I’ve been reading this book for nearly a year and a half. You know those books, usually fiction or memoir, that you pick up which ring so true in your life that you can’t put it down while at the same time you don’t want to pick it up? It’s just too much. Something about it makes you sad, you cry at every other chapter, there’s some kind of emotional involvement that you can’t avoid. Wild Mind didn’t create such sadness for me; it created frustration. I wanted to get through Goldberg’s writing memoir, I wanted to see what hint towards better writing she’d throw out next, but this book guided me through a year of discovering my purpose in writing, and it wasn’t until I graduated the course that I could finish the last fifty pages or so and move on to whatever’s next.

I recommend all writers find a book like this, one that doesn’t so much tell them why they write, but reminds them in a way they can’t quite explain. One that helps them learn how to embrace the skills they possess and utilize them positively. This book is not just a writer’s prompt book, but it’s not just a writer’s memoir. Goldberg is not mouthing off everything she does to write and telling you to do the exact same; she’s encouraging you to find your own way as she had to, showing you how she found her way and which experiences influenced her, and teaching you to find those guides in your life.

Eoin Colfer gained his fame by writing the popular series Artemis Fowl about a twelve year old criminal mastermind. He’s written several other non-series books including The Wish List, about a teenage girl named Meg Finn who is killed and must help someone she attempted to rob in order to find her place in Heaven, and Half Moon Investigations, a non-fantasy novel about a 12 year old who is an online graduate of a private detective academy. Most recently, Colfer has released an authorized addition to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy” called And Another Thing…

Despite the general appeal of all his other books (which I’ve been thinking of perusing anyway), Airman was the first that really grabbed my attention and had me thirsting for more. Conor Broekhart was born in a hot air balloon while it was being shot down by unseen enemies. It would seem that the child was born for flight and adventure, and the novel delivers both well and equally. Under the supervision of a Frenchman who is friend to his father and king, Conor learns to fight and invent with the freedom of science at a very young age. It would seem that life is too good to be true: He has his mother, the scientist, his father, the fighter, and his Princess Isabella, who never really comes into her own character, but is nevertheless necessary as a part of Conor’s life. But, as with most stories set in these worlds, there is also the king’s Marshall, Bonvilain, who is plotting to take the throne and won’t let anyone, not even a young inventor, get in his way.

This book was written either by someone who really loved Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia and found great inspiration from those and other magical books when he decided to write this, someone who really hated Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia and decided to show the world how ridiculously easy it is to write a magical adventure book, or doesn’t really care one way or the other and wanted to make a pretty penny because those books are popular and someone might pick it up and not care that it’s annoyingly similar. No, really, without knowing much background about the author or his motivations for the book (and I’m too lazy to look into it, feel free to do the research for me and comment :P), it’s too similar to not be intentional one way or the other. I just can’t tell if it’s a tribute or mockery.

Working in used books with a strict trade-in policy, I don’t get much exposure to general fiction that comes out in hardcover. We generally only take the already popular authors, the ones that are sworn to sell (Patterson, Hooper, Balogh, whatever), so when I saw this on the shelf I thought it would be a nice change of pace. Me? Read a new hardback book? It’s usually unheard of. Lately I’ve been into magical tales of wonder and adventure, but primarily kids’ magical tales of wonder and adventure; The Magicians appeared to jump out at me as something that might get me back into adult reading. (Not that there’s anything wrong with kids reading, and I plan to do a lot of it presently, but every so often you do miss seeing the word ‘fuck’ in print, I’m not going to lie.)

All right, I won’t lie. The book started off really slowly, and I admit I wanted to put it down several times. It got to the point, even, where I just wanted to set it aside alltogether, thinking that if it wasn’t going to pick up the pace that I didn’t really want to spend precious novel-planning time reading it. I’m very glad that I continued, though, to read what turned out to be a spectacularly written composition about love, longing, and loss.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier may be one of those books you’ve seen a lot, perhaps you’ve read something about it here and there, seen it mentioned, but you never really thought to pick it up. Perhaps it’s because it was shelved in the Gothic Romance section of your bookstore, right before Georgette Heyer and Barbara Michaels. You thought, well, it’s probably not my thing, so I’m not going to bother with it. Instead I’ll continue through life hearing references to it, and shrugging. At least that’s what I thought.

By all accounts and appearances, Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks should be a beautifully received masterpiece about the plauge in 17th century England. In a small Derbyshire village, residents begin to die from this horrid disease, described in such detail as to make the reader fully aware of the devastation. Michael Mompellion, the rector, pursues a plan to shut off all communication outside the village, save the slight contact needed for gaining of supplies and food for life, to thus inhibit the infection of surrounding villages with this plague. Some disagree.

The Bradfords, for example, flee as soon as possible; this wealthy family with plenty of resource to get away from the sickness, leaves all slaves to die in the shadow of the plague while they seek refuge in safer parts. The difference between class is stark in this novel; those “lower” beings, according to the Bradfords, are compassionate, caring, and strong, while the Bradfords appear weak, spoiled, and cold. It can’t just be a matter of upbringing, for while the only other wealthy characters in this book are compassionate through their own grave misfortunes, the poor can be just as heartless.

I cannot lie that the spine of this book is precisely what drew my attention to it. I have never been “ashamed” that I judge books by their covers – that is to say, I buy books based on their covers. Once read, the cover has little to do with my opinion, though I may make commentary on the appropriateness of it. I also cannot say that I am usually disappointed by my selection; books that look like [old] books are generally about books, or other literary things, and I tend to enjoy those. The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox was no exception.

This is one of those books you’ll want to set aside some time to read, not only because it’s very long, but because it’s so extremely well written that you won’t want to set it down. Ever. Not even to work. Not even to do daily tasks. I found myself carrying this book around with me everywhere I went, bumping into things and people on the way. Unsmartly, I read while waiting for red lights to turn. When I was out of the house, I visited bookstores just to pile through a chapter or two while I had some time to spare (a book of this size would not fit in the purse I was carrying around this month). Rarely does a book capture me so much as to distract me from everything, but this book did. I wanted to know about Edward, his motivations, why he killed the red-haired man and then went for oysters (this is not a spoiler; it’s the first line in the book).

Set in 1919 in Siberia, The People’s Act of Love by James Meek takes place at the end of a war. Yazyk is host to a gorup of Czech soldiers who only want to go home and a Christian sect that exercises castration as a way to become closer to God. Balashov, the leader of the Christian sect, has secrets of his own involving a widow, Anna Petrovna, who lives among these groups with her young son. Mutz, one of the Czech soliders who longs for home and yearns to get his wish, is in love with her.

Wandering through the cold and running, he says, from a cannibal called The Mohican, Samarin finds himself in Yazyk. With him he brings death; the local shaman’s body is found shortly after his arrival. He is suspected and locked up to await his trial. It is during his defense that the reader learns of his daring escape from The White Garden, a prison camp, with The Mohican under the understanding that The Mohican merely took Samarin along for sustenance.

In The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Amy Tan draws the heartbreaking, complex picture of the relationship between Ruth Young, the middle-aged Chinese-American daughter of LuLing. LuLing’s story is woven into Ruth’s life just as quickly and mercilessly as it is threaded into the reader’s life. It is a sad tale involving dragon bones, World War II China, love, death, and acceptance. Ruth assists in the writing of self-help books; on top of her problems with the authors she helps, she is increasingly finding difficulty with her home situation – Art, her boyfriend, is a divorcee with two daughters, and her struggle to understand her mother’s words is apparent.

LuLing has given her a chance to understand her, however; Ruth receives a diary of sorts describing – well, she isn’t sure. She holds on to it for a long time as her Chinese is terrible, and it’s not until she finally submits it to an expert to translate that she realizes LuLing’s signs of Alzheimer’s aren’t quite as bad as she suspects. She discovers with the reader the truth of LuLing’s past, the significance of ghosts, and the beauty that can come from healing past scars.

This was my first Norman Mailer book. Popping in and out of book forums around the Internet I discovered that a lot of people hold this author in very high regard. Some people even have related handles, and to create an alias from a living person (well, living at the time) must imply a certain degree of admiration. So I decided I would read a Norman Mailer book sometime, and it was when I was trying to decide which one looked interesting to me that The Castle in the Forest came out. Enamored as I am with European history of that era, the contest ended. This was going to be my first Norman Mailer book. It would decide whether or not I’d continue on to another one.

This is not for the weak of heart. The Book Thief, as I said in my review, may be too painful a work to read especially for those who find the events to be too close for comfort. This, however, is a vivid illustration of an Austrian family ridden with incest, hatred, fear, apprehension, manipulation, and above all, a mother’s love. This is not just the story of Adolf Hitler’s childhood; it is an explanation of the seeds which created his evil and a portrait of the mother and father who nourished him.

Once upon the time there was a princess who believed in fairies but found that fairies were not often mentioned in fairy tales. She was distraught at this fact, so she decided to spend her spring and summer months plowing through her fairy tale books in search of fairy interpretations. (It seemed a natural time to do so, as she’d always associated the end of spring with the coming of the fairies, so it was as though they were visiting her personally, egging her on through this journey.)

First she picked up George MacDonald’s Complete Fairy Tales, a collection which she had owned for quite some time but hadn’t yet read. She enjoyed his other books, Phantastes and Lilith, to the point that when someone came looking for George MacDonald books in her bookstore, she was so delighted as to regale them with her experiences in reading his books. Suffice to say, they were not always pleased to hear her talk, but she was still consistently excited whenever someone came looking for his books (though her bookstore didn’t have any copies, ever, possibly attributed to the fact that once someone read George MacDonald, that someone would not want to give up the book). (On another note, every time she mentioned her love of George MacDonald’s books, someone would say “Do you mean adventure writer George MacDonald Fraser?” to which she most certainly replied “No.”)