Kevin Brockmeier's Brief History of the Dead is the first book I've ever "read" by listening to the audiobook. I downloaded it from the library, put it on my mp3 player and listened to it here and there. Not a bad experience, but I don't think it will ever replace really reading a book for me. As for the book itself, it presents a fascinating idea of the afterlife.
I read Nikita Lalwani's Gifted a few weeks ago and was a bit at a loss right away for the right description of it. The main character is a gifted girl in Wales, the daughter of Indian immigrants. It reminded me a bit of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (given the whole Indian-immigrants-trying-to-adjust-to-a-new-society thing) though I didn't like it as well. Not bad, just not as compelling a read.
I read two books about Africa last week. Robert D. Kaplan's Surrender or Starve which focuses on Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia and Howard W. French's A Continent for the Taking which focuses mainly on the Congo and Liberia. Both are part travelogue, part journalism, part history. Surrender or Starve was Kaplan's first book and while interesting and worth reading didn't seem as polished as his later work. It taught me a lot about the reasons for famine and conflict in the Horn of Africa. French's book focused more on conflict, coups, revenge, and other human-made disasters in West Africa.
True Notebooks is the account of time Mark Salzman spent teaching writing classes in a juvenile detention facility. Fascinating. Also interesting is how well this correlated with a journal article I had to read for class recently which was a case study of the tutor/tutee relationship between someone helping with literacy and an inmate.
Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits isn't a book I can do justice to in a few sentences. It takes place over decades, has fascinating characters, and has some weird things happen. At the core it's a book about the relationships within a family, but it's so much more.
Jayne Ann Krentz's Falling Awake was the romance I read for my Book Lust class. It's romantic suspense featuring lucid dreaming. Not bad actually. She's not the absolute most beautiful writer ever, but the writing didn't get in the way and the plot was interesting enough to keep me up reading.
After reading about the controversy surrounding Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls I needed to see it for myself. I got part 1 from the library last week and read it. It's nicely done and is indeed rather explicit. For anyone who hasn't heard of it, it's basically a pornographic graphic novel starring Alice (of Wonderland), Wendy (from Peter Pan) and Dorothy (Oz). I say pornographic only in that there's a lot of explicit sex and since it's a comic book the reader can't really skim over those sections without missing most of the story.
Getting Stoned with Savages is J. Maarten Troost's follow up to The Sex Lives of Cannibals. After returning to D.C. and getting normal jobs, Maarten and his girlfriend realized they want to be back in the South Pacific. This time they head to Vanuata and Fiji. Not quite as good as the first, but fun.
