first, thank you to vanessa, stephanie, and louise for nominating me for the "thinking blogger" award. i am honored to be recognized by three of my favorite bloggers! i have avoided nominating anyone (vanessa nominated me back in april!) because there are many, many blogs out there that i love and the anxiety picking out a few is reminiscent of the school days when we would pick kickball teams and i would hope, hope, hope not to be the last one picked. so please, know that i love you all!
now, on to the book reviews. i have decided to rate the books on a scale of 1-5 cupcakes (5 being the best and 1 the worst). there are few things as good as a great book, but a good cupcake is one of them. (although i would definitely take the book over the cupcake.)
1. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
i finished this book yesterday and wrote about it first in honor of jill who also recently completed the novel. i loved this book. it is the story of leo gursky, an old polish jew living in new york and preparing for his death and alma singer, a new york teenager searching for answers about her identity after her father's death. the story is told from the viewpoint of several characters, but leo and alma are the heart of the book. the characters are at once tragic and laugh-out-loud hilarious. apparently some readers felt this book is a little too quirky, but i love quirky. i highly recommend it.
2. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
this novel is another "journey" story dealing with different generations of new yorkers. it was written by nicole krauss' husband and because of this and the similarities in the storyline it and History of Love are often considered sibling texts. the protagonist in this book is young oskar schell who lost his father on september 11th. he finds a key in an envelope marked "black." oskar sets off to figure out what this key opens in the hopes it will reveal a secret about his dad, who often left puzzles for him to decipher. this book is even more quirky than The History of Love and may therefore be less accessible to readers who prefer more conventional novels. i really liked this book and was once again taken in by a skillfully crafted combination of tragedy and humor. foer is a brilliant writer with a wonderful knack for description. i highly recommend this book, but only to those who enjoy non-traditional writing formats and quirky storytelling.
3. Wickett's Remedy by Myla Goldberg
after enjoying goldberg's first novel, Bee Season, i was very excited to read her new book. the story is set in boston in the years leading up to and including the flu epidemic of 1918. it focuses on the life of lydia wickett and a "medicinal" syrup she develops for her husband. i enjoyed imagining what it must have been like to endure the horrors of the flu epidemic, however, overall i thought this book was a little boring. the tale, like in the other two novels reviewed here, is told from more than one viewpoint. there are even comments from the dead in the margins. while these comments are occasionally funny, they are more irritating than enlightening. i found myself skimming through sections of the book, especially through the newspaper articles and letters included. while certain parts of the story were compelling and had me quickly flipping from page to page, my take on the novel as a whole was "eh."
