Haunting Bombay

Alright, Haunting Bombay. Not bad! This is the kind of book that has me nodding with my lips pursed, going yeah, yeah, that book was alright. I think that I liked it more now that it's over than I did while I was reading it. It's a little on the confusing end, but everything comes together nicely, and it's a rich, vivid story with gorgeous details of India.

Sooooo the book. Here's whatcha got: Pinky lives with her nice grammy, her bitchy aunt, her alcoholic uncle, her twin cousins, and her older, dreamy cousin. She's the daughter of her uncle's dead sister and was allowed to stay with her aunt and uncle's family by the will of Maji, grandma and matriarch of the house. Her aunt, Savita, resents her, and we're not sure why for a while but that story unfolds, along with the story of the ghost hidden in the bathroom, which must remain locked in the evenings. Of course, with a setup like that, guess who goes and opens the door one evening, thus releasing the ghost who then wreaks havoc on the family.


So what happens when the ghost is released? And why is Savita so resentful of Pinky? And who is this witch that everyone keeps referring to and blaming for all sorts of bad things? And wait, who was that character, or this one? These are the types of questions you're likely to ask yourself as you read this book.

The book is saturated with details, and you will definitely want to drink chai while you read this book, and probably go out for Indian or bust out the Indian cookbooks a few times, too. (I did). Lots of mangoes and saffron and tamarind trees and really beautiful, vivid descriptions ensue-- potentially too many, because at times you feel that you didn't need to know every item a particular drawer contained, or what the descriptions of Savita's furniture add to the story. 

However, the spookiness of the ghost story is definitely entertaining, and that combined with the vivid descriptions (to a certain point) kept me reading.

7.5/10

Read this if you:

1. Want to go to India! Great, soulful descriptions of Bombay (this is pre-Mumbai) and lots of lore.
2. Love a really well-told ghost story.
3. Want a story that is woman-centered but not at all chick lit. Strong, well-rounded female characters pervade Haunting Bombay.

Skippy Dies

Ooooh Skippy. You and your dying. I wanted to like this book a lot; I really did. I saw it on various bookstores' featured tables and I picked it up countless times. It's heavy, and the pages are thin and silky. It's a really beautiful book, and all the comparisons in the jacket to Harry Potter (an irrelevant comparison) and other boys-at-boarding-school type books made me very eager to read it, so I shelled out full price for the hardback.

The story begins with a big shocker: our main character, Skippy, dies. Rewind a few months and we get his and many other characters' stories (there is proportionately more time given to the other characters than to Skippy himself, really): Carl and Barry, the creepy, skeezy, mysogenist and violent teenaged drug dealers; Ruprecht, Skippy's friend and scientific genius (much time is dedicated to String and M theory ramblings on behalf of Ruprecht); Howard, one of Skippy's teachers, and his struggles with both his love life and with some troubling events that occurred in his own days at this boarding school not so long ago. The book takes place at this boarding school near Dublin-- points for taking place in Ireland (wee!) but don't expect anything magical-mystical-Enya here; that's really not what you're in for. This is a character study of Dublin's upper middle class; it's pretty drab and depressing except for the fact that it's also hilarious, primarily on account of Mario, one of the boarders at the school who was an outlet for Murray's pervy (and very funny) wit. Mario provided many moments of laughing out loud on a bus for me.

Pluses: the book is funny; can't deny it. Howard's storyline is interesting, and so is Skippy's and Carl's.

Drawbacks:
   1. it's waaaaaay tooooo unnecessarily looooong. Do we really need another diatribe on M theory and philosophy? I'm interested, but it doesn't move the book forward or really even add to it, in my opinion. And this is speaking as someone who is interested! Alas.

   2. Some of hte minor story lines (in particular, the sideshow of Ruprecht and friends' science project) also lacked any force in the story-- why were these here? It felt like a silly TV show with out much depth.


So, overall: 5/10

Read it if you:

1. are interested in boys in adolescence. This is definitely an insightful, funny look.

2. want to laugh and don't mind plodding through a lot of other stuff to get to these great, awesomely-immature laugh lines.

The book isn't dense, exactly, it's just long. I'm glad I read it, but I didn't love it.

Book Attention Deficit Issues

Bah, I am experiencing a great deal of book attention problems at the mo. I am 50 pages into The Observations and about the same distance into The Three Weissmanns of Westport.... and I just started Skippy Dies, which I've been eyeing for a while and which already, on page 8 or so, I am enjoying more than either of the other two. Oh, I also read the first ten pages or so of The Magician's Nephew last night after watching The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (er, is that absolutely necessarily preceded by "The Chronicles of Narnia:" for it to be known that I'm referring to the recent film adaptation? Cause I am). Have you seen that movie? See it.

SOooooo I have no review yet. Of anything. But now, I shall attend to Skippy and I have faith that I will come further than Bessy and I did in Observations, or than the sisters and mother Weissmann and I came in their story (I've been sick this week, and when you're finally having a normal appetite, you don't want to be in the same stories anymore that you were in when you wanted to take off your fevery body).

Read on, readers.

Crazy for Books Book Blogger Blog Hop!

....Say that three times fast!

Okay friendseses, the question is: favorite book cover?


Holy monkey pants, I can't decide. I have three that are from Ye Olde Current Bookshelf, but I must say that there could very well be many more. However.....

Soooo preeetttaaaaayyyy. And they look even better together.

The Story Sisters: or, Alice Hoffman, Again. And again. And again.

Ooooh Alice Hoffman. I love me some magical realism, but the problem with Alice Hoffman is that I feel like I've read Her Book about fifty zillion times. So why do I keep reading them?

Reasons Why I Keep Reading Alice Hoffman Even Though Every Book Feels the Same:  

 1. The atmosphere is always (usually...always....usuallaways) reliable. Sometimes I want that autumnal, crisp, lonely, spare feeling, and Hoffman delivers every time. Remember The Probable Future? Ahhh, so good and leaves-crunching-under-your-feet, and falling into that hoobity-boobity-spookity-cookity category of books that I read at the same time-- Ami McKay's The Birth House (not especially hoobity boobity, but incredibly good and autumn-ey) and Celia Rees's Witch Child (very  hoobity boobity and autumn-ey), for example.

2. You can count on a mildly interesting, magical tastical story. And that's fun! It adds atmosphere, and sometimes you just WANT that atmosphere.

3. Because this one might be THE ONE! You know, the next Here on Earth or Practical Magic.

But the thing is...

It probably isn't.

It's probably another Blackbird House or The Ice Queen. It probably plods along at a neutral, enjoyable, this-is-fine-but-I-have-no-urgency-toPUSHHHH pace for a couple hundred pages and then you pick up something that will leave a stronger impression on you.

So how does The Story Sisters stack up? It's the same.

The story sisters are sisters three, Elv, Megan and Claire.  The youngest and oldest, Claire and Elv, are closer to one another than either of them is to Megan on account of something AWFUL that happened when the sisters were all younger. As Elv turns into a bitchy teenager, never telling anyone about the AWFUL something or getting help for it (which really makes the reader,errr, me, ANGRY), she pushes her family away and gets into drugs and then bad things happen and then a REALLY bad thing happens, and then everyone's really sad. Time goes by; Claire hangs out with her grandmother in Paris and will-she-won't-she like Elv again, or be happy again? 

Thanksgiving! Pie! Wild Rice! Judging books by their covers!

Well! This is what I've spent my afternoon doing. I'm gearing up to go to a step and sculpt class followed by spinning as a way to prefunk for tomorrow, when my primary exercise will be the fork-to-mouth motion my arm makes, while chiseling my mad jaw muscle-pumping skills. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about.

Last night I picked up Jane Harris's The Observations, the cover of which looks like this:

 Or like this:

I thought they were both so pretty that I'd post both of them! I have to admit it to you now:

I judge books by their covers.

A beautiful cover is more likely to be picked up by moi than a plain old boring cover. Remember the boring old Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime cover? It was.... red. Yaaaaawn. I like something pretty, like the above. And sometimes, if a book doesn't look interesting, but it has a glorious cover, I'll get it anyway. Because I'm a sucker. A sucker who likes to be aesthetically pleased and will thus hand over my dollars in order to be so. My prejudice does not work the other way around, though: if a book has an ugly cover but looks interesting based on the blurb, I'll still buy it. I'll just wish it were prettier.

Recently I've been trying to learn how to buy beat-up used copies of books if they're way cheaper than their new counterparts, but gahhhh it's hard- I keep my books nice and beautiful and clean (with the exception of my cookbooks, which I don't hesitate to spill on because it shows they've been loved).

How about you? Are you a cover judger? Are your cookbooks clean? Hmmmm?


Happy Thanksgiving!  

Harry Potter and the Bittersweet Fan

Ooooooh Harry Potter. How do I love thee? Et cetera, et cetera.

So, I saw the movie. Did you know that it's two and a half hours long? That's a chunk of time! By the end of it, I felt like I'd been watching for maaaaybe twenty minutes; I couldn't believe it was over already! For the first time at an HP movie, though, I actually thought it was.... good. In fact, I frankly thought it was good not even just for a Harry Potter movie, but for a movie, period.

I was surprised by the number of children present (especially for a 9:15 showing)-- this movie is frightening! The book is frightening and the movie is really downright scary at times. I think that there may be some non-HP-reading-parents who think it continues to be a (young) children's story after books 2/3ish, but that's really not the case. Which is not to say that I don't think kids should read it (by kids I'm talking 11-ish)--I absolutely think they should! But I probably wouldn't take an 8 year old to see Deathly Hallows.

Two complaints, which I won't go into great detail with for fear of spoiling the movie for those of you who haven't seen it: