Parenthetical.net

Guess what I’m not reading? Harry freakin’ Potter. I will eventually, but a) I don’t feel like I need to own it, and b) it’s a fall/winter book. I plan to wait until I can actually get a copy at the library and then curl up and let it take over November, like I did with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell last year.

So what am I reading in the meantime?

• I finally finished the second Abarat, a YA fantasy series by Clive Barker. My professor thought it was overwritten, and she’s not wrong, but that doesn’t bother me so much. It’s all slick and full of pretty paintings, and it’s a classic good/evil story with enough twists to make it interesting. This was a much darker book than the first, and managed to avoid the middle-book curse of just moving the action along without resolving anything or introducing anything new. Thumbs up.
• Hoot, by Carl Hiassen, is something people have told me for awhile I need to read. It won a Newbury, it’s all popular and well-received and stuff. And it was good, no doubt. It’s about a kid who moves to Florida and gets caught up in a scheme to save some burrowing owls from being bulldozed to make a Mother Paula’s Pancake House chain restaurant. There was enough action and mystery to keep the environmentalism from seeming heavy-handed, and the resolution was realistic enough while still being a happy ending. But the characters were mostly pretty basic and cardboard, especially the adults (which bothered me more than it used to). The flaky, overprotective, cookie-bakin’ mom and wise career-focused dad bug the hell out of me, and they were out in force here. In the YA Writers of Wacky Florida Grudge Match, I’m still voting for Edward Bloor.
• I loved Rats Saw God so much that I got Rob Thomas’s Notes from the Undergrad. Not as good. It’s a collection of anecdotes about seniors doing required community service. Some were pretty obvious (the girl who delivers Thanksgiving canned goods to her own house), and some were unexpectedly beautiful (the guy who tutors a janitor in English in order to pass a manager’s exam). My main complaint is that Thomas sets up a frame story where a group of college students are doing a study on this community service project. They have to interview the participants and get the “real story.” But then he totally drops it! None of the stories are written as interview notes, or even from the perspective of someone writing up interview notes. There’s no bookend to the frame introduction. There was no need for a frame story; why set it up like that and then give up?
• And now I’m reading Bone at C’s house (because it’s too enormous to carry around) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest because I’ve never read it.