213/300

If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans by Ann Coulter

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I read this book as part of the task, "read about a subject you disagree with." After seeing some people read books about adultery or polygamy or hookers, I really wish I went with one of those. At least they would've been entertaining.

Previous reviews, as well as Coulter herself, say that liberals don't like her because she is scary and right. Well this liberal doesn't like her because she is everything I dislike in humanity. She lumps all liberals together as one brainless blob of baby-murdering, America hating morons. There were several times I had to read the lines to someone else because I couldn't believe that someone would say things like that. Say things just to be shocking and say that liberals should cower before her. And what's even greater about this display of literary genius, it isn't even any new material. It's just a mash-up of all her other "witty" quotes.

I think it is interesting that people always describe her as being so amazing because she is a beautiful woman, yet she has no problems demeaning women and saying they shouldn't have the right to vote. I would quote some of her crazier stuff but I was all too happy to return this book to the library as soon as I was done with it.




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212/300

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I don't know what to review this just quite yet. Just needed to share that I feel really sad after reading it.



Okay, I had the night (well 4 hours of night after I finished reading) to sleep on it and here are my thoughts.

Obviously I was really excited for this release. If excited is even the word. So when it arrived on my Nook at about 12:20, I settled in for the night.



THERE FOLLOWING IS ONE BIG SPOILER SO PLEASE DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED!



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The story starts with Katniss walking around the destroyed remains of her District, #12. Eventually they take her back to her new home, District 13. This new district (where rebels had been running the place since the Dark Days) is much like life under the Capitol, where everyone has a schedule, and a restricted amount of food to eat.



We are told from the beginning that the leaders (Plutarch Heavensbee, the Head Gamemaker at the time of the Quarter Quell and one of the leaders of the rebel force, and Alma Coin, the president of district 13) want Katniss to be the Mockingjay, the symbol of the rebellion. I was going to mention Heavensbee's assistant as well but I realized I couldn't even remember her name, since I feel like she played a large part at the beginning but then we never hear about her again. Haymitch plays a role, too, in the same confusing way him and Katniss often have a love/hate relationship. After seeing Peeta on Capitol propaganda, Katniss realizes that there cannot be a ceasefire and she must be the voice of the rebels.



There is a lot of time spent filming propaganda pieces to cut into the Capitols programming. Eventually, Katniss realizes she needs Peeta to keep going. So Gale and others go to the Capitol to find him and when they bring him back, they discover he has been brainwashed by the Capitol to hate Katniss and want to kill her. For a while, I was thinking Peeta might be dead and that this was just some kind of mutt version of him.



Katniss eventually leads the team (Gale, a semi-deranged Peeta, the new and likeable Boggs, Finnick, and other newbies) on a (unbeknownst to the team) mission to kill President Snow.



I am not going to go into too much detail here about the ending except that it was incredibly depressing. I thought the climax was strange in that they just kind of wrote Katniss off in the end as being a but nutty. I felt like there was a lot more potential there. I thought the stuff with President Snow was rather anti-climactic. I did not feel satisfied about the resolution of the relationship with Gale. I am annoyed at the little mention of Madge and her family and how that ended up. At first I thought the stuff with Peeta was glossed over too quickly (he DID try to kill her after all) but after I thought about it more, I was okay with it.



Maybe the most disturbing thing was how depressed Katniss was for most of it. Not that she shouldn't be. But God, she never seems to catch a break. And nothing truly ever seems to be okay.



Overall, I can't be disappointed in the way Collins blurs the lines between good and evil. And if it was a bad book, I doubt I would have stayed up all night reading it. But I am a little bummed. After reading some of the theories before the release of the book (namely that Madge's mother was the actual Mockingjay) I was a little upset that it didn't take that direction. Ultimately, a happy ending was not possible so I guess this was the closest thing. I am still digesting a lot of it and maybe my rating will change or I will need to add more. But now I just feel sad about it. Which I guess means it was an amazing book.



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211/300

Catching Fire reread

210/300

The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I love me some Marian Keyes. This book was most like This Charming Man - a good read with some light points, but shadowed by heavier ones. The book starts as a countdown of days and is narrated by a type of spirit. Much like TCM, you didn't really know exactly what was going on with the characters until a good couple hundred pages in.



The spirit winds up at 66 Starr Street, a building whose residents eventually have lives that entertwine. Lydia, the cab driver, is not very likeable. She lives with 2 Polish men and goes out of her way to make her roommates miserable. I didn't really think her backstory made up for as terrible as she was, although you could see why she was angry.



Jemima is an old woman who lives alone with her dog, until her grown foster son, Fionn comes to live with her. Somehow Fionn seems to fall instantly in love with every woman he comes into contact with.



Katie is just turning 40 and her boyfriend, Conall does not give her the respect she deserves. Her friends and family despise him and his flashiness.



Matt and Maeve are a married couple who appear to be in a boring routine in their life.



I found some of the stories of forgiveness to be a little far fetched, but I still love what Keyes has to offer.



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209/300

Hunger Games - listened to on audio

208/300

Deception: An Alex Delaware Novel by Jonathan Kellerman




This was a standard, enjoyable Delaware/Sturgis mystery. A young school teacher is found dead in a tub of dry ice. A video is found saying that if anything happens to her, here is who did it. I thought this was the weak part of the story. Scandal and other deaths ensue. Everything you would expect.



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207/300

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was an enjoyable, funny read. I thought it was far better than Russell Brand's book. I don't know too much about Silverman's career but I liked that she could mock herself and I thought her arguments with her editors were funny. It wasn't, for the most part, laugh out loud funny, but it was decent.



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206/300

Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I read this book to do a comparison of a movie to a book. While the movie is no display of cinematic genius, it was better than the book. At least the main character in the movie can come off as a little cute, and hard on her luck because she just lost her job. In the book, she is a completely dispicable character, that just drove me crazy. She has no morals, no sense of responsibility and is just extremely unlikeable.

In the book, the bank manager was far too easy on her. At least in the movie he treated her like the imbecile that she was.

The love story was different in both situations, too. In the book the love interest was a jerk to her much of the time. In the movie, he was her boss and she was the one who hurt him.

Overall, I didn't love either.

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205/300

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I hated this style. Really kind of hated it. It was one big foreshadow. Like, "It all seemed like it would be okay until that fateful day we went on the trip....So let me tell you about the day we went on the trip...The day we went on the trip started out like any other." So annoying.

I thought the premise of the story was great, but that the book never was really about the premise. Instead, it felt like it was about the annoying relationships between annoying people. Tommy seemed nutty and daft, while Ruth just seemed nasty. So to have the whole book really be about Kathy (the narrator)'s relationships with them bored me to death. I would have much preferred to learn about the meat and potatoes of the carers and donators than these annoying relationships.

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204/300

One Day by David Nicholls

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Wow, what a downer. It took me 200 pages to even get into this book because I hated Dexter so much and didn't really understand why Emma was keeping him around. Then they FINALLY get together, which I knew would happen since I saw someone review that the ending is predictable. That part of the ending maybe, but all of a sudden, BAM! Emma gets hit by a car and she is dead. What the heck?? What a downer.

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203/300

Night of Many Dreams: A Novel by Gail Tsukiyama

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book was the story of two sisters, their mother, their aunt, and their cook and involves forceful immigration and immigration by choice. I thought it was just ok. I didn't find myself caring about the characters too much, and just found most of it boring.

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202/300

Fly Away Home: A Novel by Jennifer Weiner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I love Jennifer Weiner, and this book is no exception. I liked it far more than Best Friends Forever. In fact, I began reading this in a bookstore and didn't want to stop. Sylvie used to be a lawyer, and now she is merely a politician's wife. When she finds out on the news that her husband has been cheating on her, her world is turned upside down and she needs to find a new normal. The narration rotates between her and her two daughters: Diana, a cold ER nurse with a secret of her own and Lizzie, a recovering addict.Some of the characters frustrated me at times (Lizzie, in her relationship for one), and I never really wound up liking Diana but by book's end I felt I could understand her a little more. Overall, I am glad to see Weiner is back.

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201/300

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


As I have mentioned before, any story about the Holocaust really interests me. It is amazing to see what disgusting travesties people are capable of, but also how people will risk it all for human kind.

The story is about a zoo in Poland that is destroyed in World War II. The zookeeper and his wife hide refugees they call "guests" in the zoos many cages, houses, etc., to keep them safe from the Nazis. While a great story of what people are willing to do for others, I found the book to be dreadfully boring. I really got in to the last 75 or so pages, probably because I was excited to almost be done with it, but also because I thought it got a little more interesting.

I don't know if I have an early copy of the book or something, but I was SO turned off that when I went to read the jacket (I had already picked up a copy somewhere along the way) the very first word of the second paragraph is "drawinag" instead of drawing. I mean, really? On the book jacket?!

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200/200

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I liked this book more than I thought I would. I am not a memoir person at all, but it did keep me interested. However, the problem I had with the book was the main character/author herself. For some reason, she drove me nuts! Maybe it was within the first couple pages as she complained about only making $82,000 (in 1990's dollars) to write about free fancy meals. In those same pages she talks about the all the reasons she does not want the job at the NY Times. Even though she sabotages her interview, she is just SO good that they hire her anyway. Poor you.So her family moves to NY and she begins to be her own person by going against the grain of old critics and the Times and weathers complaints. In order to remain incognito, she disguises herself with wigs, makeup, clothes, etc. But that's not all. When she dresses up as someone, she also takes on their personalities. To me, this seemed like a thinly veiled excuse to act like a complete bitch (or insert other adjective depending on the persona). The fact that she just morphed into this new person was so cheesy to me. I also found her son to be extremely precocious, saying things like, 'I wouldn't want to eat at a super expensive restaurant every day. Then it wouldn't be special anymore. 'In the end, it was interesting and she was a good storyteller. But I was left wondering how many times one can eat a sexually described serving of foie gras without becoming morbidly obese.

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199/200

Secrets to Happiness: A Novel by Sarah Dunn

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book is full of shallow, annoying characters that you just don't even want to see succeed. Throw in a needy dog and a few BJ's and you've got yourself a novel. I was disappointed.

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198/200

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I'm still not entirely sure whether I should give this book 2 stars or 3. I listened to it as an audiobook, and the one main impression that I got from that was that the female had a really melifilous (sp?) voice that I truly enjoyed listening to. I wish she spoke more. I think the title of the book is rather misleading. Although Oscar (whose last name is not even Wao) does have a short life, I think it was far from wondrous. In fact, nothing really happened to him at all except for his tragic end. The meat and potatoes of the story is actually Oscar's family. The problem may have been with me because it was through an audio book but I had a hard time keeping track of time periods and characters since Diaz jumps through time several times. Oscar's mom is an extremely unlikeable character, although in time you begin to understand her a little. I still don't really get why she was so awful to her kids. I liked Oscar's sister, Lola, the most, although that isn't really saying much as none of the character's were all that likable. The narrator himself seemed like a jerk. The language of the book was really harsh, and I found it frustrating to have so many things said in Spanish without a translation. Worst of all, I thought Oscar's demise was pathetic. Truly pathetic. I don't know what he was attempting to accomplish at the end, and the way he died was just silly. The way he was threatening the goons, I thought he had some kind of plan when really it was just an anti-climactic stall tactic.

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