The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

#4/2011:


The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

I actually finished this book about a week ago, but I've been a real slacker lately. This book, like my last few, was a Christmas present, this time from my friend Val. The narrator is a dog and, as the title suggests, there are a lot of references made to auto racing. I'm not necessarily a dog person and I'm definitely not a NASCAR person, but the plot line is actually about the relationship between a father (dog owner and professional driver) and his daughter after the death of his wife/her mother. The racing references have to do with the way drivers try to predict loss of control and how they handle it when it occurs and how that kind of driving zen applies to our lack of control in life. It's a book about family and relationships and philosophy on life actually written by a man instead of your typical female writer, and I think that brought an interesting spin on the genre. It took me a little bit to get into the story, what with the dog's eye view, but in the end I liked it.

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

#3/2011:


The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

Alex and Jasmin gave me this book for Christmas, and I was really looking forward to reading it since I had enjoyed The Lovely Bones. This book is probably even more shocking and emotionally challenging than that one was. The main character kills her mother right there in the very first sentence of the book! The rest of the book is just the 24 hours following the murder combined with a series of flashbacks and remembrances that tell the story of a very complicated mother-daughter-father relationship.

On the back cover of my copy is a quote from a book reviewer at the Philadelphia Inquirer which kept running through my mind as I was reading because I think it really captures the feel of the book: "Alice Sebold may be our true heiress to Edgar Allan Poe [Sebold actually references Poe at one point in the book], a novelist who dares to write honestly about the banality of violence, and about how it lives next door to normalcy, in a mist."

A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie

#2/2011:


A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie

It usually only takes me a couple of days to get through an Agatha Christie mystery, but Kate's birthday and other chaos really slowed me down this time.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Book #1:


The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett

A book about a book thief and the rare book dealer who tracks him down - the perfect way to start the year!

A New Start in a New Year

I'm not really a New Year's Resolution maker, generally speaking. I think they're a waste of time because I forget about them and don't follow through, or they're so easy and obvious that I never need anything as formal as a resolution in the first place to get them done. So why stress myself out like that?

But I'm going to give this here blog the old college try again. I like it, I like it a lot, but I got bogged down feeling like I needed to write a book about every book. I'm starting afresh with a new agenda to just record every book I read this year because I want to see how many books I actually do read in a year. I also like having a place to keep lists of books I want to get and what I already have on hand to read next. Yeah, I'm all kinds of type A like that; what are you looking at me like that for?! Don't roll your eyes.

I might make a few comments (or long rants) on a book now and then if something particularly engages me, but I'm not going to make myself nuts doing it. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason why anyone else would ever want to or bother to read this blog (not that anyone is at the moment since it died months ago), so you can all just go back to doing whatever it was you were doing.

Ah, the relief.

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

Agatha wrote The Body in the Library almost as a joke. She acknowledged that finding "a body in the library" was an English detective novel cliche and this book was her amusing take on it. She name checks herself when a small boy says he has lots of detective novelists' autographs and her name is among those he lists. And although Miss Marple is the star of the novel and the solver of the mystery, there are as many detectives here as there are suspects, with Sir Henry Clithering (another recurrent character) helping out in addition to the three different official police detectives. This is only Miss Marple's second appearance in a Christie novel, her first being The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, 12 years earlier.

Thinking in Pictures: My Life With Autism by Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin is about 6 years older than my parents. She was diagnosed with autism in 1950 (after a previous false diagnosis of brain damage) at a time when most autistics would have been institutionalized. On the very high functioning end of the autism spectrum and given early special education opportunities and tutoring at the insistence of her mother, Grandin is now a professor with a Ph.D. in animal science, an inventor, an entrepreneur, a best-selling author, a public speaker, and an autism and animal welfare advocate. She is most famous not only for being the designer of one third of all the livestock-handling facilities currently in use in this country, but also for being one of the first adults to be able to speak out about what it is like to have autism, how autistics see the world, and why autistic people behave the way they do.

In Thinking in Pictures, Grandin writes about all of these issues and about how her autism has helped her to see the world from "a cow's eye view" to be able to design better, more humane ways of handling animals in slaughterhouses and veterinary procedures. She says she thinks visually and can run images in her mind like watching a movie, which helps her to invent machines and facilities without having to build models or test them repeatedly in real life. She says she feels she can understand better than neurotypical people how animals think and feel and how they perceive the world around them, so she strives to find ways to make their experiences with humans less fear-ridden and more peaceful. She also gives a lot of advice about how normal people who work or live with autistics can help them reach their potential and feel calmer and more secure, which in turn may help them to interact more on an interpersonal level.

I highly recommend this book to all my teacher friends who increasingly come into contact with students on the spectrum. It's fascinating to read Grandin's personal accounts of how she felt as a child and feels as an adult with autism and how she perceives the world, in addition to her reports of the experiences of other people she has met who have different forms of autism. I would also recommend it to my cousin who is a veterinarian, or anyone who is interested in animal welfare, because even I thought the stuff she writes about animals' minds and their handling was pretty fascinating.

Additionally, far from being dry or overly erudite, Thinking in Pictures is a fairly quick and easy read. Apparently, Grandin has her writing heavily proofread for readability and clarity and it is remarkably approachable. She often uses computer metaphors to describe her thinking, but thankfully her book never reads like stereo instructions. It's an incredibly engrossing, very human (and bovine!), fascinating story she has to tell.