Tigers and Spies

63.  Life of Pi, Yann Martell
I read this book because the movie trailer looks so deliciously beautiful, and while I'm still excited about the movie and I largely enjoyed big chunks of the book...meh.  I said on twitter that I give Life of Pi a solid A for effort, but a D for execution - a 66%, to be precise.  The first two thirds are great.  The first third or so is about Pi's life in India and his family's zoo, and is a pretty thoughtful meditation on the nature of faith and religion.  It's really beautifully written.  The next third is about Pi's survival in the lifeboat with the tiger, which is stark and brutal and raw (pretty much exactly how you'd expect it to be).  The final third goes off the rails and gets ridiculous in a way I just can't get on board with.  My (sure to be) unpopular opinion is that at this point, you should probably wait for the movie and, if you dig it, then invest some time in the book.

64.  Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein
Help, my HEART.  This was a struggle to get into - I skimmed the first fifty or so pages really hard - but the payoff is so worth it.  Code Name Verity is the story of two young women fighting for the British during World War II; Maggie as a transport pilot, and Julie as a...well, she's a spy, really.  Julie gets captured by the Gestapo in France, but not all is as it seems and that's all I can tell you without giving anything away.  It's heartbreaking, and touching, and once again I was reading it on the train when the shit really hit the fan and I got all weepy on public transportation.  I really have awesome timing with that.

65.  Master of Disguise, Antonio J. Mendez
After seeing and loving Argo so much, I pretty much had to check out the memoir that Ben Affleck's real person counterpart wrote about his career in the CIA.  It's fascinating!  Mendez isn't a great writer, and I wish it had felt more exciting, but the details of his operations and duties are hypnotic.  Even when the writing fails to convey the tension that I wanted, the functional danger of what he was doing comes through loud and clear.  A must-read for anyone interested in the workings of our espionage system (or, you know, if you liked the movie).

Ghost Stories and Zombies

Y'all know how much I love lists.  In a break from our regular programming, I present to you:

Martha's Top Ten Horror Novels

Because it's Halloween, and All

If you read my other blog, Boycott Bluray (if not, why don't you?) you may have heard about my aversion to watching horror movies.  It comes with a lot of  caveats - I don't like ghost stories but am generally fine with slasher movies, but I'm also utterly fascinated by them and spend hours reading the plots of horror movies I will never ever watch on Wikipedia.  Also, I've been watching (and enjoying!) American Horror Story.  So, you know.  When I say I don't like watching horror films, take it with a grain of salt.

One thing I can say definitively is that I love READING horror, and I have for a long time.  So, in this spookiest of seasons, let me share with you some of my favorites.

Blood Music, Greg Bear

Medical and body horror.  Greg Bear is masterful at medical-based science fiction, and this novella is the perfect blend of clinical medical science and eerie future tech.  It's a little bit Prey, a little bit The Blob, and a whole lot of skin-crawling disease.

Bonechiller, Graham McNamee

For anyone who thinks creature features aren't scary.  This one, taking place in the frozen darkness of Alaska in the wintertime, reaches right into your primal survival center and wrings you out.  It's about a creature that stalks children, biting them...and returning later to collect.  A group of kids decide to fight back.  This novel is creepy and cold, living up to its title, and will make you want to stay indoors once the sun goes down.

Curse of the Wendigo, Rick Yancey

This is the second book in Yancey's Monstrumologist series, and I think it's the best.  Everything the first volume does, Wendigo does better: the gritty Victorian setting, examining human nature, peeling back the layers of civility to expose the savagery within.  It expands the world of Will Henry and his monster-studying (and hunting) master, Dr. Pelinore Warthrop, and does what The Monstrumologist didn't quite manage to do: give the good doctor some humanity.  It's also viscerally disgusting and pretty terrifying, especially when you consider that this is a young adult novel.

Every Dead Thing, John Connolly

I'm not a big fan of cops and robbers mysteries, which is why it is continually a pleasure to read Connolly's books about the intrepid investigator Charlie Parker.  These are detective stories imbued with a heavy amount of supernatural horror, and while he hardly ever comes out and actually says that Parker is involved in a larger war between good and evil, it's heavily implied.  Parker is a man haunted by figurative ghosts, until he starts tracking a grisly serial killer...and the ghosts who speak to him become much more literal, and much more personal.  There are a whole bunch of these, and I recommend them all.

Feed, Mira Grant  

Less outright horror, this superbly written zombie novel slowly reveals details of life in the world post-zombie apocalypse as well as bites of a conspiracy that will make your hair stand on end.  It questions the nature of truth, the relationship we have to fear, and the human survival instinct.  Not your average zombie story - quite a bit better, in fact.

House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

I freely confess to not having finished this book...yet.  The truth is, it got under my skin so bad that I had to walk away from it for a while, and it's so dense that it's been a little intimidating to get back to.  When I started it I had no idea that a book about a house that is larger on the inside than it is on the outside

Rotters, Daniel Kraus

A zombie book that has no zombies in it.  It's just as gross, though!  Joey, the main character, moves in with his dad after his mother dies and discovers that Dad makes his living digging up the dead and plundering their coffins.  So, naturally, he decides to learn the family trade.  Kraus is so descriptive the pages fairly reek of the dead, and even though there's nothing supernatural about this story you'll still want the lights on when Joey decides to take some unconventional measures to solve a bully problem later in the book.

'Salem's Lot, Stephen King

There are two King novels on this list, and I STRUGGLED to keep him from overtaking it completely.  But I finally decided I couldn't live without 'Salem's Lot being here, because it is, simply put, one of the best vampire novels ever written.  King's vampires are not romanticized, which makes them more frightening than most.  They are animals, and they are clever, and no matter how young their bodies are they will eat you.

The Shining, Stephen King

Let's face it, my top ten Stephen King novels could probably comprise a list of its own - he's prolific and extremely good at what he does, and that is to bring me, white knuckled, to the edge of my seat with slow-burn terror.  I think The Shining is pretty much the microcosmic best of what Stephen King does: it takes his fascination with inherent evil, an innocent child hero, and a spiral into bloody madness, and it does so in less than 700 pages.  It's nerve-wracking, claustrophobic, terrifying, and exhilarating, and has made more of an impression on me than almost any other book.

The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris
Will there ever be a psychopath as charismatic as Hannibal Lecter?  I honestly kind of hope not - one of the things that makes him so memorable is how unique he is in the horror landscape.  I prefer this one to the followup, Hannibal, both because the ending doesn't go totally off the rails but also because watching two dangerously insane people circle each other like tigers makes for some gripping thrills.  Buffalo Bill is horrible, but even his flaying activities can't compare to the smooth, eerie, compelling cannibal Lecter.

Books! And Comics, Lots of Comics

57.  Feed, Mira Grant
A zombie book with new stuff to offer!  Much like World War Z, the world Feed takes place in is one that has already dealt with the zombie uprising - it opens with Georgia and Shaun, our intrepid blogger heroes, filming footage for their news site in a world where people have learned to cope with the reality of the undead.  Grant goes into all sorts of interesting details, like the function of news blogs in the media and the medial science behind the zombie virus.  She also presents an interesting plot bait-and-switch: this book isn't really about zombies.  They've already happened, they're here, get over it, and deal with the presidential campaign Georgia and Shaun (and the rest of their bloggers) get invited to cover.  A really, really interesting story about the nature of fear, our relationship to the truth, news, spin, and the media, and the courage of the desperate   I'm in the middle of the sequel, Deadline, right now, and let me tell you: these books kick you RIGHT in the feels.

58.  Fear to Tread, James Swallow
The Blood Angels chapter in the Horus Heresy novels.  It was ok; it had the weird Chaos shit I love, but the Blood Angels on the whole are kind of douchey.  I'd rather read about Ultramarines (or Sallies, WHERE IS MY SALLIES BOOK, GAMES WORKSHOP?), but it had New Information and some cool scenes showing the relationship between the primarchs.  Although, at the end you're really left wondering why the Emperor didn't just erase the whole damn lot of blood-drinking mutants...

Ok, so I just read what I wrote about Fear to Tread and realized it makes zero sense if you aren't familiar with the Warhammer 40K universe (much like every Horus Heresy blurb I've written in this blog, probably).  If you're a fan of military sci-fi or epic science fiction, do yourself a favor: grab a copy of Horus Rising by Dan Abnett.  It's a deep rabbit hole, but this series has some excellent shit in it.

59.  My Name is Not Easy, Debby Dahl Edwardson
A really heartbreaking book about Eskimo and Native American kids who attend Catholic boarding school in the 1960's.  I read it for my advocacy class, and it's obvious why my professor wanted us to: no one advocates for these kids.  They think they are, but My Name Is Not Easy really shows the damage that white privilege and thinking you know better about someone's life than they do can do.  There's a nifty little afterward in the back about how one of the characters' stories is the author's husband, and essentially true to life, which gives the whole thing a strong tang of authenticity.

60.  Batgirl vol. 1: The Darkest Reflection, Gail Simone and Ardian Syaf
I'm going through a serious Batgirl crush right now, you guys.  This one is the first trade paperback from Batgirl's New 52 reboot, and Barbara Gordon is seriously the best character ever.  She's smart and resourceful and confident, and has realistic fears and fucks up sometimes and kicks SO MUCH ASS that I can't even handle it.  The metaphors in this book are a little heavy, but the art is great and, like I said, Barbara is seriously an awesome character.

61.  Suicide Squad vol. 1: Kicked in the Teeth, Adam Glass and Federico Dallocchio
I bought a bunch of New 52 trades last weekend, can you tell?  While I don't like Harley Quinn's new character design, I continue to find her completely fascinating, and the other supporting cast is pretty compelling.  I was not familiar with the Suicide Squad before picking up the reboot - for others not familiar with the concept, it's basically a collection of villains that have been apprehended and now get a chance to shave time off their life sentences by serving on a task force for impossible government tasks that have a low chance of survival.  Harley carries a giant hammer and there's a guy with tattoos that sets shit on fire.  It's pretty rad.

62.  Batman vol. 1: The Court of Owls, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo
This book is fucked, y'all, but only in the best way.  I know that DC has been putting out some shaky work in the fast few years, but so far I've been really impressed with the reboot, and if you're into Batman AT ALL I think you should check out the new stuff.  It's dark and kind of weird, but hella exciting and super interesting.

I'm running out of witty titles for these things

54.  The Family Fang, Kevin Wilson
Boyfriend's mom likes to lend me realistic fiction books about incredibly strange people, which always end up being highly enjoyable and balanced somewhere between endearing, amusing, and a little bit sad.  The Family Fang is no exception, although the strangeness is booted up to eleven - Caleb and Camille Fang are performance artists specializing in public disruption, and their children Annie and Buster get used as tools in their performances until they're old enough to flee into the normal the world.  The book does a lot of questioning about the nature and value of art, as well as studying the weight of family connections.  (When Annie and Buster fall on hard times as adults, they are forced to move back in with their parents - to everyone's consternation.)  I enjoyed it, although it gets pretty bleak in places; the chapters alternate between what is happening in the book's present and the Fangs' performances in the past.  Reading about the things the parents persuade their children to do in the name of art is like a train wreck: mesmerizing and traumatic.

55.  Nothing, Janne Teller
This was one of the selections on my YA Literature class syllabus that I did not get a chance to read, but after hearing from my classmates it sounded rather intriguing.  It is, but it's...rough.  Nothing is a Danish book about a class of 13 year olds, one of whom decides that since nothing matters, nothing means anything and nothing is worth doing, so he starts spending every day up in the branches of a tree.  His classmates decide to show him that there is meaning in the wold by collecting what they come to term their "heap of meaning" - a pile of things that mean the most to them.  Except it becomes obvious that no one is contributing what means the most to them, so they start picking for each other, and...things escalate quickly.  It's horrifying, watching what these kids push each other to do; the front cover flap calls it reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, which turns out to be a pretty apt comparison.

56.  Muchacho, LouAnne Johnson
Read for my advocacy class.  It's about a Hispanic high school student in New Mexico, who can fairly be described as "high risk."  He goes to an alternative school and has an incredibly bitter outlook on life, until he starts dating a girl who's smart and perceptive enough that he starts trying to turn himself around.  Gang activity, drug talk, and some pretty deep insights abound - it's a good read, but there are moments where I simply did not believe that some of these insights could have originated with the character, considering how disengaged he is and his education level.  

Goal!

51.  Americus, MK Reed and Jonathan Hill
I read this (and The Chosen One) for my youth advocacy class.  It's a deceptively simple story about a kid growing up in small-town America who loves to read more than he likes interacting with other people, and loves one fantasy series in particular.  His best friend comes from an extremely religious family, the mother of whom finds him reading the newest installment and organizes a crusade against the library to get the books banned.  Superficially, all the characters are caricatures, with the shy bookworm, the militant librarian, and the religious zealot.  Hill's art, though, goes huge lengths to show the emotional conflict in each character, and reveals more depth than the writing might initially suggest.  (Which is not to say the writing is lacking, simply that the art and writing work in concert to provide a fuller picture of the story.  You know, the way a graphic novel is designed.)

52.  The Chosen One, Carol Lynch Williams
Uggh, my heart.  This is another one I read for my advocacy class, and it was a lot like getting kicked in the teeth.  Kyra, the main character, is a14-year-old daughter to a polygamist family in a religious compound, and she's told that the Prophet has had a vision about her getting married...to her 60-year-old uncle.  The book is about her emotional turmoil and ultimate rebellion, but it's also about her family and the way they love and protect each other.  It is rough, but Williams treats these people in a very human way, and doesn't just vilify the adults in the compound (well, not MOST of them.  Kyra's mothers and father are never vilified.  The Prophet and her uncle, however...).  It's sensitive, and astonishing, and an incredibly fast read.

53. Iron Warriors Omnibus, Graham McNeill
This is actually comprised of, I think, two complete novels and some short fiction, but I'm counting it as one because I read them bound together and because I do what I want on my blog.  McNeill is fun to read as always, but I confess, reading this much fiction where the bad guys win every single time was bad for my morale.  It gets exhausting after a while, especially when the front-and-center characters are as loathsome as these Chaos Space Marines.  I just...I just need to read about some good guy victories, ok?

I hit my goal this week!  I have read 52 books in WAY less than 52 weeks.  Now to see how many books I can finish before 2013!

This post is mostly about Horror Novels

49. Bones of the Yopasi, Graham McNeill
This is the second book in the Dark Waters trilogy by McNeill, which are novelizations in the universe of the FFG Cthulhu games (Arkham Horror, Elder Sign, Mansions of Madness).  I picked up the first one, Ghouls of the Miskatonic, at GenCon 2011 and have been waiting pretty eagerly for volume two (released, appropriately, at GenCon 2012).  I know McNeill first from the fabulous work he does for Games Workshop - I've mentioned some of his Horus Heresy work right here on this blog (his books are, largely, my favorites).  It's slightly baffling to me that his work with FFG isn't as strong, but as people have noted, the Cthulhu mythos universe may just be more difficult to write within - it's got the time period constraints, being set in the '20s, which comes with a whole load of issues (dialogue seems to be McNeill's biggest problem, all his characters end up sounding like Casablanca cliches) but in general, the Dark Waters books serve up a heaping dose of Elder God weirdness and some fun action.  At the end of the day, that's all I want.

50. 11/22/63, Stephen King
This is the third King novel I've read this year for my challenge, and I think it's my favorite.  When I was about 13, I went through an intense Stephen King phase: I loved (and still love) horror fiction, in a way that surprises most people who know how terrified I am of horror film.  But reading something is different from watching it, and King is a master of the genre.  I read IT, The Shining (one of my top five books ever), Eyes of the Dragon, 'Salem's Lot, Four Past Midnight, almost everything I could get my hands on (I missed some cornerstones, like Carrie, which I'm going to get to before the film remake comes out next spring).  At his best, King writes brilliantly paced, incredibly eerie prose that descends into the stuff of shambling nightmares.

What is so amazing about 11/22/63 is that it is both completely recognizable as one of King's works, but also something totally unlike anything I've read of his before.  It's a time-travel novel, and while it carries some of the typical tropes you'd expect to find in one, it's also a haunted house novel akin to The Shining.  The characters, especially our would-be hero Jake, are fighting against a malevolent, intangible force...which is time itself, rather than a spirit or ghost or something else supernatural, as Jake tries to do the impossible and prevent the assassination of JFK.  It's also a brilliant example of the way that King can write complete lives for his characters that don't seem to be particularly relevant to the specific story he's telling, but are compelling in and of themselves until the moment you realize, gob-smacked, that EVERYTHING you've read matters.

I did smile a little at one particular moment, because King is also known for being self-referential, and there was a moment were I thought he was going to slot the total plot of a previous novel into this one.  He doesn't, and unless you've read IT I don't think it would have mattered, but having read IT gives a little more insight into the world of 11/22/63.  Because, like I said, everything you've read matters - even if it didn't happen in this particular book.

It's Been A Long August.

46.  State of Wonder, Anne Patchett
I really wanted to like this more than I did.  Patchett is a beautiful, lyrical writer, but the story in this...just didn't work for me.  There's medical research in the Amazon, and the main character has to go find out what happened to her colleague, and the doctors working in the rain forest are living and working with a tribe of native people who could hold the secret to post-menopausal fertility.  The characters are intriguing, especially the acidic Dr. Swenson (who is leading the research team and has been for several years), but everything breaks down in the face of a very uncomfortable notion: it feels like Patchett is relying far too much on colloquial stereotypes, rather than on any actual experience or research, and ultimately I don't see that she says anything new about the issues she raises (and the rain forest itself feels like it stepped right out of Heart of Darkness - I'm sure we can all agree we don't need another definitive "savage worlds" narrative).  I've heard her other books are better, so I'll give them a shot, but I was disappointed with this.

47. Fablehaven: Rise of the Evening Star, Brandon Mull
These books are so fun!  The follow-up to Mull's first Fablehaven book ups the ante accordingly, pulling in the mysterious and evil organization, offering plenty of action, and leaving you with a much crunchier cliffhanger than volume 1.  I don't often feel surprised by the twists in children's/YA lit, but this one kept me guessing a little longer than most.  Recommended if you enjoy kid lit fantasy.

48.  Desperation, Stephen King
Hnngh.  Overall, not my favorite of King's - but it DID have a whole lot of the creepy, weird, gross horror stuff which is basically my motivation for reading Stephen King.  Unlike a lot of his books, Desperation hits the ground running; you don't get the slow burn build-up of The Shining or Salem's Lot.  Instead, you are instantly dropped into the middle of the desert, on the highway, with a murderous cop pulling people over and dragging them back to his town (Desperation, Nevada) where he may or may not have killed every single living person.

The big reason I didn't love this one as much as others is that, while it deals with King's typical examination of evil and the relationship between good, evil, faith, and possession, it's not subtle.  David, an eleven-year-old boy, is in direct contact with God.  God sent them there.  I'm not a fan of this trope because I feel like it takes some of the tension out.  When King lets things be more subtle, when his characters are less obviously "guided by God," there's more room for uncertainty and for human error.

I do kind of love the notion that he wrote a "companion" novel, called The Regulators, under his Richard Bachman pseudonym and published the novels side-by-side (The Regulators takes place in a parallel universe, with the same characters in different positions and the same overall villain).  I'd like to check that one out, just to see the complete vision of the story.