Ok. I know I’m incredibly late to the party on this one. And I really liked it. Until the last chapter. I won’t give it away, but for those 8 million people who have already read it: Seriously? No he just did not!

Odd Thomas is a 20 year old with the ability to see dead people. He feels compelled to help these ghosts get justice, or finish their business, or just have the courage to let go of this world and move on. He gets the sense something really, really bad is about to happen in his little town. And he has to stop it.

The book is also peopled with really interesting characters that keeps it from being only creepy. Now it’s creepy and funny. Odd has a friend that is a 400 pound man with 6 fingers on one hand. His boss has a fascination with Elvis she picked up about 25 years after the King’s death. His dad only dates teenagers. His girlfriend has interesting theories about the hereafter.

Plus, the cover of the paperback is purple. I love purple.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll say this: this was written by my friend’s aunt’s friend. Did you get that? Does that make me a biased audience? I think it may be enough degrees of separation to make it okay to tell you how much fun this book is.

It’s labeled YA, I think. I would qualify that to say “Younger YA”. Like maybe 11-14. I just say that because some of the working was a little sing-song-y I thought for older readers.

A “savvy” is like a super power, kind of. And everyone in the Beaumont family (except dad) gets their savvy on their 13 birthday. And until they can control it, life can be pretty dangerous for those around them. Mississippi “Mibs” Beaumont’s savvy is the ability to hear ink on skin telling her what the wearer is thinking. Tattoos are especially helpful in this respect, but even ballpoint ink will work.

She has a really amazing adventure on her 13 birthday because she erroneously thought her savvy was the ability to wake things up. Her dad is lying in a hospital bed 90 miles away in a coma and she wants to get to him to wake him up. I won’t give it away, but the adventure includes a pink school bus and a greasy diner filled with bikers and truckers and all their attendant tattoos.

When this book came out, there was another book about Madame X: a novel called I Am Madame X. That may be why I thought this was also a novel. Luckily for me, it turned out to be non-fiction just when that was exactly what I wanted.

It is the story of John Singer Sargent’s rise in the Paris art world and how he finagled to paint Amelie Gautreau, who was then the Paris fashion world’s It girl. He took a risk with the painting and it seriously damaged Madame Gautreau’s social standing and put his own career on hold.

I had to get a book of Sargent paintings from the library so I could see the paintings that were discussed, but not printed in the book. Mike thought it was hilarious that I would read 5 pages, then stop and lug out the giant art book and find a picture to look at, then go back to my book.

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list.

The instructions:
Look at the list and:
Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read
Underline the books you LOVE.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. 1984 – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92.The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I really liked Snow Falling on Cedars. I couldn’t get into East of the Mountains. I really, really liked this book.

It’s written in the first person, and I kept forgetting that it wasn’t autobiographical. This wasn’t a bad thing. It seemed really real.

Neil Countryman met John William Barry in 1972 at a high school track meet. They became friends even though John William was increasingly strange. He drops out of college to become a hermit in the woods. Only Neil knows where and how he lives. There’s more to it, but I don’t want to give it away. It’s told in snippets that bounce around in time, but it’s never hard to figure out when a particular story takes place. It unfolds beautifully, and raises some interesting questions about when you should honor your friend’s wishes and when you should do what you think is right.

Time to remember the stuff I read in June.

Books read: 11
Pages read: 3052 (What! I went on vacation.)
Library books: 6
Shelf-sitters read: 4
Borrowed books: 1
Non-fiction: 4
Classics: 3
Mysteries: 3
Female authors: 5
Male authors: 6 (7 if you count the 2 who wrote The Monster of Florence)

Books I didn’t blog about (mostly out of laziness):
Cat O’ Nine Tales by Jeffrey Archer
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Howard’s End by E. M. Forster
The Rough Guide to Classic Novels by Simon Mason
Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich.

What is it with the Monster books all of a sudden?

Well, this one is quite a bit different from the last one. For one it’s fiction. And there’s an actual monster. Dead, but still…

Wilhelmina Upton is returning to her upstate New York home town of Templeton in disgrace. She’s 28, unmarried, pregnant by her PhD graduate school professor, and about to get kicked out of Stanford for trying to run over the professor’s wife with a plane. Her best friend, back in San Francisco, has recently been diagnosed with Lupus. And her mom drops the bomb that Willie isn’t the product of a hippie commune, she is the daughter of a Templeton man who doesn’t know he’s the father. She gives her a clue and tells her to figure it out for herself.

The day she gets back to Templeton, a man in a row boat finds the corpse of the Lake Glimmerglass monster floating on the lake. Many people have glimpsed the monster, but mostly it was thought to be a myth. The media and science frenzy over the monster parallels Willie’s research into her past and the drama in her life.

This book made it impossible for me to go to sleep at night. I had to switch to some other book to get any rest.

I really couldn’t tell you why I decided to order this book from the library. I don’t usually go in for true crime, but I guess I had a bug up my butt that day. Or it could have been the cover. I could have been waving my coverslut flag that day, and was attracted to the picture of the statue on the front. Who knows. Anyway, I got the first copy that came into the library, so I felt compelled to read it. And guess what? It was pretty good.

Here’s the lowdown. In the 70′s and 80′s a serial killer took out 14 people having sex in cars in the hills around Florence. Over the years, several people have been accused and/or convicted of being the Monster of Florence, but Preston and Spezi don’t believe any of them were the actual perp. They have their own theory for which they have been persecuted by Italian police because they dared to disagree with the going theory.

The main difference between this book and other “true crime” books, is that they still don’t have the actual killer. Most books in the true crime genre are written after the killer has been caught and convicted. Not so much, in this case.