Book #52: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Okay, this book was really, really, really awesome.

I went to check it out from the library this afternoon, and since I was waiting for the carpet cleaners to finish up at our apartment, I sat down to read for a few minutes. One and half hours later, I dragged myself home, where I sat for another hour and a half to finish the rest of my book. I felt so disoriented while waiting to get back to the rest of the book--I NEEDED to see what was happening next.

The premise of this book sounds so depressing--and it IS depressing. Two teenagers with terminal cancer fall in love with each other. The end. How much more sad can you get? But these two teenagers are so dry and realistic and sarcastic that it makes everything so much more bearable. They're tired of the pity and platitudes they get from everyone around them, and just want to live life like everyone else. But Gus has a fake leg and Hazel has an oxygen cart that she has to carry around with her everywhere, so they really can't. They make fun of their situation, even as they're struggling with it and dealing with the pain of it all, so there are so many funny and real moments in the book. I did, of course, tear up towards the end (no spoilers here), but that's pretty par for the course nowadays.

And of course, it's a YA novel, which makes it a quick read, which can only be a good thing. A+ on this one.

Book #51: Heaven is Here by Stephanie Nielson

I wasn't going to read this book. I've read NieNie's blog for years now and don't love it. I just keep going back to it out of habit and some curiosity, but her writing style annoys me (so many incomplete sentences and so much bad grammar--it's pathetic that it bugs me so much, but it does) and so does the fact that half of her posts are advertisements for people and products she loves (her cupcake shop, her photographer friends, etc.), which is nice for those people, but not really the reason why anyone checks her blog in the first place, right? For those of you who are totally out of the Mormon mommy blog loop, NieNie got in a plane accident four years ago and was severely burned over 80% of her body. A lot of her blog details her recovery and her journey back to normal life with her four (now five) kids, and her book does the same. I decided to check out the book after reading a few recommendations about it and I'm glad I did.

I checked this book out from the library (I was impressed that the Durham County Library had a copy) and powered through it just last night. I was totally absorbed in it, and it made me so sad at parts I got teary-eyed (but, then again, that's not a huge accomplishment nowadays--I cry at everything). I felt like the book filled in a lot of the gaps in NieNie's story that I've always wondered about and never really appreciated--how emotionally difficult it was for her after the crash, how it took her nearly three months to look at herself in the mirror, how hard it was for her to see her kids again and how terrified she was that they would reject her now that she looked so different. After the crash, she felt guilty for leaving her children like she did, terrified of dying during surgery, mortified/disgusted about how she looked. It was really eye-opening to read much more in-depth about her recovery, both physical and emotional, because you can't really get the full story from her blog (which she has a perfect right to keep to herself if she wants to). She doesn't shy away from talking about how hard it was and how long it took her to start getting back to normal, which I thought sounded so much more realistic than her description of her life pre-crash.

Several things: she must have had a really great co-author (slash editor) because it was soooo much better than her blog: totally coherent and flowing and grammatically correct (haha). Also, her entire extended family lives in Provo (as far as I can tell from the book), which makes half of my mind writhe with jealousy and half of it scream with incredulity. HOW can all nine of the kids in your family live in Provo? How is it that no one has moved away for jobs or school or anything? It just seems so foreign to me, having grown up with a similarly large extended family that reaches to every corner of the country. Sure, who WOULDN'T love to have everyone living in the same city and all of your kids and their cousins going to high school together? But how realistic is that? It almost bugs me that they have that amazing, perfect family situation, but on the other hand, I think she deserves and needs the family nearby with everything she's gone through.

Book #50: Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

Tommy sent me a list of books that the RAND faculty (apparently they also have a RAND grad school, which is strange to me since it's not associated with an actual university) compiled, called "Books that will change the way you think." Some of them looked more interesting than others, and this one looked the most interesting of all. I checked it out from the library here in SM and have been reading through it. It seems to me like the author is responding to some of Malcolm Gladwell's books and theories (he references Gladwell a lot, and is always disagreeing with him) and is pretty much making the point that the way we think about things, our common sense ideas about how things work, is generally wrong. He says again and again that we cannot rely on common sense to make big, public policy decisions, because common sense works well in everyday decisions that rule our personal lives, but it's not applicable on a global or governmental scale. And I'm pretty sure he's right, if that makes him feel any better. The funny and ironic thing is that Malcolm Gladwell markets his ideas as being totally against our normal ideas of common sense, and this guy is writing about them as if they ARE common sense and he's the one giving us the new, outlandish ideas.

The only thing about this book is that it's really not as engaging as other nonfiction books that I've read similar to this. The Tipping Point and Freakonomics are story-centered--they draw principles from specific people and experiments and are generally pretty narrative-based, which makes them incredibly interesting. This book is much more dry and not as focused on examples, which just means it's harder to get through and is probably why it's not as popular as Freakonomics was. All in all, a good read, but not one I'll be recommending to everyone I meet.

Also, this is my fiftieth book this year--halfway to my goal of 100! And it's only mid-August... haha I haven't read as much as I'd planned this summer. I've done much, much more than I'd planned, except for the reading. But I think I can still make it, depending on how crazy things are post-baby.

Book #49: The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear

Well, this is the last Maisie Dobbs novel I checked out from the library, so there will be a break from the Maisie Dobbs recounts for a while. But this was another book I thoroughly enjoyed. There were several things at the end of the mystery that it wasn't clear how Maisie discovered them, but I feel like that's how ALL mysteries have to be--the detective is always somewhat all-knowing and figures out things without really having the evidence to prove it (to the rest of us).

I really like how Maisie's personal life is intertwined with the mysteries, by the way. Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are completely professional beings, with no personal life whatsoever that we know of. In this book, Maisie finally gets into a relationship (!) that she seems excited about (and one that I definitely could get into) and her mentor dies after a long illness, and it's great to read about her dealing with those things along with the mysteries themselves.

Book #48: Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear

Maisie goes a little more in-depth in this book and gets more into the action. She gets knocked out by a bomb in the first scene of the book (spoiler alert!) and then ends up facing off with the bad guy at the end and beating him up (somewhat). That seemed very Sherlock Holmes of her (I love how Sherlock and Watson are always so fit and able to keep up/chase down their suspects, no matter how difficult it seems it should be) and I liked the change, since she never really has problems with actually being in DANGER while she's on the case. This seemed to make sense though.

And, completely unrelated to the book itself, I like the design of these covers, with the huge sans serif font with the title and author's name. It works very well, in my limited knowledge and opinion of design principles.

Book #47: An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear

Hooray for yet another Maisie Dobbs book! I don't have too much to add about this one, but I liked the plot of this one. It's different from the typical "whodunit" detective story, and it's difficult to figure out what's going on until later on in the story, so it was really enjoyable to read. Go Maisie.

Book #46: Austenland by Shannon Hale

This was 100% a total chick-flick in novel form. It took me about 2 hours to read and I knew exactly what was going to happen the whole way through. But it was fun and enjoyable all the same. The main character loves Pride and Prejudice and eventually gets to go to a resort-type place where you live as Jane Austen characters did, in a giant fancy house with servants and the whole shebang. You have to act like it's 1816 and everyone else does as well, so Jane, the main character, feels really self-conscious a lot of the time knowing that everyone's really pretending or acting and everyone actually belongs in the modern world. This type of vacation sounds like it would be really fun to do with a group of girlfriends instead of by yourself, though.

Spoiler alert! In the end, Jane ends up falling in (real) love with the Mr. Darcy character and he falls in (real) love with her and goes back to New York with her. Not totally unexpected, but it was a fun read for how much time I spent with it.

Side note: the author is Mormon, and lives in South Jordan. I could tell she was, simply because all the kissing scenes end up just being kissing scenes with no mention of going any farther, which is a nice change from most books of this type.

Book #45: Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear

This is the fourth book in the Maisie Dobbs series. For some reason, I'd thought that I missed the third one and that I was reading them out of order, but turns out this was the right one for me to read anyways. I checked out four of the Maisie Dobbs books from the library to read while we were at Aspen Grove (since I knew I was going to be unable to do most of the active activities), but I didn't even pull one of them out the whole time I was there! I was busy bonding with family and doing other fun things. So I read this right when I got back and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Maisie Dobbs is a great character--she's a very motivated, strong career woman. I expect her to be closer to my age--mid- to late-twenties--but she is really in her mid-thirties because of all of her experiences during WWI. I am a little bit bugged by how Maisie always seems to be perfectly in control and never unsure of herself, even when being pressured by the forceful male detectives of the day, for example. Even in the first book, during her first mystery, when she had little experience and little work, she was always able to squash the guys who came after her trying to pressure her into doing things they wanted her to. And how realistic is that? Maybe that's just me, because I don't think I'd be able to be perfectly on my game, 100% of the time, like Maisie is.

Also, I think it's interesting how Winspear has Maisie break up with her current boyfriend because she doesn't want to give up her work. She understands that if she gets married, her husband would eventually expect her to play the role of the doctor's wife and she doesn't think she can do that. I think it's great for Maisie to be so self-aware of what she thinks she can and cannot do, personally. But it's also a little sad to me that she doesn't even allow herself to become invested in relationships with people because she's so career-driven. Like I said, she's getting older and all the people she's close to are in their seventies (her father and her mentors)--soon, she's going to be all alone. It's sad that she feels like her work and a marriage are incompatible, because nowadays that's not the case. I hope she can figure that out and make things work with SOMEBODY eventually.