books #112-128

112. Hush Little Baby by Katherine Davies ****. I actually picked this up thinking it was by Kathryn Davis and was disappointed to discover my mistake. I ended up liking the book a lot, though. It reminded me a bit of Astonishing Splashes of Colour, which I also liked a lot.

113. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen ****. The other people in my book club thought Fanny was boring and pathetic for being so timid, which made me feel like a loser for identifying with her more than the more talkative characters.

114. The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland ***. I got close to disliking Douglas Coupland with JPod, and this didn't make me like him much more, even though I think it was better than JPod. At least this book didn't have pages on end of numbers. It was told with notes and letters, though, which was a little annoying, especially when I didn't see why the characters would be so involved as to write to each other to begin with.

115. Ask Again Later by Jill A. Davis **. I can't even remember this book much. It was fairly formulaic and bland.

116. Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laura Viera Rigler **. I don't even know why I kept reading this. If you liked Austenland, you might like it, though.

117. The Gift of Nothing by Patrick McDonnell ****. This was very cute and sweet. Go read it in a bookstore; it'll only take you a few minutes and it will make you smile.

118. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud ****. This was a very interesting book. I'd never really thought about how comics work as a medium. I think I tend to read them too fast and focus on the words, but I'll appreciate them more now maybe.

119. You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem ***1/2. I've been meaning to read some of Jonathan Lethem's books, but I think I picked the wrong one. I liked this, but I wanted to like it more than I did. It was upbeat and quirky and entertaining, but not very substantial.

120. Outrageous Fortune by Tim Scott **. This is the kind of book I would have eagerly picked up when I was 14 or so, right after I started reading Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. Like their work, it's supposed to be funny SF/fantasy. Unfortunately, this isn't that good (not that I even think Terry Pratchett is that good lately) or at all funny. I shouldn't have bothered finishing it.

121. The Secret History by Donna Tartt ****1/2. I really liked The Little Friend so I'd been meaning to read this for ages. It was great. Kind of disturbing and horrifying, but still great.

122. The Arrival by Shaun Tan ****. A man leaves behind his wife and daughter to immigrate to a country where they speak a different language. It has no words, except for made up symbols for the foreign language, but the illustrations beautifully convey the strangeness of the new place and the difficulties in finding food and work and somewhere to live.

123. Shyness: how normal behaviour became a sickness by Christopher Lane ***. The arguments for how pharmaceutical companies are marketing diseases in order to sell drugs and the descriptions of the haphazard and biased way the DSM listing of psychiatric disorders was created were interesting. The descriptions of how drugs are pushed on people for ordinary shyness didn't match my experiences though, as someone who's been diagnosed with social anxiety, but never offered drugs for it. He seemed anti-cognitive/behavioural therapy, too, which made me think he was biased in favour of psychoanalysis, rather than being impartial.

124. Unpublished manuscript by a fellow book club member ***. I didn't read it when another member sent it to me, because I read the first line and wasn't sure I'd like it enough to be able to say anything about it. The author just got positive feedback from a publisher, though, so I figured it would be safe. It's fine, although it has too many similes for my taste and I don't actually like it enough to say anything about it. Maybe I would've been less critical of the style if I didn't know the author, because I can't help hearing her say the words as I read it, and some things that are fine in books sound pretentious when spoken aloud.

125. The Underachiever's Manifesto by Ray Bennett ****. I think I've always been too lazy to have had a problem with perfectionism, but it was still a nice reminder that adequacy is good enough.

126. Emma by Jane Austen ****1/2. This might be my favourite Jane Austen so far, although it's hard to beat Pride and Prejudice. I liked that it wasn't entirely about the heroine's marriage prospects, and the ending wasn't crammed into a couple of pages.

127. The Gathering by Anne Enright ****. I liked this book at the beginning, but it didn't get really good until the second half. It's on plenty of "best of 2007" lists.

128. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt *****. Kermit sent me this for the gift exchange meme and I loved it. It's not about samurai, in case you were worried (my housemate just listened to me raving about it, thinking I was talking about the Tom Cruise movie and had lost all taste in books). It's about a single mother and her genius son and his search for his (or a) father, and about how to live and what's really important in life.
The author has a blog, which seems just as full of interesting things as the book.