The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold

In 2003, my brother bought me Alice Sebold's first novel, The Lovely Bones, for Christmas. I remember reading it on the plane home from Seattle. I was into it from the first page, and I couldn't help crying my eyes out on the plane. I finished it in one day. Later, I read her memoir, Lucky. I didn't think it was quite as well done, but it was about a very powerful topic, and it gave me some respect for where Sebold had come from and how much she had overcome. So, I eagerly anticipated getting this one from the long library waiting list. The Almost Moon tackles the difficult subject of family mental illness. Given my work recently, this is an area I am very interested in - how genetics affects behavior and how families attempt to normalize "crazy" behavior. Unfortunately, like mental illness, this book is all over the place. Sebold switches from present time to the main character's childhood to her life with her husband and children - and does so in a way that is haphazard and often confusing. The main character (unlike John Nash in A Beautiful Mind) is completely one-dimensional and thoroughly unlikeable. Her behavior is erratic and nonsensical, but instead of painting a picture of mental illness and its devastating effects, I simply found this book boring and irrelevant. It doesn't seem like Sebold did much research into the area before she wrote this. Rather, it's like she just took pieces of bizarre behavior and threw them together hoping something would resonate. For those who have never read Sebold, please read The Lovely Bones. For those who read The Lovely Bones and loved it as much as I did, DO NOT read this book. It will only serve to taint your image of Sebold's talent.

What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day - Pearl Cleage

After living life in the Atlanta fast-lane, Ava discovers she is HIV-positive. She packs up her hairdressing salon and heads home to hide-out with her older sister before making her way to San Francisco. Instead of a time-out, she finds herself organizing her sister's church outreach program to assist young mothers, raising an abandoned crack baby, and against her better judgment - falling in love with Eddie - a dreadlocked vegetarian with all the patience in the world. This book is filled with sorrow - from abusive boyfriends to untimely deaths, but instead of sadness and dwelling, it is filled with laughter and hope. Cleage's casual writing style and heavy subject matter reminded me a lot of Terry McMillan (How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Waiting to Exhale), but I found Cleage much more reflective. While it might be a little sappy and sentimental, this is an amazing feel-good book. It brought me both tears and a big fat smile. It's not about a woman simply trying to figure out how to live with HIV, but rather a book about women learning how to live simply. Once again, I find myself quite happy with Oprah's book selection.

Junior - Macaulay Culkin

Looking back, I see I've read some pretty bad books this year. Some were just poorly written. Some had characters that I didn't care about. Some books I just didn't like, but I could maybe acknowledge were well-written. This book, however, is simply terrible. It is the first-person narrative of "Junior" - a twenty-year old who has issues with his father and is trying to find his way in the world after experiencing some success as a child actor. In this respect, the book is apparently autobiographical. Otherwise, it is just a hodge-podge of nonsense. There are exceprts from Junior's diary, letters he wrote to people but never sent, poetry, parts of scripts, but none of it comes together in any remotely cohesive way. While I have wasted many hours and days doing nothing, I am still angry that this is 90 minutes of my life that I will never get back.

Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan - Paula Marantz Cohen

I found this one while browsing in the library and it looked fun. Carla is a housewife struggling with her disenchanted doctor husband, preparing for her daughter's bat mitzvah, and trying to keep her hyperactive son from destroying her home. On top of all this, her mother is having delusions that she was once William Shakespeare's girlfriend, and Carla's high-powered criminal defense attorney sister is too busy to help out. So, Carla seeks out the assistance of a local shrink and her daughter's English teacher -- to learn a little more about her family's various issues, and perhaps a bit more about the old Bard himself. This book is like chick-lit for women over 40. It was a very fast read and had some touching and funny moments. The bat mitzvah planning got a little irritating, but it all came together nicely in the end. Good for a mindless afternoon on the couch.

The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova

While wandering around her professorial father's library, a precocious 16-year old stumbles across a strange old book with a peculiar illustration of a dragon inside. When she musters up the courage to ask her father about it, she unleashes a long hiddden story of the quest to locate Count Vlad - better known to the outside world as Dracula. The Historian is told through a series of letters - and histories within histories. The girl's father relates how he became interested in the Dracula legend, and the various scholars he met along the way. Intertwined with the hunt are several interesting love stories that keep the action going. I had no idea what this book was about when I picked it up - and I was quickly excited to learn more about the "real life" Dracula. I enjoyed the mixture of history with the occult and found this book to be very well-written - if only about 200 pages too long.

Hotel Honolulu - Paul Theroux

A struggling writer finds himself on the shores of Waikiki, and becomes the manager of the infamous Hotel Honolulu. Perhaps not the most ritzy location on the boardwalk, the hotel is filled with colorful characters who walk in and out of the narrator's life. In this modern day Cantebury Tales, behind each door is a new story - sometimes interwoven with the story of another guest, but sometimes just standing on its own. This is the first book I've read by Paul Theroux - he has written dozens of novels (including The Mosquito Coast) and is well-known for his travel writing. He currently lives in Hawaii - and I thought he did a fine job of capturing some of the local flavor - not to mention the pidgin dialect. The writing was very easy to get into and I found the stories funny and tragic, even if a bit overly shocking/ridiculous at times. This was a fun introduction to Theroux and I look forward to finding out what the rest of his novels are like.

Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto - Anneli Rufus

http://www.annelirufus.com/ - This non-fiction book is Rufus's ode to loners - people who choose willingly to live life apart from others. Each chapter is an essay on a different part of our culture and the loners that exist (or are misunderstood to exist) in that realm - including art, literature, crime, and technology. Rufus's collection is in defense of the loner - and often comes across as a little overly superior/defensive in her need to justify her loner existence to the world. As someone who definitely loves being alone - and often prefers it to "shared" experiences - I was drawn to this book. But, my assumption is that Rufus is basically preaching to the choir - and her only readers are other loners! Any non-loner who reads this book will still think loners are weird. And anyone labeled a loner who doesn't really want to be one will not find any solutions in this book about how to become more socially acceptable. The basic message here is if you like being alone, be alone and embrace it - and recognize that a lot of other brilliant and famous individuals are just like you. But, in the end I think most loners don't really care, we just want people to stop bothering us.