Peachy Reads

Click here to check for availability at AFPLS I saw the movie before I read the book, which I almost never do, but so be it. The eBook was available from the library, so I downloaded it to my Nook. It was an impulse, but it was also free. This is why I bought the Nook and not the Kindle. This is how libraries work, and hopefully will work in the future. Reading books should not have to cost excessive amounts of money. Anyway, Julie & Julia is the book that the blogging part of the movie is based on, the Amy Adams storyline (an actress, in my humble opinion, who is about as perfect as they come). I really enjoyed the movie (which I rewatched after finishing Julie & Julia ), but I also enjoyed the book, but in a different way. Of course everyone knows how Nora Ephron used Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France to serve as the grist for the Meryl Streep (another perfect actress) half of the movie. Julie & Julia provides the structure for both stories. Even the book has short...

Star Island / Carl Hiaasen Click here for availability at AFPLS Get ready for another wild and crazy romp through south Florida, where the characters are always larger than life, and in spite of the plunging real estate market, developers still stomp on the environment. Cherry Pye (real name Cheryl Bunterman) is a pop diva like a bad-Britney who doesn’t have a lot of talent or brains. As she parties her way to oblivion, her parents employ a body double to keep up appearances. A particularly obsessive paparazzo stalks Cherry Pye, and in the ensuing confusion of who is the starlet and who is the double, there is a lot of keystone cops mayhem. Hiaasen’s characters are caricatures, always over-the-top, but also somehow believable. The narrative line of Star Island , which is big on satire, lurches around a bit and I’m not sure the environmental theme ever really meshes with the bad pop star storyline, but it’s a fun read nonetheless. This was the first full book I read as an eBook on my N...

The Burning Land / Bernard Cornwell Click here to check for availability at AFPLS The 9th century was an unsettled time in Britain. Alfred the Great was trying to keep the English speaking inhabitants unified in one kingdom, while the Danes were essentially trying to make Britain an outpost of Viking Scandinavia. We meet up with Uhtred in this fifth installment of Bernard Cornwell's historical adventure series Saxon Tales as he continues to somewhat reluctantly honor his oath to Alfred, while nurturing his true desire is to lead an army against his uncle and reclaim his ancestral home. There is lots of historically-based battle action here, as in previous books there are many sharp blades, axes, and in one clever siege innovative use of beehives and sailcloth. Uhtred experiences triumph on the battlefield (and a near miss) but disappointment and sorrow on the homefront. We’ll have to wait until another installment in the series to see if he can be Lord of Babbenberg in more than...

Solar / Ian McEwan Click here to check for availability at AFPLS . Michael Beard is a Nobel-Laureate in physics who peaked far too soon. It seems he used up all his genius early in life and this novel follows him as he tries to parlay his Nobel honor, and no further innovative work or thinking, into a lifelong career. He can’t give physics too much attention since he is caught up in his own self-absorption, can’t seem to stay faithful or married (five marriages and counting), and has no self-discipline when it comes to eating and exercise, or anything else for that matter. To stay afloat he becomes involved in several unscrupulous actions, including concealing a suspicious death, framing an innocent man for it, and stealing the poor dead man’s intellectual property. This novel has moments of greatness, but it is much too plodding, too preachy, too satirical, and too scientific in places, and the characters (other than Michael Beard) are just too flat. I love Ian McEwan, but I didn’t f...

The Virgin Suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides Click here to check for availability at AFPLS The title reveals the ending, so there is no surprise, but that is not to say there is no suspense. The Virgin Suicides recounts the story of the Lisbon sisters and the tragic gradual unraveling of their well-structured existence in suburban Detroit of the 1970s. Fate leads inevitably towards the final chapter of the book, which is also the final chapter of their short lives. Cecelia is the first to go (by self-defenestration) and her sudden death seems to set a chain of events in motion that eventually brings all her sisters with her (there is even speculation that Cecelia’s suicide released a contagion that infected her siblings). The story is told in the voice of the neighborhood boys who shared the same street and the same school with the Lisbon girls, secretly admiring them, mostly from afar, in life as well as after death. The identities of the boys remain somewhat mysterious to the reader, ...

Remarkable Creatures / Tracy Chevalier Click here to check for availability at AFPLS The best-selling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring brings us the story of Mary Anning, an early nineteenth century amateur paleontologist and discoverer of fossils. From her base in Lyme Regis in what is now known as Southern England’s Jurassic Coast, Mary Anning discovered amazingly complete fossilized skeletons of ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and prehistoric fish. Because she uncovered fossilized impressions of “monsters” of which people understood very little (this was years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or much understanding of geologic eras and extinctions), her discoveries challenged the prevailing view of God’s creation and plan, and caused her to be regarded with suspicion. (Fast forward 200 years to certain school districts in the US.) Mary Anning’s story is all the more remarkable because she was an unschooled woman from the lower class operating in a field dominated by educa...

One Day / David Nicholls Dexter and Emma, (known to each other as “Dex” and “Em”), nearly experience a romantic entanglement on the day of graduation from university in Edinburgh in 1988. Nearly, because it doesn’t quite happen. The remarkable premise of this book is that it follows their relationship for only one day during the next twenty years as their life paths drift apart and then reconnect, all the while holding on to that initial infatuation that seemed to make them soulmates. Every chapter meets up with Dex and Em on July 15th, charting the sometimes surprising, and often humorous courses of their lives. Dex is a bit narcissistic and self-destructive; Emma a little lacking in confidence and drive. But they seem to bring out the best in each other and depend on each other’s support to get through life’s tough patches. This book out-Nick-Hornbys Nick Hornby. It’s authentic, it’s funny, it’s frequently dramatic, but never boring. I smell a movie coming.