bookfrog | Entries tagged with best of 2007

In the first story, Owly finds a worm nearly drowning in a puddle and takes it home to recover. Later, the two of them set out to find Wormy's home.

In the second story, Owly and Wormy meet two hummingbirds.

These are adorable, wordless comics that really work. Anybody should like them. I loved them! Now, of course, I want my own copy. And the three additional volumes..

http://andyrunton.com/

Michael McGill is a private investigator living in his office when the President's chief of staff comes to see him. After casually revealing that he likes to shoot up heroin and shit himself while watching fashion models on TV, the chief offers Mike a job. Because of his tendency to find the weirdest shit the world has to offer, Mike is perfect to find a certain book that has been passing from person to person since the 1950s.

Setting out with a woman he meets in disturbing circumstances, Mike follows the trail of the book from weird shit to weirder shit.

I haven't enjoyed a book this much since Joe R. Lansdale's last novel.

Plus, it has the best line to start an action scene I've ever heard: "Let's do something really goddamn stupid."

Collection consisting mostly of letter fragments, along with some non-fiction and poetry. It's weird, I thought Chandler was a great writer before I picked this up, but now I absolutely adore him.

The collected writing paints a picture of a fickle man, a wise ass, an idealist, a romantic, a continually depressed man, a cat lover. He was really articulate about what makes fiction tick. I like to think he might have liked Shirley Jackson.

The book-chewing cat got at this book before I had the chance. I wish I knew how to make her stop this.

Excerpts:
It is an awful thing to admire a man's book and then meet him, and have your entire pleasure in his work destroyed by a few egotistical attitudes, so that not only do you dislike his personality, but you can never again read anything he writes with an open mind. His nasty little ego is always leering at you from behind the words.

*****

My enormous respect for our cat is largely based on a complete lack in her of this diabolical sadism. When she used to catch mice - we haven't had any for years - she brought them alive and undamaged and let me take them out of her mouth. Her attitude seemed to be, 'Well, here's this damn mouse. Had to catch it, but it's really your problem. Remove it at once.'

Arthur comes up into Ratbridge from his home underground to get some food for himself and his grandfather and winds up witnessing an illegal cheese hunt. Arthur is nearly caught, and his way back home is blocked off!

But he is saved from capture by a friendly box troll, and meets a nice man who tries to help him get home. The problem is, they keep getting further entangled with the cheese hunters and their nasty leader..

This is a magnificent adventure novel, silly and exciting--with great illustrations. I recommend you go find a copy right now!

David's mother dies, and then his father remarries. David feels betrayed by the marriage, and he resents his stepmother and new little brother. They don't get along very well.

David has begun to hear books talking to him, and sometimes he has fits where he blacks out. His dreams become stranger and stranger. And then one day, he hears his mother's voice calling to him from another world--and crosses into that world just as a German bomber crashes nearly on top of him.

This new place is somehow made up of fairy tales, and it's very violent and dangerous. David finds himself with no way home and only the vaguest idea that he must find his mother.

This novel is filled with the dark side of fairy tales and the pain of loss and acceptance. Some of the dialogue is kind of stilted, but I think that was to keep a fairy tale flavor to the whole thing.

Hell of a good read.

Lucky is ten years old. She lives with her guardian in a small town--Pop. 43. Lucky has one of the only paying jobs in town, sweeping up the porch of the museum after the twelve-step program meetings. She likes to listen in on the meetings, hearing the rock-bottom stories and how people found their higher powers. Lucky is still looking for hers.

Lucky's mother is dead, and she's worried that Brigitte, her guardian, will leave her and go back to France. Brigitte is Lucky's father's first ex-wife.

Lucky likes certain words, and she wants to be a scientist, so she collects bugs.

This book is in trouble because certain people object to a word Lucky hears and doesn't know the meaning of ("scrotum"). I would like to thank these people for protesting (even if it did mean that I was calling it "that nutsack book" up until I read it), because otherwise I might never have heard of this book.

And I love it.

Alex Feldman was born deformed. His brain was exposed, half his face is paralyzed. Though he's undergone surgery, he still looks hideous.

Gus Marchand was a man who equated ugly with evil, and a tyrant in his home. Marchand accused Feldman of stalking his daughter.

When Marchand is killed, Feldman is accused of murder and Barbara Holloway is called upon to defend him. The big problem is that her father is defending someone else suspected of the same crime. This is only compounded when Frank Holloway's client is found dead.

I went to bed early tonight. Five and a half hours later, I'd finished this book, in spite of the benadryl. It's a pretty fucking awesome book. You should read it.

This is the second time I've run into the beautiful-woman-falls-in-love-with-ugly-man theme in Wilhelm's writing. Though I love her dearly, I've started wondering why you never come across the opposite anywhere.

Harry is sick when he's six years old, and gets a weird ear infection. When the pocket of pus in his ear pops, that seems to be the end of it. But then he notices that sounds trigger things in his brain. He will see and feel things that happened to people when he hears a noise made by the incident.

Harry doesn't know how to handle this thing, and when he gets older he starts drinking to numb it. Then one night Harry sees a drunk guy kick the shit out of some men planning to mug him. Once the men are all on the ground, the would-be victim takes their money.. and passes out.

This is Tad, a guy with his own problems. Harry and Tad become friends, start helping each other not drink. Tad also teaches Harry some stuff about martial arts that slowly helps Harry let the smaller sound-memories wash over him.

But trouble is waiting as Harry's love life turns to shit and his childhood love comes back to town and asks for his help.

This is a hell of a book, funny, violent, and really well-written.

Rollo and Madlyn's parents have to go to America for the summer, so the two kids are sent to live with their old uncles and aunt in Clawstone Castle. At first Madlyn and Rollo don't understand why the castle is opened up to visitors when it causes everyone so much stress. But then they are shown the legendary white cattle that the people of Clawstone take care of. They are wild beasts, and the only pure white cattle in the whole world.

So the children decide to get some ghosts to make the castle more exiting. They find a man with a rat gnawing on his heart, a girl who had been cut in half, a bloody bride, a skeleton with interesting gobbets of flesh still stuck to him--and dancing dis-embodied feet. So everything is going well--and then disaster strikes.

I love this book. It's fun, and wonderfully gruesome--probably the best Ibbotson I've read yet.

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Bibliomania

Life's too short to read boring books.

Entries tagged with best of 2007

Navigation

Owly: The Way Home & the Bittersweet Summer, Andy Runton

Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis

The Raymond Chandler Papers

The Ratbridge Chronicles: Here Be Monsters!, Alan Snow

The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly

The Higher Power of Lucky, Susan Patron

Desperate Measures, Kate Wilhelm

Lost Echoes, Joe R. Lansdale

The Beasts of Clawstone Castle, Eva Ibbotson

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