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.”)

My head is full of France. I have lately finished Marie-Therese, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette’s Daughter by Susan Nagel, an engrossing book that tells of Marie-Therese’s life. In this fascinating and clearly well-researched account, Nagel brings the reader from before Madame Royale’s birth on through and after her death. The book illustrates her life as a child of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who, as one may have gathered from the recent movie depicting an interpretation of Marie Antoinette’s life, said at her daughter’s birth: “Poor little thing; you are not what they wanted, but we will love you nonetheless. A son would have belonged to the State; you shall be mine, and have all my care; you shall share in my happiness and soften my sorrows.”

I personally had not previously found much interest in the French Revolution and the events surrounding the Reign of Terror, but before I even reached Page 100 I was enthralled in the mysterious tales surrounding the time. The writing style flows comfortably and almost throughout the whole book, it tricked this reader into late nights with wide eyes and genuine sympathy. I could not put it down; indeed, I wouldn’t, even when others distractions sought my attention.

While I was at my grandfather’s house in between viewings, my mom and I were sitting on the big sofa that faces the TV. I had my book open and on my lap, but I wasn’t reading because I was soaking in family stories and tid bits of information about those who are related to me. She turned to me and asked what I was reading, then told me to describe what it was about and whether or not I thought she’d like it. Most of her reading tends towards romance paperbacks, so I told her she probably wouldn’t like this one. It’s “smart” fiction, I said, but I didn’t really mean that in an insulting way. It makes you think, wonder about possibilities; it made me want to separate the functions of my left and right brains and see what I could figure out about each.

The chapters in this book alternate between the Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (hence the title). In the first world, the narrator is a “Calutec” – a human data processor/encryption system. He works for the System, which as far as I could tell was a government agency, and he spends his time trying to avoid the Semiotics who work for the Factory and try to steal information from the Calutecs. The narrator is hired by a genius scientist who is experimenting on sound waves; he can remove sound from certain items (not least his granddaughter’s speech) and can enhance sound far beyond the realm of human tolerance. The narrator is asked to encrypt some data vital to the research so that the scientist’s findings cannot be misused.

Everything I read about this book before I read it promised a witty, beautifully styled text that advised the reader on how to, well, talk about books he hasn’t read, but also how to deal with social situations in which the reader finds himself having to lead intellectual discussions about a book he hasn’t read. The word I latched on to was “witty,” thinking this was going to be a serious joke book – extremely hilarious writing about a topic that needs real consideration. Like when humorists write about politics.

Instead, I found this to be an STB. No, that doesn’t mean “sexual transmitted book.” You see, books are mentioned throughout this book, as would make sense; the author gives comments on each book – whether he has not heard of the book (UB – unheard of book), books he has skimmed (SB), books he has heard about (HB), and books he has read but forgotten (FB). He then rates them. Well, I am going to call this an STB (slept-through book) with a rating of ++, which is the highest possible rating. I don’t want to imply that the book was boring; it wasn’t the book’s fault that I read it late into the night after having gotten very little sleep the night before. (Well, I suppose if you really think about it, it is the book’s fault for being so interesting that I didn’t want to put it down; however, I sort of feel that since the book gives advice on how to talk about books you haven’t read, I can rightly talk about this book which I only partially read.)

Most # books read in one month: June, October, and December (8 books)
Least # books read in one month: February and March (1 book)
Male Authors: 24
Female Authors: 14
Author Most Read: Patrick Süskind

My experience with NaNoWriMo this year reminded me of high school and, oddly enough, reading The Writing Life reminded me of NaNoWriMo. It’s not mutual, however; this book only reminded me of high school in the sense that I could imagine being required to read and analyze it on a high school level. Maybe it’s because Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood are both reading list titles here (though I was never required to read them), but I still found myself picking out phrases here and there that in my brain sounded like the clanking and clinking of doing dishes. Those were the sort of wincing noises I hear now while reading phrases and excerpts that “discussion” questions would have been based on. (They were never really discussion questions, were they? You could answer them quite simply in 2-3 sentences and being that they had right or wrong answers, there wasn’t much to discuss once someone got them right.)

Most # books read in one month: January and April (4 books)
Least # books read in one month: May and November (0 books)
Male Authors: 12
Female Authors: 10
Author Most Read: Anne Rice
31 books less than the following year