2010 Book 18 - Her Fearful Symmetry

The latest book that I've completed is Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. Before I start on my review here is what is written on the back cover:

Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls' aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including - perhaps - their aunt.

I found this to be a great novel. I really enjoyed it, especially at this time of year as we approach Halloween. Admittedly, there are parts that were disturbing to me and I found the way things wrapped up to be a little off-putting. But, all in all, great book and a very easy read. This is one that I would certainly recommend to others to read, if you are looking for a unique look at the relationship between sisters.

By the way, Audrey Niffenegger is the author of The Time Traveler's Wife, which I also really enjoyed even though if I recall correctly, it also wrapped up strangely and a little off-putting.

2010 Book 17 - Full Dark House

I just finished Christopher Fowler's book Full Dark House, which is the first in a series of "Peculiar Crime Unit" books. Here is the back cover description:

A bomb rips through present-day London, tragically ending the crime-fighting partnership of Arthur Bryant and John May begun more than a half-century ago during another infamous bombing: the Blitz of World War II. Desperately searching for clues to the saboteur's identity, May finds the notes his old friend kept of their very first case and a past that may have returned...with murderous vengeance. It was an investigation that began with the grisly murder of a pretty young dancer. In a city shaken by war, a faceless killer stalked London's theater row, creating his own sinister drama. And it would take Bryant's unorthodox techniques and May's dogged police work to catch a fiend whose ability to escape detection seemed almost supernatural - a murderer who decades later may have returned to kill one of them...and won't stop until he kills the other.

Really enjoyed this book. It had interesting plot twists; some red herrings; humor.... Fun book that I would recommend. And, I'm going to invest in the other books in this series (or at least one more of them to give a second try). There were some plodding parts, but worth getting through to the twist in the end. Definitely, a book that I would recommend to anybody who wants a light-hearted mystery.

Is It Weird or Just Sad...

I'm at the airport bookstore, because I function on ABBA time and got here 2.5 hours early, that I want to rearrange the shelves. I've met with this impulse in the past at Barnes & Noble and have gone so far as to actually rearrange the books. It bothers me when they have authors out of alphabetical order or they put a book face out in the middle of another author's spine out books just so the shelf is broken up a bit.

Does anybody else out there struggle with this impulse?

Book 16 - Jane Austen Book Club

I actually finished reading The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler on the flight back from camping. Here is the back cover:

In California's Central Valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With an eye for the frailties of human behavior and an ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships.

All in all, this was a pleasant book. There wasn't a lot of plot to it. It didn't require a whole lot of thought while reading it. I'd seen the last 30 minutes of the movie they made out of it so I didn't really have any great expectations (in fact, the movie seemed to be a little better than the book). Not a book that I would highly recommend, but since I paid the Barnes & Noble bargain bin price for it I'm not really discouraged over the waste of money. If anybody wants to borrow it, let me know. It is now in my Half-Priced Books stack.