The House on First Street, by Julia Reed

Marie Antoinette-ish nonfic. Julia Reed's book gives a tantalizing taste of what pre-Katrina New Orleans must have been like for the very very wealthy and well connected. Her memories of champagne and oysters and divine decadance are lovely and all, but even she herself admits it's all a bit Marie Antoinette. Post-Katrina, her home-renovation saga really lost any flavor. In light of all those who died, and who have lost so much in the aftermath of the storm, Vogue writer Julia Reed's flagstone steps seem hideously selfish- although, I suppose in a way, at least she is working to preserve some historic architecture. Ugh. I don't know.

The Diamond of Darkhold, by Jeanne Du Prau

Well, it was better than The Prophet of Yonwood.

Lina and Doon are such great characters that it's hard to knock a book about them, but...

Solar cells as society's only gift to the future?

I don't know.

What with the crashing banks, disastrous politics, global storming and the hey hey, maybe I'm just in a grim mood, but I sure hope that when our world comes down around our ears, we have a better plan for what we leave our underground-dwelling survivors when they emerge from the darkness.

Nancy Drew

This was a delightful surprise!

I was expecting it to be terrible, but it was really lovely. Nancy was still as perfect as could be, (I LOVED the woodshop scene!) but her character was presented so empathetically, it was obvious that she couldn't stop sleuthing if she tried, and even though it was a mite heavily done, the bit about the mother was actually a little tear-jerky.

Great job!

Not In The Flesh, by Ruth Rendell

Another wonderful Rendell. Again the issues of race, immigration, class status, PC-ness, women's rights, and age all swirl up into creating such a unique mood. Martha Grimes' books have a mood that comes close, sometimes, but not quite this dark.

The only quibble I ever have with Rendell is why her characters are all such bad drivers. Or, the ones who aren't terrible drivers are always described as being "skillful', like, (totally fake example) 'Lyn skilfully parked the car'. Why is it considered so impressive to get down the road without smashing into things? Is this an American thing, to take for granted that everyone can drive and had better be pretty good at it or we all die?

End In Tears, by Ruth Rendell

As always, a meticulously plotted out Wexford mystery from Rendell. What is there to say? The relationships between Wexford, Burden, Hannah, Dora, Sylvia, Sheila, these are such well written characters. So good.

House of Daughters, by Sarah-Kate Lynch

Really lovely book about three sisters trying to make their family champagne estate survive.

You could taste the bubbles, and oh, the food, and oh, the house! And there was a surprisingly meaty, well-told story behind all the deliciousness of it all.

Good read. I'll be looking for her other books!

Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias, by Andrew Blechman

Wow. I just have to say wow, I had no idea.

This was fascinating. Andrew Blechman's New England neighbors announce their decision to move to The Villages, Florida- an age-segregated gated, golf-cart community, and he visits them to research both the insane tax loopholes available for developers and corporations in Florida like the Chapter 190, which has allowed developments as large, resource-draining, and isolated as The Villages, Disneyworld, and Seaside to be formed independently of state government and oversight, and the people who move to places where children are, necessarily, outlaws.

Amazing, fun, surprisingly dirty (!), and just gripping, this was an awesome quick read.

The Geography of Nowhere:The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler

Re-read.

Excellent book about American community planning, from the organic early cities to the (as envisioned) park-like suburbs to inner city project housing to gentrification. Kunstler's excellent writing and doom-like vibe really make even some of the drier issues (road widths, frontage limits, etc) really intriguing, and when he's on the juicy stuff, there's no putting it down.
I know I didn't even have a wrod to say about his novel- and it was one that I was so excited about for so long, but I've been thinking about it, and realized that there was a lot I just didn't like about it.
In his novel, women are relegated to almost an early 20th century level in society- well, they are pretty much living in a post energy-crisis/economic collapse agrarian near future America, and society has become in many ways feudal. Kunstler does, in fact, predict a return to a more feudalistic society in the deep South of America in his fantastic, addictive read-in-one-sitting The Long Emergency, but for New England, where the novel is based, he was more hopeful. It upset me while reading the novel, at least, and the kind of graphic violence in it wasn't my cup of tea either. (Seriously, Kunstler- I did NOT need that Catherine Wheel shit in my head!)
BUT. I can love the guy's non-fiction and entirely loathe his fiction, and I think that's ok.
So yeah.

Climbing the Stairs, by Padma Venkatraman

A very thoughtful YA book set in India during WWII and the Indian revolution against British colonial rule.

15 year old Vidya feels responsible when her father is injured at a protest, and the family must move in with relatives who despise them. Her brother Kitta is worried by the Japanese invasion of Burma and wants to join the British Army, although it was a British policeman who injured their father. A love interest named Raman offers Vidya a chance to escape to America with him, but her grandfather saves the day by offering to send her to college.

It was good, and interesting as an adult, but I think maybe not terrifically appealing to most teens.

Lost on Planet China, by J. Maarten Troost

This was fantastic travel writing! Funny, informative, and fascinating. Made me want more than ever to visit China.

Gossip Girl: The Carlyles, by Cecily von Ziegesar

Well, I hate to say it but I didn't LOVE this.

Baby, Avery, and Owen Carlyle have just moved to NYC from Nantucket, into Blair Waldorf's old apartment, and shenanigans ensue.

I don't know- the characters didn't interest me, and there just wasn't the sense of reality that somehow (improbably) made the original series so addictive and just damn good. I'm sure I'll read the sequels, but it just didn't grab me.

Cheater, by Michael Laser

Wow, I really didn't think that this book had a lot going for it. The characters seemed very unrealistic to me, from the Vice Principal straight out of Breakfast Club/Ferris Bueller to the absurd and two dimensional Cara. I also was kind of put off by what I read as if not actually homophobic, the really insulting idea that Karl (and everybody else) decided Lizette was a lesbian because she didn't wear makeup and tight clothes like Cara. Blaine (? That's not a name, that's a major appliance!) was also so 2D and unreal - ugh!Also, the great mysterious project unveiled in the last scene? Um, I think you can get it from SkyMall. Mostly though, the book was morally ambigious, absurd plotwise, insulting to women, and demeaning to teens in that it denies them any complexity or depth at all.

So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids, by Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne

Yet another book about the lolita-ization of girlhood, and how parents and teachers (and librarians?) can help counteract the societal pressures.

A bit blah, but I think I've overloaded on this topic.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart

Fantastic, intelligent, feminist YA.

I loved this book. So much better than Dramarama, but even in Dramarama, I could see a thoughtfulness in the narrator that really shone through here. The setting was perfect too, all the details were dead on, and the whole thing rang true.

Talent, by Zoey Dean

Pretty awful YA, but fun except for one thing. I didn't like Zoey Dean's A-List series, but mainly because I thought they were so weak compared to Gossip Girl. I HATED How To Teach Filthy Rich Girls, because it was stupid as a slug.

This had a good premise, 3 Beverly Hills girls, one a surfer, one a wanna-be pop star like her diva mom, and one the daughter of a power agent, who has no talent of her own- unless it's the skill to spot talent?

Anyway, Mac, the agent's daughter, spots Iowa tourist Emily gazing her way around, and decides that Emily has star quality, and finagles her way around until Emily agrees to audition for a part in a movie that Mac's mother is casting. All well and good.

The part that bothered me, is that Mac's arch-enemy, Coco's popstar rival, and the girl whose best friend steals the surfer girls boyfriend, the total bitch of the series, is called Ruby Goldman. It's the only ethnic name in the book. Make of that what you will.

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, by Mark Bauerlein

This was intense!

I read it all in one horrified sitting, and can't get it out of my head.

Now, sure- I know (as Bauerlein admits right off the bat) that every age has had it's elders (god, I guess at 33 I'm an elder? I don't know) looking at it's youth, and saying what a pack of idiots they seem, but Bauerlein comes at this armed with an almost overwhelming array of studies that seem to point pretty damn conclusively to one tragic fact- that the high school graduates of today have learned less, comparatively, than high school graduates of previous generations, and by a lot. Also, high drop out rates skew those numbers further, and test scores of young Americans have plummeted over the past 15 years in comparison with other developed nations. Add to that rapid drops in college students being judged ready for college work, and even more disturbing drops in students majoring in maths, physics, or engineering, and we're looking at Idiocracy, man.

Oh so many tidbits and statistics pounded it home, with a passion and an eloquence that was really impressive.

One of the most interesting aspects for me, was the impact of a large vocabulary upon entering kindergarten, and the incidence of "rare words" on television and in print. I'll just give this one bit:

"One criterion researchers use is the rate of "rare words" in spoken and written discourse. They define "rare words" as words that do not rank in the top 10,000 in terms of frequency of usage. With the rare word scale, researchers can examine various media for the number of rare words per thousand, as well as the median-word ranking for each medium as a whole....

Rank of median word Rare words per 1000

• newspapers 1690 68.3
• adult books 1058 52.7
• comic books 867 53.5
• children's books 578 16.3
• prime-time adult tv 490 22.7
• prime-time children tv 543 20.2
• Sesame Street 413 2.0"

All very interesting, no? And add to this that the kids today, our so-called Digital generation spend so much of their time online- for some reason, this seems to fill folks with all sorts of giddy hope that these kids are going to learn things online. Well, I have seen teens online for hours- hour after hour of gorgeous sunny day, and they can't tear themselves away for the stupidest junk available online. It's pathetic. They can't spell, they can't type, they are not learning how to program or design games, they are learning to buy and shop and that it's cute to misspell things and in general being misled in every possible way by the only adults who are looking at them in an interested fashion, the marketers.

Bauerlein makes the sad but true point that adults who wish to influence the future can't pretend that all this MySpace/Gaia crap will let them absorb computer skills, let alone language and maths skills that will not only allow these kids to get a job, but might help our country survive.

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, by Rob Walker

Interesting but not groundbreaking book on consumerism as identity creation. I think James Twitchell covers this area better, but still, a tasty read anyway. In fact, Walker spent quite a lot of time quoting Twitchell and Paco Underhill, which I guess is inevitable when crossing such well travelled territory.

Walker did delve a little more into some kind of underground/pseudounderground consumer niches, like the sneaker freaks, etc, and the influence these subgroups have is pretty incredible. Still, it was nothing I hadn't read or known before. I guess I wouldn't really pass it on to a friend who I thought would be interested in this stuff- I would, however, recommend Twitchell's Living It Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury and his Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism without hesitation.

Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight The Addictive Power of Advertising, by Jean Kilbourne

Another solid and interesting book by Kilbourne on the way women are represented in media. Solid, not thrilling.

In fact, in this book, at least, I felt a little frustrated with her insistence on bringing her own experiences and addictions into it- while much of the media and advertising she discusses is obviously damaging, I can't help but feel that the men and boys targeted by these same companies are in many ways equally vulnerable to ugly manipulation.

When an ad for vodka (or perfume, or shoes or handbags or whatever) shows a man behaving aggressivley towards a woman (and there are many bizarre examples of that she highlights in the book), it's not just the woman who might get a weird idea about that image- especially as these ads are usually in women's magazines, so a guy flippping through it would be doubly hard pressed to understand what was going on. If it's scary and not cool, why is it in a Gucci ad, a guy might think, am I supposed to act that way? I'm just saying, it's not just women who are affected by fubar messages in media.

Real World, by Natsuo Kirino

This was intense, disturbing, and wonderful.

Four Japanese high school girls become involved in a murder, and their lives are never the same.

I am not sure if this was aimed at adults or teens, but I think it has equal appeal to both- to teens who might be fascinated with the murder and with the descriptions of Japanese high school life, so different from America and to adults who just appreciate a hell of a good book.

The story is told in a rotation of voices, each unique and intense, and by the devastating end, I was reeling.

Audrey, Wait by Robin Benway

Really fun YA!

I can't help but think that this whole book was inspired by that song Delilah by the Plain White T's, but that's pretty great.

Audrey Cuttler breaks up with her boyfriend Evan, and as she's walking down the stairs, she hears him call Audrey, wait! but she keeps on going.

His band is playing later that night, and their friend of a friend of a friend finally lured an A&R guy to one of their shows, where they play their new song, Audrey Wait!

Of course, Evan and the band are promptly signed to a major label, and The Song goes into heavy rotation on radio stations around the country. Audrey's newfound notoriety gets her all access passes at great shows, but then she is constantly hounded for interviews. After a badly judged parking lot hookup with the lead singer of another band (which gets videoed and leaked onto YouTube), Audrey is in magazines as indie rock's new muse, and it gets crazier from there.

The whole thing was well done, funny, and the music mentioned throughout the book was so good, I want to listen to Robin Benway's playlist. It was straight from Deliliah, though, because I remember when Delilah was the inescapable song in 2006, reporters drudged up the girl who had inspired it, and she seemed so uncomfortable with the attention.