Shelf Monkey, by Corey Redekop

ISBN: 1550227661

I think my friend Sophie said it best: it is good, but I won't read it again. This isn't because of bad writing, or lack of suspense or anything. This is a book's book, a bit like The Eyre Affair, a book that knows how elitist it is and revels in it. IT hits too close to home, too much like the job I have right now, dealing with people who eat up books written by women with a mental age of 13 but who have sex. Ugh.

4/5

Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis

ISBN: 978-0060723934

Apparently this is warped book week. This book is quite short, but any longer would be too much. In the vein of Incompetence, everything that can happen to him does. Everything that can go wrong, does. He gets his testicules injected with saline, half his leads die, his gf (of sorts) cheats on him... But it is a great book. It's funny, a decent look at today's society and what is wrong (or is it?) with it.

4/5

Making Money, by Terry Pratchett

ISBN: 978-0385611015

I was so anxious for this book I literally screamed when I saw it on the basement table in receiving. I got a few strange looks. This book is very funny, very twistey, but it feels more like a direct (as in moment after) sequel to Going Postal. I don't know if that is fundamentally bad, but it made my reading extremely quick since I was totally in the story already, having read Going Postal about 6 times already. I will have to review my score once I can read it at my leisure in paperback (which is always more enjoyable and comfortable than trying to be extra careful with a hardcover book you borrowed from the bookstore you work at - which they expect to sell again afterwards (the book, not the store)).

3/5

Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn

ISBN: 978-0385722438

I read this in under 12 hours, including sleeping a night-full in there. It is very short (only 200 pages) but it is also so incredibly excellent that I woke up early to finish it (then went back to bed). This book is written in the form of letters, whose vocabulary and word usage gets more and more constricted as letters fall of the statue devoted to Nollop (the guy who wrote: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog) and they get axed from the island's vocabulary. The penalty for using these letters is eventually death. This book is hilarious and still scary, a literary 1984 if you will.

5/5

Zodiac: the eco-thriller, by Neal Stephenson

ISBN: 978-0802143150


I have tried to read Snow Crash three times now and cannot get beyond the first thirty pages. Something about this guy's writing style bugs the shit out of me. It distracts me and I find it hard to keep track of who is speaking. Sometimes I skip pages and don't notice. BUT! Despite this book not being my kind of writing style, I really liked it. The topic, toxic waste and how we could "solve" it is fantastic, and it really kept me interested for the whole book. It got really good by the end, but the writing style gave me a headache. For some weird reason it is classified as sci-fi, when it should be in the regular fiction, along Christopher Buckley and the like.

3/5

The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde

ISBN: 978-0340835722

This book was just as awesome as The Big Over Easy, if not better. They develop the characters a bit more and they twist and turn the story so many times that by the time you get to the last little bit, you STILL have no answers. Love how he sums up what happened to all the characters after the book in a short little blurb. The next one will be about the hare and tortoise.

5/5

Fat, by Rob Grant

ISBN: 978-0575078208

I'm sorry to have to say it, but I ate this novel up. It follows the story of one girl with anorexia, one overweight, anger-driven chef and one publicity spinner in charge of making a Well Farm (fat-nazi camp), skipping to each one each chapter, and mixing up the narratives by the end. It is really excellent, a study of how being "fat" is now illegal. The book starts by talking about the fat tax that planes are charging people based on their BMI, to account for the extra fuel needed to carry extra-sized people around.

5/5

The Big Over Easy, by Jasper Fforde

ISBN: 978-0340835685

Jasper Fforde is the author of The Eyre Affair (The Thursday Next novels) and this is his Nursery Crime Division novels, Staring Jack Spratt and Mary Mary. This novel had an awesome buildup, tons of twists and seriously funny characters. It follows the veins of The Eyre Affair, where the world Fforde presents is more concerned with literature than anything else (such as right and wrong). Interesting factoid: The Eyre Affair is mentioned as a fictitious book in the novel. That was a nice little wink in the right direction.

There is a second book staring these characters called The Fourth Bear. Look for it soon.

5/5

Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley

ISBN: 978-0446579810

By the same author as Thank You For Smoking, Boomsday presents a world drowned by baby boomers (ours), where a bill is proposed: if you agree to kill yourself at 75, you get a tax break. More involved than TYFS, the book was more serious, almost, and just as funny.

4/5