Book of 2010 - #80 & #81
Book 80, which you might have heard of if you read book posts written by good friend oddmonster, was "Butcher Bird" by Richard Kadrey, and it was ... pretty good, on the average. There were parts of it that were brilliant and incredibly well-written. And then I got to the middle. And the end.
The good parts (mostly at the beginning) were reminicent of Neil Gaiman's work -- in fact, several people have reviewed this book at Amazon.com with the phrase "a poor man's Neil Gaiman". While still in the beginning of this book, I thought that it was an unfair comparison, but now that I've finished reading it, it really does seem like the author should have effusively thanked Neil G in his foreward, if he'd had one.
(On the other hand, I just opened the book again to make sure there wasn't a foreward, and discovered the dedication page, which says, I swear: "For N, with love".) *grin*
With oddmonster's kind permission, I'm going to link here to her review of this same book, which she posted the same day *I* finished reading it! (Toooooo weird.) She said things that I wished I'd said, and since she beat me to it, I'm going to be lazy. Warning: there are spoilers in her review, but nothing that's going to keep you from reading this book if you want to. I still don't know whether to recommend this book, or not, but I WILL recommend his other book, "Sandman Slim", which I liked a lot better.
http://oddmonster.livejournal.com/120259.html (Thanks, Odd!)
Book 81 was "Breath - a lifetime in the rhythm of an iron lung" by Martha Mason. I think I read about it online, maybe on the library website, or maybe on BookPage.com. It was given a glowing review, and I found that I agree with *part* of it.
It IS a moving story of a person who lives life despite disability -- Martha got polio in 1948 when she was a young girl, and hospitalized on the same day that her older brother was buried, having died of polio just days before.
Being placed in an iron lung saved her life, and after months of hospitalization, her parents were allowed to bring her home for the year at most that she was expected to live. She outlasted both of her parents and several caregivers, graduated first in her class in high school (teachers came to her home to bring her homework and her mother was her devoted teacher.) Her parents went with her to college at Wake Forest University, where she graduated and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She wrote this memoir using a computer equipped with voice recognition software, and managed to entertain everyone who came to visit her, and died in 2009, as the person to survive the longest in an iron lung.
That said, this book is obviously the work of an amateur who is in love with her own words -- I can say that, being an amateur writer in love with my OWN words -- and could have used a good editor to trim some of the 330+ pages.
"How could you trim any pages out of what sounds like such a fascinating story?" you ask. Unfortunately, she skims over the more interesting aspects and stories of her life and spends a lot of time telling us the life stories of the various folks who visit her.
If you are a reader who likes the triumph over adversity, especially of the medical variety, you might enjoy this book.
I enjoyed "The Forest of Hands and Teeth" by Carrie Ryan. I wish I could say the same for the sequel, "The Dead-Tossed Waves".
From the start, Gabry (sort for Gabrielle) annoyed me. Her friends are trying to get her to go with them beyond the barriers (where the zombies are!) to check out an old abandoned amusement park. She refuses until she sees that the boy she likes is going, and then can't run fast enough into danger.
When the zombies attack, as they do, the boy she likes is bitten. She escapes, leaving her friends behind. Those that survive are punished with banishment by the townspeople while Gabry keeps quiet about having been there, too. And then she goes out beyond the barriers to look for the boy that she likes, who is in the process of dying and being turned into a zombie. A wishy-washy character like this is annoying enough to me as it is, but in a zombie novel? Where idiocy like this gets you killed, and she survives? No, thanks.