Books 26-30: 2011

26- The Titan's Curse
By: Rick Riordan
Genre: YA fiction
Three words: Percy Jackson continues
See previous entry regarding Percy Jackson. I am sure he continues to have magnificent Greek and Harry Potter inspired adventures...I just will not be reading them.

27- Hate List
By: Jennifer Brown
Genre: YA fiction
Three words: School shooting fallout
This YA novel, which we will be reading at my high school bookclub next year, follows Valerie, the girlfriend of the perpetrator of a school shooting as she tries to piece together her life in the aftermath. She returns to the high school after summer break. Her boyfriend is dead, having shot himself last, and the media has made her a victim, a hero, and a criminal. Valerie herself is unsure of which she is- while she had no idea what her boyfriend was planning, she did co-create the hate list, a notebook that included all of the victims and seemed the shooting's primary inspiration. I found it a compelling read, though the ending was a bit hurried and trite, and I'm eager to hear what my students make of it during book club. I would far prefer we could read Asher's 13 Reasons Why- same issues, more compelling book- but it has some inappropriate sexual content, so we're reading this instead.

28- Between Shades of Grey
By: Ruta Sepetys
Genre: YA fiction
Three words: Russian Anne Frank
This book details life in a Siberian work camp through the eyes of Lina, the daughter of a political prisoner. It's told in first person POV, and has a similar tone to Anne Frank's diaries; the focus is not just on the difficult times but how a teenager, specifically, behaves in these difficult times. Lina fights with her mother, worries about her father, and falls in love. It was an easy read and far brighter than most Holocaust fiction, but go read The Book Thief instead.

29- The Paris Wife
By: Paula Mclain
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Book Club
Three words: Hadley's Life Sucks
Seriously, this poor woman was a sickly, overprotected child. She meets the much younger, dashing writer Ernest Hemingway and is swept off her feet. They move to Paris where she has a child and they are blindingly poor. Once Ernest starts to become successful, he also starts having an affair with the couple's friend Pauline. He then blames the marriage's break-up on Hadley, because she didn't just ignore the affair. None of this qualifies as spoilers, because even if you don't know anything about Hemingway, Hadley tells you from the beginning that the relationship is doomed. Mclain vividly creates the world of the doomed couple, and if you're a Hemingway fan (like myself), it's fun to watch pieces of trivia you know pop up in the story. There are a few strange POV shifts that break the flow of the novel, but other than that it's an enjoyable, though not remarkable, read.

30- A Moveable Feast
By: Ernest Hemingway
Genre: Memoir, Literary Fiction
Three words: Drink, Starve, Write
I've had this novel since I visited Hemingway's Key West home years ago, but it took the inspiration of Mclain's novel to finally get me to read it. It was interesting to see how this book obviously influenced Mclain's novel and even how the oft besmirched Zelda Fitzgerald (slightly vindicated in Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin) rated in Hemingway's eyes (not well at all). Hemingway's memoir is the prototype for all the stereotypical descriptions of starving Parisien writers that have come after- so much, that it often feels like reading a cliche instead of the work that started the trend.