Sum: Eight Quick Reviews of Nine Books: The Book List

Ah, the promised book list has arrived.

It will be brief, though. I know that I can’t detail entirely all the books that I’ve read since my last review so, like Inigo Montoya, I will summarize:

1. Three Cups of Tea: Good story, good cause, aggravating main player. Why does Greg Mortenson bug me so much? I feel as if his co-writer didn’t do the story service, too.
2. Blind Submission and About My Sisters: Both by Debra Ginsberg, her first novel and one of her memoirs, respectively. Blind Submission wasn’t the hardest book to figure out, but it was still a fun read about literary agents. About My Sisters was touching and very impressive; at first I thought I was in for something like How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, California style, but this was better in terms of presenting the sisters as human as opposed to outrageous characters. Recommend for both.
3. The Prince of Mist: Carlo Ruiz Zafón’s first novel, which was a young adult read. You can see his atmospheric, haunting style emerging, but there was a major plot hole that drove me absolutely nuts. Recommend to see how the good start out, but beware: you might tear your hair out at the end.
4. Do Not Deny Me: a compilation of short stories by Jean Thompson. I don’t know what drew me toward this collection, but I have to say I was not impressed. I read it so long ago that I can’t even tell you why. I like stories about ordinary, everyday people who live in extraordinary ways just by being themselves, but this one left me cold.
5. Remarkable Creatures: Tracy Chevalier’s take on Mary Anning, the 19th century paleontologist who found the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified and the first two plesiosaur skeletons, among other finds, and Elizabeth Philpot, her friend and collaborator. Great story, but like with Chevalier’s Girl with the Pearl Earring, the writing is slow. Would recommend.
6. Sum: a collection of forty short vignettes that speculate on what happens in the afterlife. IP hated this, but I found it oddly engaging and charming. Why? Not enough room to answer completely, but briefly: the New York Times review of this book is titled “Eternal Whimsy.” And that’s the best way to describe the book: it’s whimsical in that the afterlives are so focused on the absurdities of this life. The dead of Sum seem to take everything with them, which is unfortunate and ultimately pretty pessimistic. But it’s pessimistic in a nudge, nudge, wink, wink kind of way. In a way that makes this atheist—who doesn’t believe you do anything but blink out like a light when you die—chuckle. Ah, vain humanity. Of course you think everything is about you. Even this paragraph, right?
7. Burning Bright: another collection of short stories, this time by Ron Rash. Recommend? Hell yes! Rash is a talented writer who does take those ordinary people mentioned above and make them extraordinary. Read this!
8. Mothers and Others: Empathy, cooperative breeding, the ability to read a person through body language and facial expressions: all this and more constitutes Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others. A complex book that synthesizes a variety of disciplines to argue its thesis—that from lengthy childhoods springs the need to develop the trust required to allow others to care for a child; and from that springs the roots of humanity’s ability to understand one another. The book was a wonderful read, but it made me even more fretful about the idea of having children. We have no one around us to be allomothers! No one to engage the child constantly, with love being the reward instead of babysitter hourly rates! How could we possibly do it all on our own? Even one would be nigh impossible! Where do I get my tubes tied? IP snipped? Help! Ahem, kidding. Kind of.

That’s all, folks. I have two works that I’ll be reading in the next few weeks that won’t be placed on the book list, so it may be a while before you see another one of these. Keep reading!

Onto the book list.

Finished:

1) The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault
2) The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
3) The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peal Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
4) Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron by Jasper Fforde
5) Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
6) Unaccustomed Earth: Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
7) Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
8) Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
9) Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer
10) The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton
11) Under the Dome by Stephen King
12) Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge by Eleanor Herman
13) Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics by Eleanor Herman
14) The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez
15) The Road by Cormac McCarthy
16) The Hidden by Tobias Hill
17) The Best American Short Stories 2009: Edited by Alice Sebold & Heidi Pitlor (Series Editor)
18) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Translated by Reg Keeland)
19) The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
20) The Grift by Debra Ginsberg
21) The Help by Kathryn Stockett
22) Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson
23) About My Sisters by Debra Ginsberg
24) Blind Submission by Debra Ginsberg
25) The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Translated by Lucia Graves)
26) Do Not Deny Me: Stories by Jean Thompson
27) Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
28) Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
29) Burning Bright: Stories by Ron Rash
30) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Re-read:

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Currently Reading:

1) Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea

Waiting To Be Read (Already Purchased, Got as Gifts, Borrowed from My Husband or Otherwise Accessible without the Use of Funds, But Not an Assurance That I Will Read These Before I Buy More Books):

1) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
2) Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg
3) Total Immersion by Allegra Goodman
4) One Day by David Nicholls