books #68-76

I'm entirely giving up on plot summaries, in an attempt to catch up on books I've read (I still have enough to fill another post after this). I'm instituting a grading system, though, on Jeremy's recommendation. Grades are entirely subjective and may be based on how much I liked the book, how much I think other people might like it, whether it's actually a good book or some combination of the above, depending on the book.
Roughly:
* ick
** meh
*** good
**** very good
***** excellent
I'm pretty sure the mode will be *** and the average somewhat higher.

68. Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson ****. I wish I'd written this post earlier. I couldn't remember what I thought about this book, other than that I liked it, until I opened my quotes file. Here's an example of why I liked it:

Common and rare, to sit face to face like this. Common that people do, rare that they understand each other. Each speaks a private language and assumes it to be the lingua franca. Sometimes words dock and there is a cheer at port and cargo to unload and such relief that the voyage was wroth it. 'You understand me then?'

I wanted her to understand me. I wanted to find a word, even one, that would have the same meaning for each of us. A word not bound and sealed in dictionaires of our own.

69. Restlessness by Aritha Van Herk **1/2. I don't think I really liked this book, but it was very interesting. I'm always interested in books about what makes life worth living and what obligation people have to stay alive.

70. The Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize by Peter Doherty **. I saw Peter Doherty talk earlier this year and it was one of the worst talks I've been to. Every one of his slides was cluttered with more text than I've seen outside a "how not to use powerpoint" example and most slides contained at least one typo or grammatical error. He would flip through a bunch of them way too fast and then stop on one until he'd talked about everything on it and multiple subsequent slides. Plus he spent the whole time jingling his keys in his pocket. I'm sure he's a much better and more organised speaker at other times, and some of the problems were probably due to the fact that it was meant to be for a general audience. I was hoping the book would be better, but I was still dissatisfied by his non sequiturs and lapses into conversational style.

71. Field Guide by Gwendolen Gross ***. I liked parts of this book a lot, but others seemed lacking development, or something. Or maybe I was distracted by a few superficial details that irritated me.

72. Kings of Infinite Space by James Hynes ***1/2. This was fun. It's kind of a creepy Office Space-ish book. It reminded me of the Big U, as well, except the descent into fantastical warfare wasn't so ridiculous since the presence of the ghost cat right from the beginning signalled that it wasn't going to be realistic.

73. I'm Not the New Me by Wendy McClure ***1/2. I hadn't read Wendy McClure's blog Pound before, but I subscribed to the feed after reading the book. I thought it was a very funny book. I especially liked the parts about her blog (website, really; it was pre-blog days) and gaining readers and meeting people in real life.

74. My Most Secret Desire by Julie Doucet *. I didn't like this at all, really. It was a collection of bizarre dreams, mostly, with no narrative thread.

75. Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs ***. I enjoyed this book, but I didn't find it as funny as most people seem to. I want to find out what happens next, though, so I'll probably read the sequel.

76. The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar ***1/2. Perhaps ***1/2 will be the mode after all... The problem is I want to be able to say this was better than Running with Scissors, but not as good as Gut Symmetries, or maybe I just think it can't rate as high because it wasn't as literary a book. It's about fairies, after all. It was sweet, though, and funny.