More Books! #10 - 22

I've been doing some reading this spring, but since I read some of these books a couple months ago, I can't remember too many details about them.

#10: You Suck by Christopher Moore
I think Moore is really intelligently funny. This one is about vampires in San Francisco.

#11: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
This trilogy of books totally deserves its Best Seller status. They are fun, exciting, thrilling, and really well written. The plots are complicated and layered, but Larsson keeps them under control. The characters are well-developed. My only complaint is that there are a lot of horrible sex crimes in them, and I'd prefer not to read so much of that.

#12: The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
I tore through this one even faster than the first.

#13: Cemetery Dance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
I really like the books by these two authors. They are thrillers with interesting (though absolutely unbelievable) plots and great characters. Special Agent Pendergast is a long-time favorite character who appears in this one.

#14: Fever Dream by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
This one felt rushed, like they'd often cheat to advance the plot by suddenly being in a new location and Agent Pendergast would explain to another character how he followed a clue to arrive there. Still fun to read -- if you're looking for excellent writing, you probably shouldn't look to genre novels in the first place :)

#15: The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Excellent novel about early civil rights-era relationships between those Southerners who employed black servants and the servants themselves. Not too upsetting for us sensitive types.

#16: Frankenstein: Dead and Alive by Dean Koontz
The third installment in this series of sci-fi thrillers. Frankenstein's monster is alive and well in modern times and is on a mission to destroy his creator! Fun, fast read.

#17: Jazz by Toni Morrison
Morrison is an awesome writer, but I felt ambiguous about this book. It left me kind of unhappy at the end. (Of course I also finished it on an annoying flight when I was exhausted -- possibly no book could have made feel happy at that point.) The main plot of this one revolves around a cheating husband who kills his mistress and makes his wife go crazy, so it's not a light-hearted read. I guess I'm in the mood for more light-heartedness right now.

#18: The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
How many times have I read this book? I first read it at about age 12, when our family got a used copy of it at a book exchange in my Dad's workplace. It's a gritty crime novel written in 1952 about a deputy sheriff who plays dumb to hide his inner sociopath. With this reading, I noticed multiple parallels to the TV character, Dexter Morgan, who I also love. They are both told by their fathers that they are sociopaths and that they can't ever live normal lives and have to hide in plain sight. Dexter pretends to be kind of wimpy, letting people walk all over him, while our deputy acts like a moron, talking mostly in cliches and pretending he just made them up. Like, "I've always believed that every cloud has a silver lining!" Once their respective fathers die, each man has to face new problems without his sociopathy mentor, and they struggle with it.

#19: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
A lovely novel that focuses much more on philosophy than action.

#20: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
A great little mystery novel told from the perspective of a 12-year old girl in NY in the 70s. I will definitely be reading this one again.

#21: Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
Excellent, hilarious and beautiful short stories. Moore is a great writer.

#22: The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
A big novel by the author of The Historian (about vampires!). I recommend both highly. In this one, a psychiatrist/artist unravels the breakdown of his artist patient. He traces the root of the problem all the way back to the 1870s and becomes far too enmeshed in his patient's life and relationships.

And I'm reading a bunch of books about babies, pregnancy, exercising while pregnant, baby name books, still working on War and Peace, and also devouring the third Stieg Larsson book.