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 Girl Stays In The Picture, by Melissa de la Cruz

Pretty bad YA- I'm surprised, I liked Melissa de la Cruz's Blue Bloods books very much, and Fresh Off The Boat was really good too. The Au Pairs were all pretty terrible, but this one was even worse.

The Finishing Touches, by Hester Browne

Silly but kind of fun book, about a woman trying to update a traditional finishing school for the 21st c. Overly complicated subplots distracted.

How I Became A Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely

Now this was pretty fantastic. Pete wants to become a writer for many reasons, but mostly to upset his ex at her wedding, so studies the market and sets out to write a commercially successful book. The best part of this was the skewering, with sample chapters, of so many of the most recognizable writers out there, and the NYT bestseller lists were hysterical. This was a lot of fun, but also a pretty decent look at what literature means to who.

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters

Gothic horror meets Brideshead Revisited. Creepy, but not spectacularly so.

The Wedding Girl, by Madeleine Wickham

A fast paced fluffy bit of very very very light but kind of fun reading from Madeleine Wickham/Sophie Kinsella. Fun but predictable. but thats kind of fun in its own way.

Finger Lickin' Fifteen, by Janet Evanovich

Fluff but fun. The same as all the others.

The Rapture, by Liz Jensen

FANTASTIC book. Apocalyptic near future environmental disaster thriller with amazing, well-developed and memorable characters, and quite honestly, incredibly good writing. Couldn't put it down, and want to read it again.

Fearless Fourteen, by Janet Evanovich

Fun Stephanie Plum book. Jersey mayhem with all the usual characters.

One Second After, by William Forstchen

Pretty fantastic post-apocalyptic drama. 3 EMPs knock out electrical systems over the continental US, and the story is set in a small town in North Carolina, where the residents have to adapt and then band together to defend the town from rampaging hordes of refugeses.
It was distressingly realistic, and I've read more about the actual possibility of this kind of attack, and it is kind of scary.
If you want to really freak yourself out, go to http://www.empcommission.org/ - the full report to Congress is at http://www.empcommission.org/docs/empc_exec_rpt.pdf.
Great read, pretty good book, and *very* anxiety inducing. Good times!

The Blizzard of '78, by Michael Tougas

Interesting photographs, mostly, of the blizzard. Some text. Amazing snowstorm.

101 Projects for Bottle Cutters, by Walter Fischman

Yet another wildly attractive strange hobby book from the mid-seventies. Along with the amazing array of vases, jars, ashtrays and q-tip holders that one can make out of bottles, this book included, surprisingly, detailed instructions on how to build a water pipe.

Bottle Cutting, by Michael de Forrest

Bizarrely appealing 1974 book on the craze that was sweeping the nation. Not much more to say about this one.

Mercury in Retrograde, by Paula Frohlich

Yet another NYC chick-lit name-dropping frothy book.

Not terrible, but it is what it is.

Not as good as Tatiana Boncampagni for the same flavor, quite like Lauren Weisberger, but infinitely better than the loathsome Candace Bushnell, whose whore-oines have been inexplicably misunderstood as some kind of warped symbols of female empowerment. It made a decent bath book, if you ignore some absolute howlers in the writing.

Up For Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over, by Cathy Alter

Well, this was kind of annoying. Good idea- Alter decided to take one year, and follow the advice in magazines to see if her life would improve. It did- and maybe dumbing the jerky boyfriend and learning to cook etc helped with that. What was annoying about it was that she never said how she could afford to spend Beauty Month trying all sorts of new makeups and spas, she never talked about how Clothing Month would devastate a normal person's budget, she never talked about how she could afford all the new pots and pans that went into Cooking Month. Apparently, freelance writers make a lot more money than one could have guessed. I just kind of wanted to slap her silly, which isn't a great way to enjoy a book.

Security, by Stephen Amidon

Disturbing, haunting book. Lives in a small, mostly wealthy college town intertwine in desperately sad ways, and people's attempts to keep their families, lives, and town safe lead to even more trouble. Security company owner Edward is distanced from his crusading politician wife Meg, and drives around all night. One night, he gets a report of an alarm going off at the home of a local business magnate Doyle (whose money, incidentally, is supporting Meg's campaign), and after speaking with Doyle and hearing that it was nothing, drives through the town and comes across Connor, his ex-girlfriend's troubled son. Taking drunken Connor home, he begins to rekindle his relationship with his ex, Katherine. Trouble really beings when Mary, a student at the local college, claims that she was assaulted that night at Doyle Cutler's house, and college classmates, townspeople, and even the newspapers turn against Mary and her father. As events tighten up, all in the space of a week, the awful inevitable looms, and while it is certainly sad, it wasn't shocking.
Good read. Still not what I've been looking for, but it was good, and a writer to read more from.

Terminal Freeze, by Lincoln Child

Slightly silly thriller- I had hoped for a better book. A team of researchers studying global warming's effect on glaciers discover a perfectly preserved large mammal, like a saber tooth tiger but bigger, frozen in the ice. The researchers received grant money from a nature documentary company, so are obligated to let the tv people do what they want with all of their findings, and of course, lots of people die in increasingly horrible ways, and wise native people have to step into the scene. Also, one character is an ice trucker who wants to make a movie about ice truckers. Oh, well.

Well Enough Alone, by Jennifer Traig

Very funny memoir of being a lifelong hypochondriac. It wasn't as funny as her other book, Devil in the Details, which made being an anorexic obsessive compulsive laugh-out-loud funny, but she is definitely an amusing writer.

The Enthusiast, by Charlie Haas

This was a strangely mournful, odd book. Henry Bay writes for specialized magazines- hobby magazines, Crochet Life, Zipline Monthly, things that have a tiny but dedicated fanbase, but he doesn't actually do or love any of the things he writes about, he just loves the enthusiasts. It got long and kind of wildly complicated at the end, but the nugget of such a good book was in this. I'll be psyched to read his next book.

Gone Tomorrow, by Lee Child

Fantastic (and gory) fast paced thriller. Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher is on a subway in NYC when he notices a passenger showing every sign of the checklist to suspect a suicide bomber. He tries to intervene, and gets caught up in an international terrorist plot. This was a lot of fun, but some of the ickier bits will haunt my head. Definitely want to read more of these though- now I understand the epic waitlists for this title!