jodiwilldare's reviews
1523 reviews

All About Lulu is so good that I am willing to forgive its author, Jonathan Evison, for being a little coy with the reader. This is saying a lot. Next to adverbs and Chuck Klosterman, coyness is my biggest literary pet peeve. But what Lulu lacks in upfrontness she sure makes up for in humor, emotion, and, as odd as it sounds, honesty.

All About Lulu is less about Lulu and more about William Miller (not the “Almost Famous” William Miller but nearly as nerdy) and his obsession with her. Lulu is Will’s stepsister who joins Will’s family after his mom dies and his body-building dad marries Willow, Lulu’s mom. Will was having a tough go of it after losing his mom, his only ally in the family, until Lulu comes along.

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I can’t remember if this is the year that we proclaim the death of the novel or if it’s the short story that’s supposed to be dead. Maybe it’s fiction in general, or publishing specifically. It’s hard to keep up with all the death knells. So depending on what’s supposed to be dead at the moment, Ali Smith’s collection The First Person and Other Stories is either a blazing celebration of the short story or a tender eulogy.

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I really wanted to dislike Wonder Boys. I even tried to dislike it. I mean, here it was a book about writers (barf) by Michael Chabon (barf) who kind of gives me the willies (I think it’s the hair). Despite all that, Wonder Boys still crawled into my heart.

So we’ve got pot-smoking, wife-cheating, never-ending-novel writing Grady Tripp and the weekend from hell. His editor comes into town for writerpalooza or something and brings along a drag queen. Grady’s wife has also chosen that day to leave him and Grady’s mistress, the chancellor of the university he teaches at, also decides to tell him she’s pregnant. Oh and Grady also managed to thwart the suicide of his gifted-oddball student James Leer who steals a jacket worn by Marilyn Monroe. Also, the chancellor’s dog is killed.

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I’m the type of reader who doesn’t often read reviews of books that I want to read. I read all kinds of reviews of books that I’ve never even heard of, but if the book is on my list I wait until after I’ve finished it to read any reviews. This nearly killed me a few months back when I was reading Philip Roth’s Indignation and saw that David Gates had written a review of it for the NY Times.

The same can be said for Jim Harrison’s The English Major. Even though I’d never heard of the book the minute I read the subhead on a LA Times review from October. It said this:

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Too Cool to be Forgotten is a slender little graphic novel by Alex Robinson about Andy Wicks and his inability to quite smoking. Andy, 37, has tried everything he can think of to quit smoking. After years of failure he tries hypnosis at the urging of his wife.

Andy’s not so keen on this method, but goes for it anyway. Once the hypnosis is underway Andy finds himself transported back in time to 1985, a few days before he smoked his first cigarette. Andy, ever the smartie-pants decides that it’s his mission to redo things and not take that first puff, thus curing himself of the smoking curse.

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Saying that I really, really loved Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life makes me feel a little bit creepy. There isn’t much happy in the life of our unnamed narrator who talks about her life while being locked up in an asylum that has apparently been abandoned.

Unnamed Narrator has not had it easy. She was found in a shoe box near an orphanage as a baby and spent her childhood bouncing from foster home to orphanage and back again. She’s often homeless and has the hapless luck of ending up in the company of people who want use and abuse her — physically, mentally, and sexually. It’s kind of horrifying, and yet the book is tender and beautiful at the same time.

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I admitted to Kurtis Scaletta yesterday that I approached reading Mudville with more than a little bit of trepidation. It’s one thing to review a book my some faceless entity, but I had exchange a few e-mails with Kurtis, giving him a face and personality.

After admitting my fear, I thanked him for writing a good book. Mudville is a charming novel for what are dubbed middle grade readers about a boy named Roy who loves baseball.

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I was none too pleased that the same week I decided to finally read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice a bunch of yahoos decided to release (or write, or something) a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I do not like zombies. I like robotos. Robots are better than ninjas and pirates and zombies all put togther.

Also, zombies are dumb and hipsters love them. Hipsters ruin everything with their stupid fetishes — like bacon and cupcakes.

But this isn’t about zombies or hipsters, this is about Jane Austen’s book which I want to call pre-Edwardian chick lit. I have no idea when or what pre-Edwardian is. However, I do know what chick lit is, and this is totally it. Of course it’s like the great great great grandmother of chick lit, which makes it kind of cool.

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I’m pretty late to the Malcolm Gladwell fanclub, but after reading Outliers I feel pretty nicely ensconced. It’s not often that I read non-fiction, I tend to find it a little dry and too teachy. While there’s a lot to learn from Outliers, the writing is so conversational and smooth that you feel like you’re being talked to rather than lectured.

The basic premise that Gladwell sets out to prove is that genius is not based solely on rugged individualism, but that situations and opportunities play a large role. For instance, did you know that something like 40% of the top youth hockey players in Canada were born in January, February, or March? Weird, eh?

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I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking because in his answers to the 6 questions we always ask, Bill Tuomala said he would take Joan Didion out to Jax. Plus, I vaguely remembered hearing great, great things about this memoir Didion wrote following the death of her husband.

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