one of the finest examples I have read. Justin Cronin's The Passage was a straight-up Stephen King-ish horror vampire epic, Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story kind of skipped the apocalypse and led us right to moral ruin, but this book showed the steps in between. Wonderfully done.

The Party After You Left, by Roz Chast

Very clever cartoons fron New Yorker staple Roz Chast.

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, by Ken Jennings

This was wonderful, readable, fascinating nonfiction. This made me want to paper the walls in maps, and to snuggle up with globes and atlases. Jennings is such a likeable writer, and does that Bryson-ish trick of imparting a ton of info without coming across as pedantic or lecture-y, and made me really think a lot about the meanings of maps, the implications of geography, the importance of spatial cognition, and the charming and bizarre hobbies that people can create for themselves. I feel a special fondness for the "earth sandwich" people, just because that takes geography hobbies to a new and particularly strange place, but I just also really loved this book.

Crossed, by Ally Condie

The second in Condie's YA trilogy, Crossed has Cassia leaving the safe confines of Society to search for her love Ky in the Outer Provinces. Disturbing scenes have Society dropping off unarmed young Abberations off in the wilds to serve as decoys for the enemy, and that is where Ky has ended up. Cassia and Ky's romance gets helped along by a few too many coincidences, but it was still a fast and enjoyable read, if of a very different tone than Matched.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller

Dazzling early (1960) post-apocalyptic Sci-fi, with a heartbreaking sense of inevitability and repetition to our own self-destruction. Obviously born of nuclear nightmares, this still had  a strong message to send, despite a certain datedness. I can't believe I had never read this before, this was definitely filling in a gap for me. I still think On The Beach is a more powerful novel, but this went to darker places after the final clouds rained poison, and suggested that we would do it all over again.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor

This was WONDERFUL. It was a fully realized fantasy, and I mean that in every way. The world building was impeccable, from Prague to a planet with two moons, and the characters were better developed than in almost anything I've read this year. 17 year old art student Karou has blue hair, a marionette-making best friend called Zuzanna, and a very complicated home life.   I know this is published as YA, but I think it might truly be more of an adult book. I wonder a bit if some authors are allowing themselves to be steered towards publishing in YA because it is a more accepting realm? Either way, this is one of the best books I've read this year.