The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

1994. Random House. Hardcover. 300 pages.

Recommended by: Alyce of At Home With Books

From: the public library

In a nutshell: The Hot Zone first describes a family of ‘thread’ viruses which include Marburg, Ebola Sudan and Ebola Zaire.  These viruses have horrifying effects on the human body, and scarily high kill rate.  Ebola Zaire kills nine out of ten people infected with it.

When monkeys start dying mysteriously in a Reston, Virginia quarantine unit for a laboratory products company in 1989, researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) are contacted.  They are alarmed when they realize that the monkeys seem to be infected with a virus very much like Ebola Zaire.  The Hot Zone closely follows the government’s response to the emergency.

Review:

I had first heard about the Ebola virus in the late 1990’s, when I was in high school.  When I read about the symptoms in the newspaper, I thought it sounded like one of the worst ways that you could die.  Preston’s book doesn’t do anything to dispel that conclusion.  The experienced researchers and medical personnel quoted in the book readily and repeatedly state that Ebola terrifies them.

The first part of the book describes the outbreaks in nightmarish detail.  One particular account of an Ebola Sudan outbreak is seared on my brain.  I won’t quote it in full, but here is some of it:

The virus transformed the hospital at Maridi into a morgue.  As it jumped from bed to bed, killing patients left and right, doctors began to notice signs of mental derangement, psychosis, depersonalization, zombie-like behavior . . . There is no doubt that Ebola damages the brain and causes psychotic dementia.  It is not easy, however, to separate brain damage from the effects of fear.  If you were trapped in a hospital where people were dissolving in their beds, you might try to escape, and if you were a bleeder and frightened, you might take off your clothes, and people might think you had gone mad.

p. 68

After Preston establishes the wider context of the Ebola virus, he concentrates on the story of Ebola’s arrival in Reston, Virginia.  I liked reading about the decision-making processes that the researchers made, and how they examined their choices.  At the time, the public health crisis was kept very hush-hush.  It makes me wonder – not in a paranoid way – what under-the-radar crises are being dealt with now by people I drive past, or ride on the train with here in the D.C metropolitan area.

I think Preston overdoes the foreboding tone at times.  It reminds me of movie scores that are telling you a scene is scary, because the filmmakers decided you couldn’t be scared without a musical cue, all ‘dun-dun-dun‘.  It’s simply not necessary when Preston has so firmly established from the beginning how dangerous and infectious Ebola is to human beings.

That said, the book is very fast-paced and sucks you right in.  I’m actually kind of surprised Ebola hasn’t worked its way into my dreams yet, as my mind tends to absorb stuff like this and spit it back out into vivid narratives while I am sleeping.

When I told my roommate that I expected to have nightmares about what I had read in The Hot Zone, she said why are you reading it?  I’m not sure what the full answer to that would be. The thing is, I am often drawn to the relatively gritty stuff in my choice of books, with the caveat that hope – however slight and tenuous – remains intact at the end.  In The Hot Zone, while there were shudder-inducing mistakes made in the process of dealing with the virus, I still found most of the medical professionals and infectious disease researchers to be portrayed as competent and humane people.

Others’ reviews:

At Home With Books – “As the author relates how a strain of Ebola is potentially being spread throughout a town in Africa I got the same spine-tingling feeling that I get when watching the young girl in a horror movie step outside ‘to see what that noise was.'”

Bibliolatry – “The Hot Zone is all about EBOLA. In fact, that’s how I imagine the word in my head: all in caps. It’s just that intense.”

Shelf Love – “Preston writes in a journalistic style that is friendly to the general, non-science-oriented reader. There’s enough detail that I put down the book feeling like I learned some science, but there’s not so much technical jargon that I ever felt bogged down in it.”

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

1999. Scribner. Hardcover. 224 pages.

From: the public library

Recommended by: Teresa and Jenny of Shelf Love

In a nutshell:

Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland is out hiking with her older brother and her mother, when she steps off the trail to pee and subsequently gets very lost.  With piecemeal survival knowledge, she tries to find her way to civilization.  She is buoyed by the baseball games she can hear on her Walkman radio but also frightened by signs that she is being stalked by something nonhuman.

Review:

This is the very first book I have read by Stephen King.  I was feeling that I should give him a try since he hails from Maine, my original home state.  When Jenny and Teresa of Shelf Love wrote a post with recommendations for Stephen King newbies, I took up one of their suggestions, this survival tale called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

At first, I thought the voice of Trisha McFarland felt forced (the book is written mostly in third-person limited, with some omniscient narrator interjections).  Writing from a young child’s perspective can be tricky, and Trisha’s inner monologues were a bit annoying at the start.  As the business of survival settled in, however, Trisha seemed to crystallize and become sharper as a character.

I think I saw some reviews that said this book was light on scares, but I thought it was satisfyingly creepy and was rapidly flipping the pages to the end.  Getting lost in the woods and feeling ‘watched’ by something malevolent touches on some primal fears.  I thought the slight paranormal element of the narrative was effective in part due to its restraint.

Tom Gordon is a baseball pitcher idolized by Trisha, and thoughts of her hero help steady her as her ordeal drags on.  As her mental and emotional state deteriorates, she even imagines that she sees him walking beside her at times.  In this, the book reminded me strongly of Geraldine McCaughrean’s book The White Darkness which I read last year.  In The White Darkness, the teenage protagonist idolized the doomed explorer Titus Oates, and ‘conversed’ with him as she fought for survival in Antarctica.

I thought the climactic encounter of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was contrived and a bit underwhelming, but I liked how Trisha’s story ended overall.  Also, Stephen King did a great job of describing the Maine / New Hampshire woods.  Having grown up there, I could definitely visualize the terrain he described.

Other reviews:

A Life in Books – “There are some truly scary moments in this novel, including a feverish dream involving robed priest-like figures, and I think if I had been reading this book in front of a fire in a cabin in the woods, rather than on the deck of a beach house at sunset as the ocean breeze wafted over me, I would have been really frightened, and probably would have had nightmares myself.”

Caribousmom – “[King] keeps it interesting from beginning to end with palm sweating descriptions and suspense.”

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

1977. Penguin. Paperback. 204 pages.

From: the library

Author recommended by: Vishy

In a nutshell:

Bruce Chatwin became fascinated by Patagonia when he was a child.  His grandmother had a scrap of prehistoric animal skin in her house, sent to her by her cousin, Captain Charley Milward, from one of the ends of the earth: Patagonia.

This book is the story of his travels in Patagonia as an adult, complemented by scraps of relevant history.

Review:

I think one reason I am fond of travel writing is that I love a good anecdote.  I like the short tales of people met, lives and places encountered, conversations with strangers.  When I visited cities as a child from a small Maine town, I was astounded by the throngs of people.  I wondered what all of their stories were.  Reading travel writing taps into that brand of wonder.

When Bruce Chatwin was in school, the Cold War was in full swing and everyone expected imminent destruction from bombs.  This prompted research into where one could flee from the fall-out:

We fixed on Patagonia as the safest place on earth.  I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.

p. 3

Later, traveling in Patagonia as an adult, Chatwin encounters people who find Patagonia an ideal remote refuge and others who are homesick for their original homelands.  Chatwin inquires locals about Butch Cassidy and members of his gang who fled to Patagonia to escape the law.  He is often on the trail of some local legendary and infamous figure.

As Chatwin’s travels take him further south to Tierra del Fuego, he increasingly focuses on the life and journeys of his relative, Captain Charley Milward who had spent time down there at the end of the Americas.  He even includes fascinating excerpts from Milward’s own memoirs of his seafaring days.

I did wish that I knew more about Argentinian and Chilean history while reading In Patagonia.  Chatwin often makes fleeting references to conflicts, revolutions and military leaders that I only half-understood.  It wasn’t enough to make me completely lost in the text, but I did feel that I wasn’t getting a full comprehension of certain anecdotes.

Chatwin tends to let tragedy and people’s callousness speak for themselves.  While on Navarino Island, Chatwin meets Grandpa Felipe, the last member of the Yaghan people lives in a shanty on base.  Grandpa Felipe tells Chatwin of how his people lost their language to compulsory English education, and then lost their lives to epidemics.  In another anecdote, Chatwin talks to an old English farmer who refers to the Ona people in terms of ‘tame Indians’ and ‘wild ones.’

After reading this book, the overall picture I get of Patagonia is that of a hardscrabble, lonely place, a place where one would likely  feel inconsequential.

Here are a couple excerpts from the book:

Paco loved his truck and called her Rosaura.  He scrubbed her and polished her and hung her cab with lace frills. Above her dashboard he fixed a statuette of the Virgin of Lujan, a St Christopher and a plastic penguin that nodded with the corrugations of the road. He pinned nudes to the roof, but somehow the girls were an abstraction whereas Rosaura was a real woman.

p. 79

Offshore there were grebes and steamer ducks, and out in the strait, sooty albatrosses wheeling effortlessly, like knives flying.

p. 134

Other reviews:

A Brooklynite on the Ice – “The tales Chatwin tells of them are typical of his unparalleled nose for backstory, his ability to find the choice historical nugget that gives a place meanings unrevealed by classical history.”

Macumbeira – “And what a story teller Chatwin was! We get it all and all in a same breath, in a short elegantly starved down style we switch from Paleontological Monsters to Mythological Unicorns, from American desperadoes to Communist agitators, from Wells and Darwin to Bakunin and Mandelstam.”

ricklibrarian – “The sharp-image quality may make little sense to someone plowing through the book quickly. To them it may seem to be just one thing after another. Readers need to pause and contemplate what Chatwin has shown them to draw their own conclusions about the place and its people.”

For credit, please click on photo.

The Autumn Castle by Kim Wilkins

2003. Aspect. Mass Market Pbk. 534 pages.

From: the public library

In a nutshell:

Christine Starlight’s rock-star parents died in a car crash when she was a teenager.  Now in her early thirties, she has followed her long-time boyfriend Jude to Berlin where he has a summer-long art fellowship.

Christine had lived in Berlin when she was a child.  Her childhood friend May had disappeared one night and was presumed dead.  When Christine briefly blacks-out in her apartment due to a household accident, she finds herself in another world, inhabited by faeries, and ruled by none other than her now-adult friend May.

As May finds herself attracted to the ‘real-world’ and Christine is drawn to the faery domain, a faery-hunter plots to make a lethal raid in May’s kingdom.

Review:

After enjoying Kim Wilkins’ novel Veil of Gold last year, I decided to seek out her backlist.  The Autumn Castle appeared to be a well-liked predecessor.  Similar to how Veil of Gold pulled from Russian folktales, The Autumn Castle delves into German folklore, with overtones of Grimm fairy tales.  It is not a retelling of any particular Grimm fairy tale, but characters’ backstories contain familiar elements: a bargain too eagerly made and soon regretted, quests to undo curses, talking magical animals.

Kim Wilkins apparently has a knack for creating characters that burrow into my affection.  In Veil of Gold, it was Em Hayward.  In The Autumn Castle, it was Christine as well as May’s faithful wolf advisor, Eisengrimm.  I loved how Christine and Eisengrimm quickly developed a companionable rapport.

I did look at some reviews on goodreads.com before writing this review.  Of course, when I do that, it makes me want to respond to some of the criticisms other readers had.  I remember a few reviews complaining about predictability, which surprised me.  I guess it depends on one’s past reading experience.  Having read Veil of Gold, I knew that there were no guarantees about characters’ safety from Wilkins.  I knew what I hoped would happen in The Autumn Castle, but I didn’t know if it would, and if so, how that would be accomplished.  Wilkins foreshadowed some events, but there was enough left ‘up in the air’ to keep me wondering what was going to happen next.

Also, a certain level of predictability doesn’t seem out of place for a book which consciously evokes Grimm fairy tales.  That’s my take anyway.

One thing I liked in both Veil of Gold and The Autumn Castle is how Kim Wilkins dealt with unprepared humans encountering fantasy worlds for the first time.  I’ve read a fair amount of urban fantasy and fantasy novels, and though it makes sense that humans would react with disbelief to magical worlds, I get impatient if this adjustment period extends too long, or remains throughout most of the book.  I appreciate that Wilkins dispatches of this stage quickly and in a way that works with the characters and setting.

The Autumn Castle is less bleak and desperate than Veil of Gold, but there are still high stakes in play, and not just of lives, but of love and memory.  The villain is utterly creepy, psychotic and dangerous, but the rest of the characters are quite capable of causing hurt to each other in regular human ways (even if they are faery.)

So chalk this one up to another good fantasy read.  And I just found out while writing this review that The Autumn Castle and Veil of Gold are books 1 and 3 respectively of The Europa Suite.  Apparently book 2, Giants of the Frost, is based around the tales of Scandinavia.  So I guess I know which Wilkins book I’m going to read by next.

Other reviews:

Geranium Cat’s Bookshelf – “However, although I liked [the characters], and romped through the book at a rapid pace, I felt its grisly themes weren’t fully realised.”

Karissa’s Reading Review – “This is an urban fantasy that is more like some of Charles DeLint’s works than the more modern urban fantasies that are being published by the boat loads.  To be honest, although I enjoyed the fairy-tale like quality to the story, it was a bit slow for me at points and I missed the action.”

 

 

 

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

2000. Doubleday. Hardcover. 521 pages.

From: the public library

Recommendation by: She of A Book Blog. Period.

In a nutshell:

The Blind Assassin is at its core the story of Iris Chase and her sister Laura, told mostly from the perspective of Iris in her old age.  The Chase sisters were born into a family made wealthy by the success of button factories.  The story particularly focuses on a period of time in the 1930’s, shortly before and after Iris’ marriage to the successful older businessman and aspiring politician, Richard Griffen.  Iris’ memories are framed by her musings on being old and on change.  The story of the Chase sisters is interwoven with newspaper clippings and also with chapters from a small novella called The Blind Assassin, written by Laura Chase.

Review:

The Blind Assassin is an ambitious book, with all of its plot strands.  The strands are certainly connected but at first the connections are small – a shared detail, a turn of phrase – until the reader has figured out the bigger picture.  One can figure out much of the mysteries of the story before they are explicitly spelled out, but the final illumination remains necessary.

The main mystery of the novel (and this is not a spoiler) is why did Laura commit suicide?  Readers know from the beginning that she was 25 when she drove off an embankment and died, and so as the flashbacks lead up to that point, we gather more information as to the reasons behind her act.

The Blind Assassin is not a happy book.  As children, Iris and Laura are ill-educated by a parade of incompetent or worse tutors brought in by their father.  Iris marries while still quite young and is manipulated into compliance by her husband and his sister-in-law Winifred.  (The characterization of Winifred is extremely well-done.)  Laura is a questioner and a rebel, but events and people work to break her spirit.  The sisters have one short period where they are unified in purpose, but for most of their lives, they completely fail to understand each other.  There is a pervasive feeling of isolation. Closing the book, I felt perturbed and heavy in my mind.

In She’s review of The Blind Assassin, she intriguingly had said that The Blind Assassin struck her as a more adult version of I Capture the Castle.  She couldn’t quite put her finger on why.  I can see why that comparison might come up, especially in the flashbacks of Iris’ pre-marriage days: two temperamentally different sisters, dwindling resources but a big house, a father who locks himself away from the family, an artist step-mother figure.  But the comparison that jumps more readily to my mind as I’m writing this review is actually Atonement.  In telling the story of herself and her sister, Iris is seeking redemption for mistakes made while young.

Iris rejects the beatification that her sister has received by fans of Laura’s book.  I wasn’t sure if the novel was also trying to paint Laura as a ‘better’ person than Iris, but I don’t think so.  Sure, Laura has her eyes more open than Iris and is more independent, but I didn’t like her all that much, even when I knew her whole story.

This is the first book I’ve read by Atwood and I really did like her writing as it was exquisite.  Sometimes I can be annoyed by placidly pretty writing, but Atwood’s style is beautiful without being inert:

The leaves of the maples hang from their branches like limp gloves; on the sidewalk my shadow crackles.

p. 83

I said earlier that I particularly admired Atwood’s characterization of Iris’ sister-in-law Winifred.  Here is an excerpt about Winifred:

“Call me Freddie,” she said after I’d sat down. “All my chums do, and I want us to be great chums.” It was the fashion then for women like Winifred to favour diminutives that made them sound like youths: Billie, Bobbie, Willie, Charlie. I had no such nickname, so could not offer one in return.

“Oh, is that the ring?” she said. “It is a beauty, isn’t it? I helped Richard pick it out – he likes me to go shopping for him. It does give men such migraines, doesn’t it, shopping? He thought perhaps an emerald, but there’s really nothing like a diamond, is there?”

While saying this she examined me with interest and a certain chilly amusement, to see how I would take it – this reduction of my engagement ring to a minor errand.

. . . .

(She was a card player, I discovered later.  Bridge, not poker – she would have been good at poker, good at bluffing, but it was too risky, too much a gamble; she liked to bid on known quantities.)

p. 231

For all the skill evident in The Blind Assassin, it’s not a book that makes me rapturous.  It was not a book I took to my heart.  Still, I’m glad to have finally introduced myself to Atwood’s excellent writing.

Others’ reviews:

an adventure in reading – “I can see why this story was written how it was, and it is very ambitious and well done, but overall, it didn’t resonate with me. I felt too detatched from the characters since Iris herself wasn’t very aware for much of her life.”

Evening All Afternoon – “Atwood’s feminist passion is still here, but it’s incorporated more smoothly and less didactically than in either of her other novels I’ve read, and is just one part of a seamless, enthralling story.”

Sophisticated Dorkiness – “Iris is, I think, one of my favorite fictional narrators of all time. She’s crotchety while still vulnerable, quick-witted even though her body is starting to fail her, and desperate to atone for mistakes the reader isn’t sure she has even made.”

The Best Travel Writing 2008

Beirut. Click on photo for credit.

Subtitle: True Stories from Around the World

Edited by James O’Reilly, Larry Habegger and Sean O’Reilly

Introduction by Sara Wheeler.

2008. Solas House. Paperback. 323 pages.

Review:

I have previously read books from the Best American Travel Writing series  and really enjoyed them.  I noticed my library also had several books from The Best Travel Writing series, so I decided to check out this 2008 edition, because Sara Wheeler (Terra Incognita) wrote the introduction for it.

Despite the similar names, the two series are not related to each other. The Best American Travel Writing series are one genre segment of the Best American Series run by Houghton Mifflin.  The Best Travel Writing series is published by Travelers’ Tales.  Another major difference is that essays chosen for the Best American Travel Writing series have been previously published, usually in magazines.  The Best Travel Writing essays, from what I gathered, have not been previously published and are frequently the winners of the Solas contests sponsored by Traveler’s Tales.

In travel writing, the writers are often balancing between an outward and an inward focus.  If there is too much focus on the personal, the writing is in danger of a self-absorbed tone.  A complete lack of the personal, however, and the narrative may seem cold and unengaging.  Successful essays may reside on either end of the spectrum, but I usually like essays somewhere in the middle.

I want to say that many of the essays in The Best Travel Writing Series 2008 were too inward-focused for my tastes, but that doesn’t quite hit the mark.  It was how the personal was described that bugged me.  I don’t mind writers’ personalities coming through and knowing something about their background and where they’re coming from.  But in a number of these essays, the writer didn’t really say why they were in a particular country or what drove them to be there.  So when the writers wrote about their emotional response to a place or event, I found it hard to be on board, because I felt distanced from them.

Also, another problem I had with some of the essays was over-wrought poetic-to-a-fault writing.  The writer would take a moment – watching a flamenco dance, or visiting a Filipino faith-healer – and endow it with so much Meaning, and so many adjectives, that it was tipping over into the ridiculous – at least for my tastes.

Of course this wasn’t true for all of the essays.  The following avoided the above pitfalls and were the highlight of the collection for me:

“Heroes of the Caribbean” by Kevin McCaughey

This is a humorous essay describing the writer’s time on a luxury cruise with his seventy-something parents and a friend.  He and his friend hang out some with the crew members, and get a little behind-the-scenes knowledge.  My favorite part was the writer and his friend’s fascination with a manic electric fan on the island of Guadeloupe.

“Key to the City” by Catherine Watson

Watson used to live in Beirut as a graduate student in 1963.  Decades later, she returns to the city, with the key to her old apartment still in her possession.  While on her visit, she experiences great hospitality from a family living in her old neighborhood.

“Mount Rushmore Revisited” by Tony Perrottet

Perrottet delves into the history and controversy of Mount Rushmore.

“The Tides of Burano” by Eliot Stein

Stein tells of his trip to Burano (near Venice).  There he meets a 90-year-old woman and her daughter.  The elderly woman is one of the few that still knows how to make the famed ‘Air Stitch’ in Burano’s lace-making trade, a trade which died off eventually.  This was a sweet essay without being cloying.

“Once that Gun Goes Off” by Laura Katers

In this essay, the writer gets spontaneously swept up in Sydney’s 14km race.

“Tortola” by Richard Goodman

Goodman’s essay covers a not-so-great trip to this Caribbean island.   He finds himself in the uneasy situation of witnessing his hotel’s housekeeping staff participating in an ugly and public domestic dispute.

“Above Crystal Mountain” by Michael McCarthy

Following in the steps of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (which I have not read), McCarthy’s exhausted Himalayan hike with a Lama is interrupted by a robbery by Maoists – an event that has been expected by the travellers.

“Death of an Adventure Traveler” by Rolf Potts

On assignment to write about accessible adventure travel, Potts simultaneously tries to locate Mr. Benny, an old Burmese immigrant he had known from his previous stay in a remote town in Thailand.  Mr. Benny was a fascinating individual who had done everything from diving for pearls, to guiding on a rhino poaching expedition, to working for the CIA.  In parallel to his search, Potts laments the commercial idea of ‘adventure travel.’

Burano. Click on image for credit.

 

Teaser Tuesday: The Blind Assassin

It’s been a while since I have done this meme.  Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Miz B of Should Be Reading and the basic rules are to open your current book to a random page and share a sentence or two from it.

 

I am currently more than halfway through The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood:

There’d been a couple of close things – some previous entanglements. (This was how Winifred always spoke of women in relation to Richard – entanglements, like nets, or webs, or snares, or merely like pieces of gummy string left lying around on the ground, that you might get caught on your shoe by mistake.)

p. 232

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Click on photo for photo credit.

 

1998. Bantam. Paperback. 493 pages.

From: the library

Recommendation from: things mean a lot

In a nutshell:

Ned Henry is a time-traveling historian who has been commissioned along with other historians to go back in time to conduct research on Coventry Cathedral.  A wealthy benefactress is rebuilding a replica of the cathedral, which was destroyed by bombs in 1940.  After Ned is diagnosed with advanced time lag, he is sent back to Oxford 1888 for rest and also to correct a discrepancy accidentally instigated by another historian, Verity Kindle.  Unfortunately, the correction is not as simple to accomplish as Ned’s superiors believed, and Ned and Verity find themselves trying to solve the puzzle while navigating the strictures of Victorian society.

Review:

I had worried about not reading Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) before reading Willis’ book, as I knew To Say Nothing of the Dog alluded to Jerome’s 1889 book.  However, several bloggers assured me I would be okay with proceeding and they were absolutely right.

Plainly put, I adored this book.  I feel safe in predicting it will stand among my favorites of this year.  To Say Nothing of the Dog is a delightful blend of time-travel conundrums, historical fiction, literary allusions, and humor.   It even has some romance thrown in for good measure.  Willis’ writing is assured and lively: I trusted that wherever the story was going, it was going to be good, and just enjoyed the journey.  Much like a boat ride down a river, you might say.

This is a good sci-fi book for people who don’t think they like to read in that genre.  I’ll admit it took me longer than it should have to grasp the concept of ‘slippage’, but it was an exceedingly minor point of confusion.  Overall, the time-travel is described in accessible ways, without being too simplistic.

Ned and Verity are easy to like and root for, especially as their mission causes them to do baffling things such as take over a seance, play croquet with a Victorian spoiled brat who sneakily cheats, and organize an inane rummage sale.  The rest of the characters are quite memorable, including – and perhaps especially – the pets.

I had been hoping for a truly excellent book to sweep me away at the beginning of the year, and this was the one.  I definitely plan on reading the rest of Connie Willis’ books.

Others’ reviews:

Rat’s Reading – “What’s obvious from when [Ned and Verity] meet is that this is their love story, but without the schmoop. I like love stories without schmoop.

things mean a lot – “…it’s hilarious and chaotic and frenzied – yet everything manages to make perfect sense in the end. Connie Willis, my hat’s off to you. Where have you been all my life?”

The Written World – “On the one hand I enjoyed the story, but on the other I found the book way too long. I know she was making a point when she didn’t have her characters clear thing up really quickly, but I would get impatient.”

Library Loot: 2-2-2011

Library Loot is a weekly meme hosted by Claire of The Captive Reader and Marg of Reading Adventures.  Readers share what library books they have picked up recently.  Claire is hosting this week.

My last library loot contained a lot of fiction, and so when I was returning a book to the library, I decided to pick up some non-fiction reads as well.  It’s good to have options lying around.

I picked up only three books this time, as I’m still in the middle of reading the haul from my last library visit.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston – This might be more like reading a horror novel than an account of a deadly virus.  Ebola virus and its related viruses freak me out – but obviously not enough to keep me from wanting to read about them.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts – Jenny of Jenny’s Books said, “If you are ever going to read a book about a national tragedy, it should be And the Band Played On.”  High praise from one of my favorite bloggers.  Also, apparently I’m drawn to reading about viruses at the moment.

Safe Area Goradze: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995 by Joe Sacco – It’s a non-fiction graphic novel written by a journalist about a conflict I feel like I should know more about.