The Walking Dead

A collaboration: Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Cliff Rathburn, Rus Wooton

Just finished reading chapter 8, Made to Suffer. Love this series; can't get enough. I've become obsessed.  Never really been one for zombies, but this is more a story about people dealing with the end of the world they know, and after a while you kind of just get used to the walkers as part of the scenery - a very dangerous part.

The writer does a brilliant job portraying people dealing with a crazy situation in a way I find very true to life.  By that I mean yes, I think there would be people killing themselves left right and centre, and that there certainly would be a lot of needless blood shed as people adjusted to a world re-written.  But there is still beauty in certain moments as what life there is carries on, and people need to cling to whatever scraps of humanity they can (or have left).

The characters are multileveled, believable, and you find yourself rooting for almost everyone. The drama! The suspense! I can't wait to read the next one!

Because I only just finished reading it I've got to get this out: I CAN'T BELIEVE HIS WIFE DIES!!!!!!

Oh, p.s. - spoiler alert.

An Exclusive Love - Johanna Adorján

I read an article about this in a magazine a while ago and was intrigued, so brought it home from work last week when I had nothing to read. A slim little thing; I read it in about two hours, but felt very present in the story all the same.  Adorján begins by bluntly telling the reader the date of her grandparents' double suicide and proceeds to work her way through the background information.

She details conversations had with her grandparents' friends and acquaintances in an effort to fill in the blank spaces of their lives, with medium to minimal success. It seems her grandparents were both extraordinary and extremely private people, with many stories/secrets that will now forever stay buried. What is known of their lives is both remarkable and inspiring, as is their united final exit. It seems Adorján herself found both some closure and a new sense of home/family through her searching while writing this book. Bittersweet.

Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen

Read this last Friday, trying to get myself up to date here so I can just start posting as I finish a book.
I definitely liked this book. A quick read, a little sad, but sad like real life is sad. And yet it still manages to have a happy, conclusive ending, which also does sometimes happen in real life. So true to life, then.

A completely vivid depiction of several places, each a world unto themselves: the era of the Great Depression itself, a present-day nursing home, and a travelling circus.  The world of the circus just draws you in, as does the voice of the narrator, at once longing and averse to his own longing. A seriously pretty little story, with enough jabs of tragedy to still make you feel slightly unsettled even as you enjoy it. But in case you haven't noticed, everything beautiful is also unsettling, in some way, to some one.

Millennium Trilogy - Stieg Larsson

I had these sitting on my bookshelf for months before I finally got into them - and then devoured the series in about a week.  My stepmother had given me all three with good recommendations, and I had tons of customers coming into my work speaking highly of the series. But I had started Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just after it was given to me and had a hard time getting into the story.

 After being told several times that 'it gets good' I picked them up just after the new year and found out why these books are so wildly popular. Featuring a broad, vibrant range of characters and tight plotlines, the books are great crime fiction that becomes impossible to put down.  Larsson has dreamed up a wonderful heroine in Lisbeth Salander, a character he obviously loved, and I think that anyone reading the books will also love her in their own way.

 A racing good read, notably the last two thirds of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and all of The Girl Who Played With Fire.  I was slightly unsatisfied after finishing Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest; in some ways it is like the last Lord of the Rings movie and has several different endings.  The writing also becomes somewhat fragmented and choppy, possibly the translation? It is hard to say.  I feel that perhaps Larsson was laying the groundwork for a fourth book, or had written an excerpt to be included with Hornet's Nest, and then the editors/publishers/whatever tacked it on to the end of the book for lack of something better to do with it.  Not necessarily a bad thing but it certainly dulls the impact a little.   

However, all in all I did love the books, will be keeping them, and certainly found Sweden a surprisingly exotic place to immerse myself in for a time.