Building and Shifting and Rebuilding Again

Building Stories by Chris Ware
(Pantheon, 2012)
Format: it's a box. filled with 16 different, interrelated graphic booklets. mostly different formats. Anyway, I bought it, because sometimes, a gal's gotta spend hard-earned cash on her reading material. (her hard-earned gift card from her awesome friend.) (Thanks, A!)

From Goodreads: "Building Stories imagines the inhabitants of a three-story Chicago apartment building: a 30-something woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple, possibly married, who wonder if they can bear each other's company another minute; and the building's landlady, an elderly woman who has lived alone for decades. Taking advantage of the absolute latest advances in wood pulp technology, Building Stories is a book with no deliberate beginning nor end, the scope, ambition, artistry and emotional prevarication beyond anything yet seen from this artist or in this medium, probably for good reason."

So, it's safe to say I'd never have picked this up if it weren't for the Tournament of Books. I do like graphic novels sometimes, but I don't seek them out - I just get them when strongly recommended. And this isn't a normal graphic novel. There's no explicit method of reading it - the books, fold-outs, broadsheets, etc. are packed in order of size, but of course as soon as you unpack them, you have to play with them and flip through to see all the variety and generally make a mess of it all, so it's not like you can keep them in order that way. 

I started with the one that's like a game board / blueprint of the building, then flipped around some of the smaller stuff, then wisely picked the one modeled on the Little Golden Books, which was, naturally, earlier source material about the woman with one leg who appears in most of the stories. She's the often-depressed-and-lonely woman who struggles with forming attachments, finding fulfilling work, and other 'lives of quiet desperation'-type issues while her downstairs neighbors fight (and make up) and her landlady sits quietly with a lifetime of secrets unshared, and the flowers by the front stoop grow and cross-pollinate and grow anew.

Some of these stories end a little hopefully, and many of them wrap around tragedies large and small. They focus on interior lives, the fictions we knowingly perpetuate, the futility of striving, the moments of happiness which are all too fragile. It's all very cyclical - when the building is knocked down, taking with it the stories of all who have lived there, another will arise and the lives within will be formed from the same building blocks as those who have come before. And that's a little grim, in its way, but also, sometimes, a comfort.

Baghdad Bureaucracy and Grim Humor

Fobbit by David Abrams
(Grove Press, 2012)
Format: Audio CDs via library (read by David Drummond)

From Goodreads: "Fobbit \’fä-bit\, noun. Definition: A U.S. soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2011). Pejorative.

In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit takes us into the chaotic world of Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph. The Forward Operating base, or FOB, is like the back-office of the battlefield – where people eat and sleep, and where a lot of soldiers have what looks suspiciously like an office job. Male and female soldiers are trying to find an empty Porta Potty in which to get acquainted, grunts are playing Xbox and watching NASCAR between missions, and a lot of the senior staff are more concerned about getting to the chow hall in time for the Friday night all-you-can-eat seafood special than worrying about little things like military strategy.

Darkly humorous and based on the author's own experiences in Iraq, Fobbit is a fantastic debut that shows us a behind-the-scenes portrait of the real Iraq war."

War is fun! Okay, perhaps war isn't fun. But Abrams sure is. He took his experiences in the Iraq war and swirled them in a layer of sarcasm, a sprinkling of humanity, and leavened it with all the absurdity at his disposal. And it's yummy. A bitter trifle, sweetened by excellent comic timing and a plot that grows, almost without the reader noticing, to one of those perfectly constructed moments of ironic narrative inevitability.

Two things about the characters: the primary narrative voice, Gooding, is far from foible-free, making sympathy with him something he really has to earn; and the secondary characters are deep enough, even the deeply flawed ones, to avoid caricaturization and blanket ridicule. Everyone has someone who loved him once, or the intention to behave properly, or something real and redeeming about him. And as much as the grunts outside of FOB Triumph dealing with daily life on the streets of Baghdad might look askance at the Fobbits in the air conditioning of Saddam's former palace, Abrams gives the back-office set enough of a purpose to somewhat balance the often ridiculous bureaucratic shell game they tend to be playing, day in and day out.

Some readers might tire of the constantly sarcastic tone, unless they're listening to Drummond's narration, when they will instead be laughing, then laughing, then laughing some more. Each character's distinctive, carefully planned (I have to presume) and perfectly gauged voice is a gem. He's also finely tracing, with his tone, the journey from, for example, writing an early press release about a KIA soldier, with all the fresh horror of the danger outside the gates and gruesome photos in the in-box uppermost, to the ennui of the third or fourth such report in a shift, when it's all about carefully parsing how much of a presence the Iraqi forces should be reported as having in the latest incident. Drummond and Abrams are one of those perfect narrator-author pairings, and I'm so glad I listened to this title as I tackled the Tournament of Books. Much as I gobbled up Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, I hope that Fobbit beats it into the play-in round, because I'd love to engage in more conversations about it. (I haven't read the 3rd option, Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds, so I kinda also hope that makes it, which would give me a push to move it up my TBR list.) (Not that my TBR list isn't a megalith dominating my bedside already.) (But enough about me. Get Fobbit on audio. Enjoy!)

Disappearing Genius and Suburban Warfare

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
(Little, Brown & Company, 2012)
Format: audio download via library (narrated by Kathleen Wilhoite)

From Goodreads: "Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. 
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. 
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world."


"Mummy?"
(Sorry, Empty Child reference - favorite Doctor Who quote of my sons & mine. Kind of a fun echo between the gas mask kid and the book cover, though, right?)

This is so readable a compilation of the source documents young Bee compiles in her efforts to find out where, exactly, her mother (the titular Bernadette) has gone. Bee's voice is on the line of naiveté, but her gradual awakening to a broader understanding of her doting, almost coddling parents is her internal journey. Her actual journey - the family trip to Antarctica that was the straw that broke Bernadette's hold on what she tried to call normalcy - is a hard-won and significant journey, as well. I loved the way Semple (via Bee) arranges all of the emails, invoices, memos, articles, and other documents to tell the Fox's story, which builds to unexpected and fun places.

It's hard to put down, it stays with you, and it has a lot to say about genius, identity, community, and family. Plus, sarcasm. Lovely, lovely sarcasm. Not that I've ever had cause to make slightly snarky comments about über-parents in the suburbs or anything. (Love you all! Thanks for all you do to make our schools shine! But you scare me some.) And the payoff between Bernadette and her self-appointed arch-enemy Audrey takes the sting out. Somewhat.

Wilhoite gives Bee a touch too much lisp and verve at times, but also the wry tone that suits the teen. I really like what she does with the adults, especially Bernadette and Audrey. Bernadette's ennui regarding her community clashes brilliantly with Audrey's self-satisfaction.

Rooster Tournament of Books

On Monday the official Tournament of Books (hosted by The Morning News) (sponsonred by Nook) (enjoyed by me) begins!

They have a fancy fun circular "bracket" printable, which is nice and all, but I... I've mentioned me & spreadsheets, right? I love spreadsheets. And traditional looking brackets. So I made one.

Feel free to download, copy, share, adjust, make fun of my color choices, etc.

Here's the blank bracket (well, with opening round filled in):
And here's my picks:
(I'm sending my picks to Kerry at Hungry Like the Woolf - she runs a contest to see who picks correctly. Enter yours by Sunday night!)

Happy Roostering, y'all.

Stories Worth Grasping for Dear Life

Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro
(Douglas Gibson Books, 2012)
Format: ebook via library

From Goodreads: "With her peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but spacious and timeless stories, Alice Munro illumines the moment a life is shaped -- the moment a dream, or sex, or perhaps a simple twist of fate turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these stories (set in the world Munro has made her own: the countryside and towns around Lake Huron) about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virtual and real, paint a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be."

Short stories aren't always my cup of tea. (I adore tea, BTW. A cup of tea is always my cup of tea.) Short stories ask so much of the reader in such a short space, if they're done well, but if they're not, well, it's cheating, isn't it? The writer just not having a book's worth of conversation to have with me, but not making the shorter chat weighty and worth my time.

(Sometimes I am hard to please. And judgmental.)

Anyway, Munro never does that. The only problem I have with reading Munro is that she reminds me of why I get impatient with non-Munro short story writers sometimes. Also, I want to stop after each one and reflect and reread and relish, but I also want to race forward to the next one. It's all giddy-girl with her first crush, me and these stories. The quiet but essential inner lives of the characters, the spotlight nature of small town inhabitants never not in each other's business, the language! Munro's language is simple and precise, incisive, alive.

I was going to tell you my favorite stories so you could dip in if you don't believe me, but it would just be the first ten items on the table of contents. Maybe Amundsen or Gravel, but they all sang to me, so I'm not going to choose. I will say that the final quartet of stories, which she sets apart with a note about them being more autobiographical, are my least favorite in this collection.

That said, even in those, Munro's turn of phrase seemed designed, at times, to shoot arrows of self-realization at me. I mean, could this sum up my own child's play any more smoothly:

• From Night, describing the games of her younger sister: "These tended towards domesticity rather than glamour."

Or this, my suspicion about how I'm viewed today:

• From Voices, describing why her mother didn't always fit in: "I think people found her pushy and overly grammatical."

This is one of the nominees in the Tournament of Books and I'm looking forward to the discussion about it. Unless people don't say nice things about it, and then I'll get judgmental on them.

History, Fact, Fiction, Terror, Bravery, and a Possibly-Green Car

HHhH by Laurent Binet
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012)
Format: hardback via library, translation by Sam Taylor

From Goodreads: "HHhH: “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich”, or “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”. The most dangerous man in Hitler’s cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the “Butcher of Prague.” He was feared by all and loathed by most. With his cold Aryan features and implacable cruelty, Heydrich seemed indestructible—until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service, killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History.

Who were these men, arguably two of the most discreet heroes of the twentieth century? In Laurent Binet’s captivating debut novel, we follow Jozef Gabćik and Jan Kubiš from their dramatic escape of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to England; from their recruitment to their harrowing parachute drop into a war zone, from their stealth attack on Heydrich’s car to their own brutal death in the basement of a Prague church.

A seemingly effortlessly blend of historical truth, personal memory, and Laurent Binet’s remarkable imagination, HHhH—an international bestseller and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman—is a work at once thrilling and intellectually engrossing, a fast-paced novel of the Second World War that is also a profound meditation on the nature of writing and the debt we owe to history."

Here's what I think:          . 

This is so complex but playful but sobering but deft but messy that I'm having trouble knowing where to start. First of all, a factual thing - yes, the parachutists and their mission are followed in some detail, but this is really, I think, a novel about Heydrich. Who, if you don't know much about him, kind of sucks. Binet's account of his rise to power and absolutely single-minded ruthlessness is as chilling and nausea-inducing and gob-smacking as you'd expect, given that he truly was, as the synopsis says, 'feared by all and loathed by most.' Binet doesn't give us everything - well, it would take several volumes to give us everything - but he does enough. More than enough. 

Mixed with that is the author-as-narrator voice, where Binet details his own growing interest in Heydrich's assassination and the ways in which he builds up information and impressions to turn them into this book. While I looked askance at this through the first third of the book - not because I object to the intrusion and inversion of traditional narrative, but because I was rolling my eyes at Binet's view of himself - I hit a point where the author-narrator comments were treasures. From then on, the book flew by and I hated to put it down. In my mind, he was assembling a bunker around himself of source materials, so that by the end he was fully immersed in each second of the attack and attempted escape. I actually came to care whether the Mercedes Heydrich was in was the black one in the museum, or green, as reported in a couple of earlier fictionalized accounts. 

So now I'm changing my earlier statement. (Announcing this is a very Binet-like thing to do.) This isn't a novel about the Slovak and Czech who united under the Resistance to kill "the Butcher of Prague." It isn't a novel about how Heydrich grew into each of his terrifyingly well-earned nicknames, making him a most desirable target for assassination. It's a novel about writing a history, about Binet as writer and Binet as character, destined to make you think about him every time you encounter a historical account from here on out. 

Read it, and tell me if you are as flipped over by it as I am.

Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
(Harper, 2012)
Format: audio download via Audible (narrated by Edoardo Ballerini for Harper Audio)

From Goodreads: "The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.

And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot--searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters."


I abandoned this novel after a couple of pages and only went back to it because it's on the 2013 Tournament of Books list. Since a couple of people had mentioned the quality of the audio, I used one of my Audible credits for it, and gave it another try. Boy am I glad I did. Let that be a lesson to me about judging too soon. 

So, there's the innkeeper Pasquele, who's the driving force, the pure-hearted guy with a couple of not-so-pure moments in his past. His encounter with the actress Dee, though only a couple of days in their lives, affects them both profoundly for decades to come. And not just them - there are webs radiating out across continents, in their gentle but insistent ways. There are multiple time frames and story lines here, and they play together nicely. I kept wishing the different characters could impart their lessons to each other, even if they were no where near each other in time or space, which was an interesting game to play as I read. (Listened. Whatever you want to call it.) It all pulled together into a rich, fun, smart tale that touched on desire, identity, heritage, memory, ambition, beauty, and loss. Just lovely.

Ballerini is a new-to-me narrator, and I enjoyed him ever so much. The Italian accents were charming, and his handling of many different Hollywood types (producer, writer, actors) felt spot-on. I do think that if I'd given the print version another chance, I'd have devoured Walter's novel for its own sake, but this is one of those narrations that truly enhances the experience of the book.

The Round House

The Round House by Louise Erdrich
(Harper, 2012)
Format: ebook via library

From Goodreads: "One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.

While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning."

Did y'all know that I got a double major in college? Yep. Literature with an emphasis on creative writing, and American Studies with an emphasis on Native American Studies. That was, you know, years and years (and years) ago, but Erdrich was big on my list then, and has remained there ever since. Every word, people. I read every word she writes.

(I'm such a liar. I haven't read much of her poetry.)

Anyhow, it's not like I wasn't going to like The Round House, is what I'm saying. I didn't need the acclaim or National Book Award sticker to convince me to give it a try. But if it helps any of you decide to pick it up, excellent. You'll find yourself in a deeply complex and beautifully realized world, connecting with everything about Joe. He is on the brink between childhood and adulthood, and the attack on his mother shoves him firmly in the adult direction. The freedom of a teenage summer, time with friends, first jobs, biking and exploring and experimenting in ways I'll pretend my own teens would never consider, slammed up against a world full of darkness. Terror and pain and emptiness and loss, plots both immediate and far-reaching. Joe has to learn who to trust, and how to handle trust that is broken. He has to navigate the often irrational-seeming strictures of reservation life, learning why laws on one side of a line apply differently than laws on another. He looks to his father, to traditions, to the church, to his friends, in his attempts to stabilize the ground beneath his feet that fell away when his mother was attacked. And it's neither a smooth nor a straight road. But it's a journey you'll be glad you took at his side.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
(2012, Ecco) 
Format: ebook via library

From Goodreads: "A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at "the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal"--three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew--has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America's most sought-after heroes. For the past two weeks, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. Now, on this chilly and rainy Thanksgiving, the Bravos are guests of America's Team, the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime show alongside the superstar pop group Destiny's Child.

Among the Bravos is the Silver Star-winning hero of Al-Ansakar Canal, Specialist William Lynn, a nineteen-year-old Texas native. Over the course of this day, Billy will begin to understand difficult truths about himself, his country, his struggling family, and his brothers-in-arms--soldiers both dead and alive. In the final few hours before returning to Iraq, Billy will drink and brawl, yearn for home and mourn those missing, face a heart-wrenching decision, and discover pure love and a bitter wisdom far beyond his years."

I went into this not really knowing what to expect, and came out of it with a totally new perspective on the experience of soldiers returning from war. Billy and his squad are thrust into a limelight far more odd and unsettling, in some ways, than the war itself, if only because there is very little in the way of a goal to it all. They are props to the people they meet, a cell phone photo op as significant as a flag pin or yellow ribbon, as far as the impact on their own lives. Because when the media tour is up, unless the producer they've been matched with manages to chase down the dream of a film deal out of their firefight, it's back to the status quo (such as it is) of daily service in Iraq, and the world will go back to not really knowing much of what their lives are like. 

The Bravo Squad men are the most compelling and vivid of Fountain's characters. Having these young men - many of them still in their teens - standing beside Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, rich businessmen, Hollywood dealers, roadies, and pop stars points up the vast difference an experience of warfare gives. Billy's outlook is changed, and his fellow soldiers are the ones who understand that, in ways that no cheerleader or family member back home can. So while I might have looked for a little more dimension from the civilians, I can also appreciate the reversal that it's the soldiers who become real while the people back home are the props in their strange post-fame trip.

Fiction is Fun for Everyone

Three hefty bits of fiction this week, published between 1847 and this year, but I’ll take them in reverse chronological order of their stories.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – I don’t know what to tell you. Read it. There, done. I mean, I could get into the plot some (woman goes missing on her 5^th anniversary, husband is confounded and suspected, things happen) but really, it all unfolds so grippingly that I wouldn’t want to give a bit of it away in advance. What I will tell you is that Flynn knows her characters inside out, more thoroughly than most any author I can think of, and it is wonderful. And terrifying, because everyone is flawed, Flynn’s characters perhaps more than others. I listened to this book, narrated by Julia Whelan and Kirby Heywood, and you know, normally I listen to books while I do stuff – chores, work, exercise, whatever. But this, I was often enough just sitting, rapt. Or pacing, to better concentrate and absorb and anticipate and fret. Whelan was smooth as butter, which fit the character to a tee, and Heywood, oh - there was such a landscape in his narration. This was my second Flynn novel, and I found after the previous (Sharp Objects) that I needed a little recovery time before starting this, but I am unable to stay away from her. Her writing has become a serious, dangerous addiction.

My little palate cleanser after Gone Girl was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which I hadn’t read since high school. I had the mistaken impression that I didn’t really care for it, that it was too gothic and silly and melodramatic for me. Well, maybe it had been, at one point (there is a madwoman in the attic, after all), but that would have been when I was stupid. Now that I’m smart, I love it. “Reader, I forgave him….” Oh, I was in tears. (Okay, I cry all the dang time at books. One of these days I’ll be crying over something in real life, and my family will just not blink, because they’ll assume my head is, again, as always, in a book or a movie. But these tears were realer than the rest! They were Velveteen Rabbit tears!) Anyway, I had forgotten large swathes of this novel – all of her school years, much of what brought Jane and Mr. Rochester together to start with, the annoying neighbors. (Mad women in attics and a little bit of transcendental communication will knock other details right out of the mind.) And I don’t think I’d ever noticed just how awesome a female Jane Eyre is. She’s far more the arbiter of her own fate than I’d realized, and I delighted in getting to know her strength and intelligence and morality. And the humor between her and Rochester! Such fun. I’m very glad I gave this another chance. (Now, will I do the same for Wuthering Heights? Reader, stay tuned!)

Madeline Miller’s debut, The Song of Achilles, is more a fleshing out of the lives of Achilles and Patroclus than a retelling of the Iliad, though of course the Trojan War comprises a great deal of the novel. We meet Patroclus, the narrator, when he is five and first encounters the depth of his father’s disapproval of him and the height of golden potential that is the five-year-old Achilles. Patroclus spends a few dismal years disappointing his kingly father before being disowned and sent off to foster with Achilles’s father, King Peleus. It takes time for the resentful and jealous boy to make peace with the glory that is Achilles, but soon they are intimate friends. The sea goddess Thetis is Achilles’s mother, and she is not best pleased that her son has taken an ugly mortal as his boon companion. The whole ‘mom’s disapproval of teenage son’s friendships only brings them closer’ thing is clearly at play here, and Achilles will not be separated, even when Thetis sends him off to be educated by the centaur Chiron. It turns into a golden idyll for the young men, and the exploration of their physical love for each other. Then Helen is kidnapped, and Greece goes to war against Troy. Fate sends Achilles to battle, to wrestle with his destiny and prophesized death, and Patroclus remains at his side. What I loved about this book – the reverting of Achilles from legendary warrior to sweet kid, the view of him through the eyes of a loving friend who doesn’t love war, the easy prose. My husband (who teaches the Iliad) snorted at the ‘they were lovers’ angle, but for us modern mortals who don’t ‘get’ godly motivations as well as the ancients did, adding the upset and jealous mom to Thetis’s relationship with both men was interesting, and effective. Note to self: approve of my kid’s romantic choices, or risk his rebellion.

Kid Stuff (But Awesome for Adults, Too)

I've listened to some super-good YA books this year. And I have outside proof that the books I'm going to write about are great ones - they all made it onto the "Best-Ever Teen Novels" 100 title short-list that NPR Books came up with this month. So, obviously I'm brilliant, and also you should read these books.

Start with The Fault in our Stars by John Green (which I listened to on audio, read by Kate Rudd. Although it's a great audio - I'm always a fan of Rudd's proficiency with teen voices - the book has some major tear-fest moments, which is mighty inconvenient while driving or trying to get my job done or whatever.) Anyway, TFIOS is a gorgeous, emotion-packed, wry, deep, fun book. About kids with cancer. Our narrator, Hazel, is a terminal teen, which, okay, isn't really a laugh-riot. But she's also just a teen, and a pretty engaging one. Smart and funny and, of course, sarcastic (as all the best teens are.) (Note to my teens: I love your sarcasm. Guess whether or not I am being straightforward.) Anyway, there's a boy - the beautiful Augustus - and books and video games and a Cancer Kids Support Group and hospitals and tulips and, all in all, I want to insist you read it without totally giving away the plot. Lots of people insisted I read it before I got around to it, and I now formally apologize to all of them for taking too long.

So when you've dried your eyes, move on to The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. Frankie is another bright teen, and her intelligence lands her in some serious hot water when she uses it for nefarious purposes. As a student at the formerly all-male prep school that her father attended, she led a fairly shadowy existence until she decides that the still all-male secret society her dad belonged to ought to be infiltrated. Specifically, by her. She can't break into the ranks, but she does manage to wrest control of their actions, directing an escalating series of campus pranks that - well, these things never end up quite textbook. The novel is her detailed confession after things go wrong, and Frankie's voice has tons of wit, brash charm, and more than a smidgen of social commentary. Tanya Eby's narration of the Frankie's journey into herself is fun, smart, and perfectly gauged to the text. I keep pushing this book on people, and so far no one has pushed me back, so I think I can safely say that you, too, will adore reading it.

Not yet sick of exceptionally smart teen girls? Good. Because Robin Wasserman's The Book of Blood and Shadow is next on my list for you. This is a quest, complete with academic puzzles, strange prophetic Eastern Europeans, and murdered friends. Nora and her best friends and her perfect new boyfriend have a lovely time translating ancient letters and manuscripts for a Latin professor, until the professor is the first in a string of murders that sets her on a journey to Prague, beset by secret societies (I do love a secret society) and chased by police. The worlds here are exquisitely drawn, and Wasserman draws you so deeply and steadily into her web that you are captivated before you realize it. Narrator Emily Janice Card's voice is fluid and graceful, despite the plethora of languages in the book, and her pacing and tone during the many tense scenes is, frankly, just a little too chilling at times.

And before we leave Prague, let's settle in with Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone, audiobook read by Khristine Hvam. Did I mention that this is another book about a teenage girl who doesn't quite fit into her world and finds herself on a quest full of danger and self-discovery? This girl is Karou, who, as it turns out, maybe isn't all that human, despite her almost-normal student life in Prague. Her blue hair, inability to tell lies, access to wish-granting charms, and the fact that she was raised by a demon who frequently sends her through doors in his shop into other cities so she can collect teeth for him all point to a certain otherness about her. But she doesn't know who - or what - she is, and when those doors from her demon families' domain all start bearing the same black-handed mark, she has more questions than ever. Hvam's bright, edgy voice mirrors Karou's emotions and adds depth to Hvam's multi-faceted, imaginative, fascinating world. This is one of those audiobooks that kept me up nights listening, and I am eagerly awaiting the second book in the series, out in November. Read this, so you can tap your foot impatiently along with me, won't you?

Fun, Smart, Tricky, Subversive Books for Everyone

You may have noticed, what with the Sayers, Bowen, Winspear, Christie, Tey, and Upson titles I'm always reading, that you can hand me a cast of English people in the early-to-mid 1900s and I'll happily disappear into their stories. Is there anything better than a country house with mysterious goings on? Yeah, I didn't think so. Which is why I grinned so much as I began Sadie Jones's The Uninvited Guests. The country house is of the crumbling variety, the inhabitants (mother, step-father, two children just coming into adulthood and one left to navigate childhood on her own) are individualistic and odd, and it is clear that Emerald's 20th birthday party will not go off without a hitch. Or two. Or a couple of dozen, in the form of refugees from a nearby railway accident, including one with a mysterious connection to the family. You're grinning, too, right? You want to know more? I won't tell you more, because that would spoil it, so go read it for yourself.

Another grin-getter? (Not a word, I know, but I am coining a phrase here, all right?) The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. In addition to having the best cover ever (though the paperback isn't so brilliant), it packs a serious punch. Like Jones, deWitt is taking a known genre (outlaw Westerns) and tickling it to fit his fancy. The brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, are gunslingers sent from Oregon to California in search of the man they've been hired to kill. Along the way they encounter witches, bears, whores, panhandlers, dentists, and inventors. I listened to the audio, read by John Pruden, and through him Eli's narration hits every note of comedy and pathos, while remaining as understated and almost naive as deWitt drew him. I'm left with a deep well of affection for Eli, and a lot of admiration for deWitt's subversive skills.

And speaking of subversive, check out Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son. Unless you're going to North Korea anytime soon (you're not, are you?), in which case you should definitely not pack this. But why go, when you can just inhabit the world Johnson creates - with a massive amount of research and imagination combined, I assume. The orphan in question, Pak Jun Do (or 'John Doe' to American ears), has one of those Forrest Gump-like careers, taking him from the orphanage's work details to kidnapping duty along Japan's beaches, from tunnels under the North-South Korean borders to Texas, of all places. And everywhere he goes, he is surrounded by the influence of the "Dear Leader." Jun Do is immensely likable and very much the kind of character you want to root for, despite all the odds against him. Johnson is quite a deft writer - closely observant, incisive, wry, and emotionally intelligent. I was particularly impressed with the fact that none of his characters were caricatures, which I almost expected given the setting. But even the Dear Leader has depth and humanity. I also loved how immediately I felt at home in Jun Do's world. Narrator Tim Kang kept the whole production rolling smoothly along, and somehow gave Jun Do the strong core of inner silence that carried the character through so many strange and often horrible experiences.

You guys, I loved these books. The last two, especially, rank super-high in my 'best of' list for the year so far. Check them out and let me know if you disagree. (You won't disagree.)