Books read in August 2012

Yes!  A mere six books finished this month!  And with three weeks off from work!  Good job me!

Read
Are You My Mother
Alison Bechdel
This was beautifully drawn and pretty hard to slog through.  Alison Bechdel has done a lot of therapy and thinking about herself.  Her story is sort of interesting, sort of annoying.  Parts are rather funny, but the whole thing is very cerebral, in a distancing way.

The World of Downton Abbey
Jessica Fellowes
This was a “companion book” to the TV series which I totally grabbed from the “Lucky Day” shelf at the library and enjoyed.  Aside from insights about the actors, the book also examined different facets of society and related them to the characters we saw in the series.  It was the kind of “history-lite” learning I enjoy.

Why We Broke Up
Daniel Handler
Matt and I read aloud.
Reading this out loud is a perfect way to capture Handler’s fabulous prose.  I liked it the second time just as much as the first.

Specials
Scott Westerfield
It may have been the wait between the last book and this one or it may be that it took me too long to read it, but I found this book to be less compelling than the first two.  The elements were there, but they had grown stale.

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
Read for Kenton Book Group.
By the time I got to the end of this book, I loved it.  This book has everything!  And I mean everything!  At one point I challenged Matt to tell me any fiction plot point that didn’t involve guns or sci/fi and that it would be in Jane Eyre.  And it was!  We played that game for 45 minutes and every plot point he mentioned was in the book which was doubly interesting because he was mostly recounting plots from comic books.  I realized that the book had everything in it when Jane Eyre goes on what would now be termed as a “shopping spree” near the end of the book.

That said, I had trouble getting in to the book. The dense prose and archaic vocabulary was off-putting before I realized that I love dense prose in modern books, why not love it in this one.  Still, I think if I hadn’t been on vacation, I might not have finished this.   And wouldn’t I have missed out?

The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides
While I adored Middlesex I found this to be incredibly “eh.”  None of the characters caught my attention which is often the kiss of death for me and a book.  There were some amusing observations here and there, so that was nice, but overall, I was not a fan.

Started and did not finish.
Prince Caspian
C.S. Lewis.
Yep.  I’m throwing in the towel on this series. I just don’t care enough.

Moneyball.
Maybe if I had not already seen the movie I would be more interested in this book?  But the movie so nicely sums things up, I just let this book go after a bit.