Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (#23, Reader's Choice)

It wasn't until four J.K. Rowling books had been released that I jumped on the Harry Potter bandwagon. Normally, I avoid books that anyone and everyone read. Being my book snob self I assume that if everyone thinks a book is good there must be a giant flaw. Funny then to find me in a line, 100+ people deep, waiting to purchase my own copy of the seventh and final installment of the series. Turns out I am a Harry Potter fan through and through, and am proud of it.

There are few books I will while away a whole day reading, but I have done it multiple times to see how things turn out for Harry, Ron and Hermione. J.K. Rowling somehow managed to encapsulate all childhood dreams of an imaginary world into her stories: flying, changing into animals, being invisible, time travel--to name a few. Yet, alongside her very magical and imaginative ideas she weaves in real world situations and themes--war, racial purity, the struggle for power and interpersonal relationships. To write a book that appeals to even one person is a feat, but to write a book that can enchant people from all walks of life and all ages is as mysterious as the books she writes.

I have nothing but good things to say about each book. My favorite is still probably The Prisoner of Azkaban, but in my opinion she wound up the story perfectly in The Deathly Hallows. I can guarantee I will be eagerly awaiting the next gem J.K. Rowling has to offer.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (#26, Reader's Choice)

I feel very strange writing this post. Everyone is reading this book. Everywhere I look I see some eager child or adult clutching the final installment of J.K. Rowling's immensely successful series. I too am guilty of the addiction to this wonderfully crafted world of witchcraft and wizardry. While I didn't go get the book at midnight on the 21st when it became available, I did make my way to Borders to wait in a long to purchase it so that i could begin feverishly reading what would eventually make me weep. I use the word weep instead of cry because when you read a seven book series, you become attached to the characters. You become attached to the world within the pages and you don't ever want it to end. The ending of any series is always bittersweet, but Harry Potter even more so. Rowling got me before I even read the first page with her dedication that says, "The dedication of this book is split seven ways:...and to you, if you have stuck with Harry until the very end." Yep, I stuck with Harry to the very end as has everyone else who chanced to go out on a limb and pick up The Sorcerer's Stone.

I won't be very specific about what happens in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I will say that I enjoyed it very much and I thought Rowling did an amazing job tying up loose ends and solving all the mysteries raised by the previous Harry Potter books. I got the answers I came for and the final chapter didn't leave me aching for more. It is rare for a book to deliver complete satisfaction, especially with a series but this one did. I wept for the end of an era that this final book ushers in. I would like to do it all over again and I am completely jealous of the budding young readers who have yet to discover Harry Potter and who will inadvertently pick up Book 1 and find themselves on the literary ride of their life. Cheers.

Three Junes by Julia Glass (#22, Contemporary Literature)

I started Three Junes while I was sitting at work, on a hour break between shifts. I can get some reading done there, but generally it is sporadic and interrupted with people coming in and out, co-workers chatting me up, and the ever alluring smell of food to distract me. But, Three Junes was different. Within the first 10-20 pages I was transported to another place and everything going on around me disappeared (which I am sure Bridie did not appreciate because as I was floating in book world she got super busy).

Since that first day I have been asking myself over and over again, "What is it about this book I like so much?" I can't pinpoint it. I immediately liked the character of the father. A smart, hardworking, family man, who is still striving to learn how to express himself emotionally ( I could take some lessons!!). Then we get to investigate his life more through his three sons, specifically one in the second and third sections.

Julia Glass somehow managed to take the life of a family and weave it into a beautiful story. Their lives were not filled with excess drama, they were not typical, but they were also not off the deep end. The pages were filled with love, animosity, bickering, and relationships between male and female, brother and sister, old and young, human and animal--maybe I liked it so much because of the involvement of animals in the story. The allure of Three Junes will continue to be a mystery to me, maybe that is what makes it so great, nothing earth shattering, just life.

A Death in the Family by James Agee (#21, Classic)

I found A Death in the Family on a list of Pulitzer winners and thought, hey, it won an award, I'll give it a whirl. I didn't love it. It irked me for two reasons, first there was talk of religion, and we all know how much I love religion, and secondly the little boy bothered me. The kid gets picked on to the nth degree and just doesn't get it. It was painful to read as he kept walking right into the traps set by older boys to make him look like a big idiot. He knew they were making fun of him, yet he longed so much to be liked that he continually tried to talk himself into believing they were actually his allies. But the whole time he seems to know they really aren't his friends, but he is okay with that because he enjoys the attention in some distorted way. And then, the icing on the cake, after his dad dies, he uses his knowledge of what happened as coolness leverage. Bragging about your dad's death, not cool. Okay, so he was only 7 years old or something, but still, it IRKED me!

I think the novel captured how a family may react to the death of a loved one. The book as a whole didn't make me think or stand out to me, but there was one passage, or scene, that I don't think I will ever forget. There was nothing extra special about what happened, just the exchange between a husband and wife as he is going on a short trip, but it paints a vivid picture in your head of what I believe to be true love. You feel the love between the two of them. Cheese, I know, but it was nice. And it didn't make me want to vomit in my mouth, so I think it had to have been cleverly written, otherwise I probably just would have made a gagging noise and breezed past. :) Ah, forever the cynic.

A Mighty Heart by Mariane Pearl (#25, Nonfiction)

I didn't exactly plan on reading this book. My sister picked it out and read it by the pool. I don't really think A Mighty Heart qualifies as a nice pool read, but everyone has their own flavor of chewing gum I suppose. This book just seemed too serious to be a summer read, but I got desperate on the 12 hour drive from Virginia to Maine. I had a couple books left to read in my stash, but when I started reading them, I just couldn't make it past the first page.

I picked up A Mighty Heart on a whim and got sucked in. Mariane Pearl tells the horrible story of how her husband, American journalist Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and then murdered but she does it in such a way that instills more hope in than sadness in the reader. I really enjoyed her descriptions of Danny, he came alive through her words and she honors his memory in the telling of this tragic event.

I am embarrassed to reveal that I barely remember the actual event occuring in real time. Where was I and how did I react? I don't think I pay too much attention to current events to really get sucked into these types of news stories. Reading this book made me wish I had. I wish I could remember reading about it in the paper and watching the news to find out what happened to Pearl but sadly, I didn't watch the news back in high school, nor do I watch it much now. But I am glad to have read this book, glad to have heard the story, glad to have learned that Mariane Pearl didn't let the tragic, horrible end of her husband kill the good in her. She writes how Daniel Pearl had a mighty heart, and it is through her own unwillingness to let anger and hatred blacken her own life that she and her son, Adam, triumph over the terrorists that took Danny's life. She too has a mighty heart.

Smashed by Koren Zailckas (#24, Nonfiction)

Like most people my age, I find myself wondering if the amount of alcohol I consume when drinking is enough to be considered alcohol abuse. After reading Koren Zailckas' account of her drunken girlhood, I don't think my own experiences with alcohol make me an abuser. By her standards, I am a saint. I do not use alcohol to make me intimate with my lovers, nor do I depend upon it to give me the self-confidence I lack when sober.

Smashed is the brutal story that traces Zailckas' first introduction to the dizzying effects of alcohol at the tender age of fourteen to the last time she drinks and blacks out, waking up the next morning in a strange apartment, not knowing where she is or how she got there. I found the first part of the book the most riveting, as it detailed the underage drinking portion of her life. I guess I found it so interesting because I never drank in high school and her descriptions could be used to describe every suburban town in America, including the one I went to high school in.

Zailckas writes well, although sometimes I find that she is trying too hard. Her message to young girls is obviously to not use alcohol as a means by which one deals with self-esteem or self-confidence issues which is good, sound advice.

Bergdorf Blondes by Plum Sykes (#23, Reader's Choice)

Why did I do this to myself? This was the question that plagued me the entire time I was reading this book. The answer is a simple one: you need a mindless book to read when lounging by the pool or when laying out on the beach. One summer I had the Da Vinci Code to keep me riveted on my beach towel. I had sort of hoped Plum Sykes' Bergdorf Blondes would be an entertaining and witty piece of popular chick lit. It became quite clear after page 30 that this was not to be the case. I contemplated abandoning the book entirely but in a race to read 50 books in one year, I had to just push through to the sorry and predictable ending.

I am not really a connoisseur of chick lit novels, but I have read more than a handful. After nearly every single sad attempt at writing about the woman plight, I come away annoyed and with the resolve to never pick up another one of these books again.

There really is nothing I liked about this book. I hated the narrator, Moi, and her pointless Manhattan existence. I hated the other characters as well for their idiocy and the fact that every single one was a slightly altered carbon copy of the one that came before. I had the ending predicted by page 50 and this was probably the greatest downfall of all. I like to be surprised, and when I know what's going to happen it just totally ruins it for me--unless the writing is superior enough to save it, which in this case it just wasn't. Plum Sykes should stick to fashion magazines and I should stick to books that don't make me dumber for having read them.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (#22, Contemporary Literature)

I have waited and waited to read this book. I am a fan of Margaret Atwood, after having read The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin. Oryx and Crake seemed rather promising. Who doesn't enjoy a good sci-fi mystery told by the talented Atwood?

I am sad to say but I was sorely disappointed. I guess I never really believed the world she creates in this narrative told in two parts--by Jimmy and Snowman. Jimmy starts off as a young boy with two scientist parents who help to engineer new species. Snowman is a bald man who runs around in a floral sheet fighting to stay alive in a world that was ravaged by some disaster that left very few survivors. The novel fluctuates between these two narrators, who only tell us little bits, and make us follow their disjointed retelling of how Snowman ends up running around in nothing but a sheet.

I guess I expected too much. The ending didn't surprise me. I really like to be surprised, so I was left wanting more. I wanted more than the character of Jimmy or Snowman could give me. Perhaps this is Atwood's style. The satirical nature of the story, the warnings against consumerism, against the way our society conducts itself were not lost on me though. I found it scary, and quite possibly almost too accurate.

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (#21, Reader's Choice)

Sitting by the pool requires specific types of books. I never want anything too serious. I do like to read adventure stories though. This book fit the bill. From the young adult section, Scott Westerfeld's Uglies was just what I needed for my relaxing Wednesday at the pool. I basked in the sun and read book one of his futuristic series about a world where everyone gets cosmetic surgery at the age of 16 so that everyone looks the same. The reason for this type of homogenization is to eliminate conflicts that arise from someone else looking visibly different than you. This obviously raises some interesting questions, and makes you wonder if having everyone look the same would solve some of the problems in our own world that arise out of the visible differences among people.

Unfortunately for me, I neglected to bring books 2 and 3, not knowing that Westerfeld ends Uglies with a cliffhanger. I am eagerly awaiting getting back to Portland so that I can find out what happens to Tally.

Popco by Scarlett Thomas (#20, Reader's Choice)

Wandering through the library shelves aimlessly often results in me finding little gems that I normally wouldn't have found on my own. I stumbled upon Scarlett Thomas' Popco in just this manner on a recent excursion to the public library. It jumped out at me and I remembered seeing it on another blogger's page as a somewhat interesting and satisfying read. After Vanity Fair, I was ready for something light and fluffy.

Can Popco be described as light and fluffy? If you look at it for what it appears to be on the surface--a tale about a toy company--then yes, it might be called that. But I think Thomas means the book as a critique of today's consumer-centered society. There is also a lovely mystery weaved in that involves code-breaking. I feel like by reading this book, I can now use a Vigenere Cipher and crack codes by looking for patterns in jumbled sequences of letters and numbers.

This book has a lot of interesting information about psychology, prime numbers, code breaking, and marketing theories. I definitely don't feel dumber having read Popco. The only thing that bothered me was the ending, which fizzled out. The secret was revealed in an inept two part narrative that made it seem anti-climactic to me. Other than that, I really enjoyed reading this on the way from Ohio to South Carolina.

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (#19, Contemporary Literature)

I loved this book's utter strangeness. How can you resist a narrator like Alex, who butchers the English language so beautifully and to such comic ends that to laugh out loud while reading his chapters is virtually impossible. I was so amused I had the urge to read particularly funny sentences to who ever was in my general vicinity. A book like this isn't one you keep under wraps--you tell everyone you know to read it so you can laugh at things like how Alex repeatedly refers to the grandfather's dog as his "seeing-eye bitch."

Everything Is Illuminated is not all fun and games though--there is a balance between that which is hysterically funny and that which is heartbreakingly sad. The other main character, Johnathan, comes to Ukraine to search for the woman who supposedly saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The search for this woman leads them on a comical, yet serious journey that ends in the illumination that the title suggests.

There were parts that confused me, and I was slightly put off by some scenes of brutality towards the women, but overall, this strangely entertaining story charmed me and I plan on reading Foer's second novel sometime in the near future.