How Do I
Tara's Picks
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Atkinson, Kate Case Histories Fiction |
| The first book in Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series gives us a memorable and sensitive detective worth rooting for, and three intricate, involving mysteries for the price of one. Private detective Brodie (an ex-cop and ex-husband) is hired to investigate three separate cold cases—two disappearances and one murder. In turn, he is hired by a father to find his daughter’s killer, two squabbling sisters looking for their sister who disappeared when they were children, and a young woman looking for her runaway niece. All three cases create an overall portrait of family dysfunction and cruel fate. Although the mysteries and their resulting conclusions are satisfying in their own right, it is the very human and damaged characters that give this book its emotional heft and make it a mystery worth checking out, even for those who are not typically fans of the genre. Recommended July 2011 |
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Unferth, Deb Olin Revolution: The Year I Fell In Love and Went to Join the War Nonfiction |
| It's 1987, and college freshman Debbie is so enamored
of her new Marxist-quoting boyfriend George that she drops out of
college to travel with him to Central America. What follows is a tender,
honest, and painfully funny account of the idealism of youth and the
banality of revolutionary life. The author and her increasingly disappointed
boyfriend travel from Guatemala to El Salvador and finally to Nicaragua.
They occasionally take up odd “revolutionary jobs,” but mostly just
hang out and argue politics with fellow revolutionary tourists, and
occasionally suffer from food poisoning. Surprisingly warm and moving,
the story is less about the revolution of countries and more about
the slow, inevitable, and not totally revolutionary changes that take
place as memories become unreliable and adulthood starts to stake
its claim. Recommended June 2011 |
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| Rabin, Nathan My Year of Flops: One Man's Journey Deep Into the Heart of Cinematic Failure Nonfiction |
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| Nathan Rabin, a writer for the Onion's A.V. Club, has
long specialized in writing about the dregs of popular culture in
his columns "Direct-To-DVD Purgatory" and "My Year of Flops." The
book My Year of Flops: One Man's Journey Deep Into the Heart of
Cinematic Failure collects some of Rabin’s best writing, as he
chronicles cinematic failures past and present, covering classics
such as Ishtar, Howard the Duck, and Cleopatra,
as well as newer stinkers like Battlefield Earth, Gigli,
The Love Guru, and Elizabethtown. The point of the
book is not, however, to kick a bad movie while it’s down. The truly
great thing about Nathan Rabin’s writing is that he clearly loves
cinema, and so is not merely engaging in schadenfreude. He obviously
loves the films he gingerly pokes fun at, even while watching films
like the 2001 comedy Freddy Got Fingered, and gasping with
open-mouthed glee, ”how did this movie even get made, let alone released.”
This book is a true treat for lovers of awful cinema, or anyone who
has ever been giddy over what Rabin enthusiastically refers to as,
"toxic buzz, noxious press, and scathing reviews." Recommended May 2011 |
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Wertz, Julia Drinking at the Movies Graphic Nonfiction |
| Julia Wertz has a bad attitude and a knack for getting
into trouble, or, as she herself claims, “I attract chaos and people
who sleep in garbage.” Reading her comics is a cathartic experience.
She has an elegant way of stating all the witty (and filthy) observations
that most people are either too polite or too repressed to utter out
loud. Drinking at the Movies, Miss Wertz’s third foray into
graphic memoir, chronicles her big move from the dirty streets of
San Francisco, to the cleaner (but slightly meaner) streets of Brooklyn,
NY. Over the course of a year in New York, Julia lives in four different
sketchy apartments, works seven different dead-end jobs, engages in
all matter of debauchery, and tries to figure out the whole growing
up business. This is not your typical coming-of-age narrative however,
as there is no redemptive arc—the narrative happily starts and ends
with sloppy, drunken behavior, and throughout Julia remains the same
old curmudgeon and prankster we have grown to love. It's not a pretty
story, but it certainly is funny. Recommended March 2011 |
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Egan, Jennifer A Visit From the Goon Squad Fiction |
| "Time's a goon, right?" This is the question asked by
Bosco, a once incomparable punk rocker (think Iggy Pop), now obese,
depressed, and heavily medicated in his Soho apartment. In any other
novel, Bosco might be a main character, but in Egan's latest, he is
merely one of a number of casualties of that perplexing goon, time.
Other victims include womanizing music mogul Lou and his wayward children,
the failed marriage of ex-punks Bennie and Stephanie, Bennie's kleptomaniac
assistant Sasha, failed movie ingénue Kitty Jackson (a stand-in, I
imagine, for both Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears), and many other
friends, relatives, co-workers, and children. Time is kind to almost
no one in this novel, but it is still fascinating (if occasionally
painful) to discover how the characters travel from A to B, while
trying to keep dignity and humanity intact. Not unlike a great, dystopian
rock album, chapters in Goon Squad read like disparate songs,
until by the end, the themes of time, disappointment, aging, and addiction
come together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Recommended February 2011 |
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Wood, Brian Local Graphic Novel |
| These 12 graphic short stories follow the young wanderer
Megan McKeenan as she drifts across America and the extended childhood
of her twenties. Each story represents a year spent living in a different
city, as she takes on dead-end jobs, gets into unhealthy relationships,
deals with sketchy apartments and roommates, and finally finds her
own sense of peace and home. Recommended January 2011 |
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French, Tana Faithful Place Mystery |
| I’m not normally a fan of mysteries, but I’ve addictively
read each of Tana French’s three novels. This is the third in a series
of finely written books loosely linked to the Dublin Murder Squad,
and by my account, probably the best. Lieutenant Frank Mackey has
not returned to his rough, working class neighborhood of Faithful
Place for 22 years. After the supposed disappearance of his childhood
sweetheart Rosie, Frank had abandoned his toxic family to become an
undercover cop. Now, years later, Rosie’s remains have been found
and Frank must return to his neighborhood, and his family. Like French’s
first two novels, Faithful Place has less to do with the
central mystery than with memory, and the re-opening of long-forgotten
wounds. Readers looking for a quick, addictive read filled with dark
secrets and well-drawn, hardscrabble characters will probably read
this in a couple sittings. Recommended November 2010 |
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