March, Or The Month In Which I Start Many Books But Only Finish Two

March 2008

Books Purchased:
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - Joshilyn Jackson
I Was Told There'd Be Cake - Sloane Crosley
The Ordinary Princess - M.M. Kaye
Wildwood Dancing - Juliet Marillier
How To Seduce A Ghost - Hope McIntyre
The Color of Light - Karen White

Books Received Gratis:
The Lace Reader - Brunonia Barry
The House at Midnight - Lucie Whitehouse

Books Read:
The House at Midnight - Lucie Whitehouse
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - Joshilyn Jackson

Books Started:
Holy Cow - Sarah MacDonald
The Lace Reader - Brunonia Barry
How To Seduce A Ghost - Hope McIntyre
I Was Told There'd Be Cake - Sloane Crosley


I have a problem. My bookshelves are bursting. I continue to buy (and be given) books. Always with the intention to read it next or just after the one I've been meaning to read but can't because I need to finish this month's book club selection first. Long ago I accepted the fact that there will always be more books that I want to read than I possibly can. I'm no Harriet Klausner, the Amazon super-reviewer who allegedly can read six books in a day. (Miss Harriet is the subject of much controversy. Some people, mostly Harriet-haters, think she's not a real person - one theory is that she's a syndicate, another is that she's a robot. Personally, I find her annoying and usually unhelpful as she likes everything she reads). But now my ratio of purchased to read is completely skewed and I'm losing ability to finish a book I've started before getting wrapped up in the next. In fact, this month it wasn't even the books' faults! I want to read all of them, but each time I started something, a better book came along. Well, except for How To Seduce A Ghost. That I stopped because I got bored.

March did start off auspiciously. I read a book in an entire weekend, something I do not normally get the opportunity to do. This particular book was an advance copy of Lucie Whitehouse's debut novel, The House At Midnight. When I found THAM unclaimed in the latest shipment of ARCs, I was thrilled. I did not know anything about the book, but the back copy sounded intriguing. Frankly, I had been hoping for an advance of Carol Goodman's next, The Night Villa. That wasn't in the box, but THAM seemed like an excellent substitute. I could not put the book down, and have already determined that it will be the store's recommended title when it pubs in June. In the vein of The Secret History, it's a haunting story of 30-something friends who spend the summer at a country mansion filled with secrets and tensions.

After THAM, I wanted more of the same. So I tried How To Seduce A Ghost. Not the right choice. Admittedly, this could have been a victim of the dreaded Follow Up Book Syndrome or FUBS (See January), but it was lacking. A worrywart ghostwriter named Lee lives an unsatisfying life until she gets caught up in the mystery surrounding a neighbor's death in a fire. Should appeal to me, right? Nope. Lee was too whiny, always complaining about her overbearing mother or how she didn't love her boyfriend Tommy as much as she should. I did a bad thing and peeped at the end. The creepy fruit and veg man dun it. Yawn.

Moving on, I chose Holy Cow by Sarah MacDonald. Changing tack usually defeats FUBS, so this memoir of learning to live in (and love) India seemed like a great antidote, and it was. At least until The Lace Reader came around. I will finish HC - I'm almost there, actually - as it was our book club pick for April. Kind of a hipper, younger Eat, Pray, Love, which seems to be the It Book that female-majority clubs are reading. I'd sent for TLR myself, half-interested and thinking it was free so who cared if it sucked. The night I received it, I read three chapters, all very promising. It may even be better than I'd expect - after all, Joshilyn Jackson, who I will talk about very soon, was raving about it at her reading. But alas, TLR was halted for The Girl Who Stopped Swimming.

For a long time, my friend LG has been praising Joshilyn Jackson and trying to get me to read gods In Alabama, Joshilyn's first book. I was hesitant - the book descriptions always sounded great up to a point and then I'd read a phrase or line that made me go "maybe...not...." Well, she finally got me. The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, Joshilyn's third novel, came out in March and she went on tour. This tour brought her to Boston, and we had just selected TGWSS as the March recommended title. Joshilyn didn't appear at our store, but at one across the river in Cambridge. I talked LT into going with me as cover for my "spy mission" - I like to attend events at other stores to compare with ours. Well, after listening to Joshilyn for half an hour, we both were hooked. Joshilyn was adorable and funny and I had to have a signed copy. After that I dived into TGWSS.

Kind of Jodi Picoultish, TGWSS follows Laurel, a suburban mom and quilt designer, after her "just so" perfect world crumbles in the wake of a neighbor teen's death in Laurel's swimming pool. Haunted - literally and figuratively - Laurel becomes obsessed with solving the girl's death. Enlisting the aid of her estranged sister Thalia, Laurel embarks on a mission that stretches the bounds of her sanity and her relationships with her husband, daughter, and parents. Thalia is an in your face Tasmanian devil of trouble who hampers Laurel as much as she helps. Family secrets - sexual abuse, murder, absolute poverty - simmer just below the surface of Laurel's investigation. All in all, highly enjoyable if somewhat predictable. Thalia was a brilliant character and Laurel, though somewhat trying, was a relatable character. Laurel's quilts, with their odd found adornments (one has a human tooth disguised in a flower with pearl petals) and hidden not-quite-rightness (like a bird skull peeking out of a pocket) were an excellent metaphor for her state of mind and her relationship with her family. I will read more of Joshilyn's works - after all, she's my 'twin' as a crazy guy in the audience made a point of informing me, her, and the rest of the audience.

Once TGWSS was finished, I had just enough time to read some more Holy Cow and then get one essay into Sloane Crosley's hilarious I Was Told There'd Be Cake. Both of those will be reviewed in full in April's entry. Rounding out my March purchases were two books I'd already read - Juliet Marillier's Wildwood Dancing and M.M. Kaye's The Ordinary Princess - and one book recommended to me, The Color of Light (K recommended it as a Carol Goodman-like novel after I'd hooked her on CG). I've nearly memorized The Ordinary Princess and already own a copy - it was my favorite book as a child, and given to me by a beloved aunt. Fantastically brilliant, it satirizes fairy tales while being a truly enchanting one in its own right. I'm planning to adapt it into a screenplay as a writing exercise. Wildwood Dancing is a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses set in Romania and imbued with a bit of the Transylvania vampire legends. I read it in a day when it was in hardcover and now that it's in paperback, I had to have it.

I'm crossing my fingers that April goes better than March. I will finish Holy Cow and I Was Told There'd Be Cake. No more reading a book without finishing the one I'm already reading (unless it's dreadful, then abandon away!) In fact, I bet I can read five books in April. Anyone want to take that wager?