Books that didn't make the book club

With the meeting coming up, I started reviewing all of the books I've read since the last meeting to decide which ones I'm going to discuss - and I discovered that I read a lot of books! (on a side note, I heard a speaker yesterday quote that 58% of Americans do not read another book after high school Statistics at Parapublishing.com - a stat I find hard to believe). I can't discuss all of these at the book club since we don't have time, and it would greatly increase the already inordinate gap between the club and the publication of the notes... so I thought I'd put an incomplete list here - avoiding any that I think others may discuss (like Walking in Circles Before Lying Down, which Bev hopes to have finished by Saturday, or Empire of Ivory - the 4th book in the Naomi Novik Temeraire series that Karen introduced us to). Naturally, if you are interested in any of these, I'm happy to loan them out. So this is my list - how about yours? What have you read of interest lately that won't make it to the book club (either because you chose something else, or aren't going to make it?)? Post them into comments on the blog!

The Keep, by Jennifer Egan - a genre-defying novel about a prisoner in a creative writing class, and a shiftless guy who is invited by his formerly nerdy, now millionaire cousin whom he wronged in their youth to help restore an ancient castle somewhere in Bulgaria. This is a somewhat mind-bending book - my most frequent thought throughout it was 'What the hell...???" - but I got sucked into the story and read it with abandon throughout the final third of the book.

American Gods and Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman - I already reviewed Neverwhere by the same author at the last book club, stating that he's rapidly becoming my favorite author - and these two books don't disappoint. Kind of unfair to lump them together, as they are totally separate stories with a single character in common - but I loved both of them. They both deal with the existence of the minor gods of superstitious lore and fable, placed into today's world.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, by Mil Millington - Martin and I were discussing the Gaiman books by email when he asked me when Cristopher Moore (the author of Lamb) was coming out with another book. I went to his website (http://www.chrismoore.com/ - his blog is hilarious!) to check, and sadly, there is nothing on the horizon. So I checked out his reading list - and Mil Millington was one of his recommendations. Basically, a battle of the sexes (and English vs. German sensibilities) set against a madcap series of events from a slacker's perspective, this book had me cackling throughout. I've got another Millington book Love and Other Near-Death Experiences in my stack of to-be-read.

1632, by Eric Flint - I sent my mother (or tried to - that's yet another story) Connie Willis' The Doomsday Book, a story about a young doctoral candidate who is transported back to England in the Dark Ages, right before the plague (a great book, if you've not read it). When I was describing it to her, she recommended I pick this book up, so I did (it's good to listen to your mother). And I almost put it down... The premise is that an entire town in present day West Virginia disappears and is plopped into the middle of Germany during the Thirty Years' War. The dialogue and the patriotism were hokey and overstated, to the point of being patronizing. When I complained about this to my mother, she said to stick with it, it gets better (it's good to listen to your mother). And what I found, beyond the hokey and patronizing dialogue, was a fascinating well-researched, pragmatic look at what would happen if today's technology was dropped into the environment of the past - including the dependence on diminishing resources. And I found that toward the end, I didn't mind some of the hokiness... this book has spawned a number of sequels that I'll eventually circle back to read.

The Gun Seller, by Hugh Laurie - some of you may recognize the author's name - he's the actor who plays House on Fox. If you imagine House as a British author (despite the midwestern accent he uses on the show, Hugh Laurie is in fact British... hearing him interviewed always throws me for a loop), writing a James Bond novel, bringing all of the cynicism and wit of his character, that's what you have in The Gun Seller. I really enjoyed the book, although I must admit that it was a little lethargic in the middle, and it gets kind of redundant to constantly place the protagonist into seemingly impossible, inescapable peril, only to see him use his wit, luck, deus ex machina, or an attractive woman to emerge relatively unscathed - but I could say those things about every James Bond movie (including the latest - which I thought was great) I've ever seen.

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami - this book was recommended to me because I responded to a post on a website about Black Swan Green, one of my favorite coming of age books (by David Mitchell - I also recently read Cloud Atlas by him - another fantastic, genre-bending book that I highly recommend). Kafka is a fifteen year old Japanese boy who runs away from home. And then things get weird. Full of Japanese mysticism, fantasy and philosophy (it's easy to see where manga comes from), this book was like the feeling you have trying to do simple things like walk, get a drink of water or go to the bathroom, after getting on one of those rides at the amusement park that spins you in every direction all at once. A challenging, but rewarding experience - I've not yet decided if I'm going to seek out more of the author's work - a line in a review on Amazon sums it up best... Occasionally, the writing drifts too far into metaphysical musings—mind-bending talk of parallel worlds, events occurring outside of time—and things swirl a bit at the end as the author tries, perhaps too hard, to make sense of things. But by this point, his readers, like his characters, will go just about anywhere Murakami wants them to, whether they "get" it or not.