jodiwilldare's reviews
1523 reviews

The sex isn’t what drove me nuts, it was Celeste and her all-encompassing, one-track-mindedness. It makes her boring as hell, and unbelievable too. Forget sympathetic or unlikable, these kinds of things don’t come into play here, because this character is about as realistic as a Barbie Doll. And the world she inhabits, Barbie's Dream Condo. I just don’t buy Celeste as an actual living, breathing human out in the world. At all. read more.

I was pretty tempted to dismiss Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. as one of those annoying, pointless books steeped in its own Brooklynness and thus published because if there’s anything Brooklyn writers like to read and heap with effusive praise, it’s a book about Brooklyn. Barf.

As a citizen of the Internet and an avid-reader, I’ve made a conscious choice to actively avoid the whole Brooklyn-literati thing. It’s entirely too twee and self-congratulatory for my midwest sensibilities. Also, I have yet to be wholly impressed by anything it has produced. Read more.

The Rovaniemi family of Michigan are the stars of Hannah Pylväinen’s “novel” We Sinner. What’s with the quotes? They might have slapped the label novel on the cover of this one but it sure as hell doesn’t read like a novel. It reads like a series of interconnected short stories, with various members of the Rovaniemi family (and once a friend of the family) taking over the narration duties. Read More

&Sons by David Gilbert is the kind of book that when you’re in the thick of it, you dig immensely. The writing is great and the characters engaging, what’s not to like? It’s once you close the cover and think for a minute or two about the book that the cracks in the facade begin to show. Read more.

The best thing about reading Touch & Go by Lisa Gardner is that it made me appreciate how damn good Gillian Flynn and Gone Girl are.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not much a genre reader. But since this year is all about reading outside my comfort zone, when Gardner’s mystery was offered up as our next Rock & Roll Bookclub read I retracted my initial farty-noise dismissal and agreed to give it a go. Read more.

Stephen King’s 11/22/63 probably could have been a cute, if cliched, little time travel romance novel if it’d clocked in at about 400 pages. Sadly, it comes in at over 800 pages turning it into an annoying, insufferable doorstop of frustration. read more.

The further away I get from The Golem and The Jinni by Helene Wecker, the more I like it. When I first finished the book a month or so ago I was all “eh, that was pretty.” And make no mistake it is pretty. It’s a pretty, pretty physical book and a pretty, pretty story of two beings finding each other in turn-of-the-century New York. Do we still call the 1900s the turn of the century when we just had one a dozenish years ago? Read more.

This was my first Dan Brown experience, brought about by a member of my Rock & Roll Bookclub who has spent much time studying Dante’s Divine Comedy, the book at the middle of Inferno.

With any luck this will be my last Dan Brown experience because listening to this book (I couldn’t bring myself to read it) tried all my patience, a virtue I do not have much of. I’ve also come to the conclusion, after reading this book, that I just don’t like thrillers. They frustrate me. Read More.

There’s something a little lonely and alienating about being on the opposite side of popular public opinion. In this case, I’m talking being one of the few people who did not fall head-over-heels in love with Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

In fact, I wouldn’t even go so far as to say I like like Freedom. Though I’m pretty sure that I like it. If I were in a relationship with this novel, our Facebook status would be “it’s complicated.”


Franzen’s tale of suburban ennui centers around Patty and Walter Berglund, their relationship, and the people who orbit planet Berglund. Patty’s from suburban New York the black-sheep athlete in a family filled with politicians and artists. She leaves home to go and play basketball at the University of Minnesota and never looks back. In school she meets mysterious rocker Richard Katz and his earnest roommate, Walter.

After some romantic hokey pokey, Patty chooses Walter and the two marry, settle down in St. Paul and raise two children. After a few decades in Minnesota, the Berglunds pack up and move to DC where Walter, an allegedly good liberal and environmentalist, heads up the Cerulean Mountain Trust. While in the nation’s capital a lot of shit hits a lot of fans. Then some other stuff happens.
Really, when you have a book that encompasses the entire life (and in Walter’s case his father and grandfather’s lives) of a few characters, trying to pithily summarize it is nearly impossible. It’s a big book about everything and the kitchen sink. Had it been a slightly smaller book without the sink, I might have loved it.

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