Well, finished I, Zombie last week, and also started and finished Coraline. Next will most likely be Silent Tears: A Journey of Hope in a Chinese Orphanage. Since we should be completing our China adoption within the next year or so, the book hits close to home.
I decided to check Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion out from the local library after hearing about the upcoming film based on the novel. I spent a couple of engrossing (though not very gross) hours reading through it. The novel is told from the viewpoint of R - a sentient zombie. While he and his fellow Dead can’t remember much about who or what they were before, they form a society of sorts, living (oops - I mean, residing) at an airport and interacting with one another.
They can speak a few syllables at a time, with R and his buddy M being the most verbal of the group. The zombies form hunting parties to bring back parts of their kills for the young and the old/decrepit ones - known as Boneys. There’s even a religion of sorts, run by the Boneys. R gets “married” to a fellow zombie and they are given two child zombies to care for.
Things get interesting when R goes on a hunting party, and we learn what benefit they get from eating brains. I won’t spoil this, as it plays a large part of the plot of the story. During this hunt, R meets Julie - a Living girl to whom he feels strangely attracted. So he brings her back to the airport… alive.
The rest of the novel focuses on their interactions, and how R seems to become more alive the more time he spends with Julie. We also learn more about how the Living are surviving in this post-apocalyptic world once they return to the city…and she sneaks him in.
While the novel plays things a little more straight than the movie adaptation seems to, Marion still adds touches of dry humor to the story. For example, R provides a bit of exposition as follows:
“Eating is not a pleasant business. I chew off a man’s arm, and I hate it. Of course if I don’t eat all of him, if I spare his brain, he’ll rise up and follow me back to the airport, and that might make me feel better. I’ll introduce him to everyone, and maybe we’ll stand around and groan for a while.”
The characters are very well drawn and R’s humanity shines through - he is not a monster. It wasn’t until I read another review of this novel that I got the Romeo & Juliet references. R is Romeo and Julie is … well. yeah! Remember R’s best friend M Yep - he’s Mercutio and Paris and the Nurse fit in the story, too. I assume the warring Capulet and Montague families are obvious as well!
The plot is not as action-driven as a lot of the zombie fiction out there, but there are several fight scenes, especially closer to the end of the novel. There are some gory moments, too, but nothing compared to American Psycho, which I also just read. For what it’s worth, Patrick Bateman was much more of a zombie than R ever was!
But back to *Warm Bodies. *Sure, you have to suspend disbelief at times - Julie is a awfully resilient, and the climax of the story is a bit anti-climactic, to be honest. I can see where the romance element might turn some potential readers off, but this novel really is about more than the love story. It’s about what makes us human, and how memories and interaction are as much the key to survival as ammo and barricades.
This novel is on my Christmas wish list and I’m looking forward to seeing the film in February.
I don’t get Bret Easton Ellis at all, I think there is probably something he is going for with his emotionally detached and brutal style, but it escapes me completely. I think perhaps the goal is that it makes the events seem more real, more stark … but for me, the book ends up being more boring. I need more of an emotional hook to get invested in the story (and interestingly, Politzania, I would say the same thing about Natural Born Killers – the events depicted are horrific, but I don’t find them to have much impact because I feel so disconnected from them).
I haven’t done much reading myself since last month, I realize now! I did back-to-back readings of Connie Willis’s Blackout and All Clear. Overall, I enjoyed the story, but felt that her insistence on not editing was a mistake. THAT NEEDED SOME EDITING.
I also read Molly Ringwald’s collection of connected short stories, When It Happens To You. I was impressed by her writing voice and style, although I thought the content sometimes lacked nuance, and I was somewhat bothered by a few glaring inaccuracies that should have been picked up by an editor. Any editor, a junior editor. A random person on the street, even.
A middle reader that I thought was terrific was Three Times Lucky, by Sheila Turnage. It is a quirky mystery that manages not to be cloying, which is impressive.
I was not so pleased with Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead, which got strong reviews in the Times, but I thought was a snooze. WASPs and their comical problems, I just couldn’t buy into any of this. It was too bad, because some of the writing was lovely – it was just simply put to ill use here.
Agreed - I don’t think I need to read anything else by Bret Easton Ellis. He does give Bateman a little backstory/explanation there in the last couple chapters, but then the story just… ends. American Psycho was an interesting experience and I’ll leave it at that. Tho I did enjoy the history/review of 80’s pop music figures like Phil Collins & Huey Lewis and the News 
Working on Umberto Eco’s latest The Prague Cemetery - if this is his most accessible work, I dunno if I have the literary stones to attempt anything else of his! The main character(s) are, as tellyworth said “offensive and despicable” but much more compelling than any of Ellis’ cardboard characters. My relatively recent read of Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard gave me a little background on the Carbonari, but otherwise am feeling dreadfully ignorant, history-wise. I’m not sure I’ll get done with it before the e-book disappears from my Kindle next week, but I’ll give it a good try.
Jim Butcher fans, his new book is out today.
And if you are reading the Iron Druid series, there is a new one of those out today too.
I pushed my way through Name of the Rose and got about half way or so through Baudolino before giving up in disgust. I just can’t suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy his nonsense.
Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats and the Worlds They Came From by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Good but very sad.
Finished Lost Light, by Michael Connelly. Another winner. But this one seemed a bit unusual, and I finally realized this was the first Harry Bosch entry that was told in the first person and not the third. At the end of the previous novel, Bosch retired from the force – a situation that apparently won’t last long since I saw him back on the force in the Lincoln Lawyer series later – and in this book he’s doing the private-eye bit. Clearing up an unsolved case from his past. I guess Connelly wanted to give it more of a Philip Marlowe feel, and it works.
Taking a break from Connelly and will start A Mencken Chrestomathy, a volume of writings by HL Mencken, edited and annotated by the man himself. A chrestomathy is a collection of choice passages from an author. Odd, but I once knew an American newspaperman who was born and raised in Baltimore but claimed he’d never heard of Mencken. I thought he was pulling my leg, but no, it soon became apparent he was telling the truth. Strange little guy. You just had to know him. He eventually suffered a mental breakdown and was in and out of psychiatric wards here in Bangkok. And he’s still around. I’ve not seen him in years, but occasionally a piece he’s written will appear here or there. Plus we have mutual acquaintances, who assure me he’s still pretty ripe for the loony bin.
New library book Breed by Chase Novak. The blurb on the back says it’s “gut-churning” so I may need to read it only during the daytime. 
I’m binging on Peter Straub.
I have Mystery (his best book, IMO) on my Kindle and I’m listening to the Koko audiobook. They are both re-reads, but I read them so long ago that it’s all new to me, now. One of the little perks of aging.
After reading Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance I got sucked back into the Vorkosigan universe, and over the holiday weekend I re-read The Warrior’s Apprentice, The Vor Game and Cetaganda. (Ivan has some hilarious scenes in Cetaganda.)
I might continue with them after taking a break to finish my Andrew Jackson biography. I’m just up to the passage of the Indian Removal Act early in Jackson’s first presidential term, followed by the beginning of the Bank War.
So is this out of print already? According to Amazon, the cheapest buying option is $43.00. I didn’t like the first two * that * much.
Holy crap. That’s weird.
bitter brew. interesting book about budweiser beer and the family (s) that brew it.
my lager the loveydovey (mostly white cat with orange tabby spots and tail) was given to me in a budweiser box. i do read the more interesting bits to him.
It’s not available in the US yet. It should be out sometime in 2013. I had to order my copy from the UK, because I DID like the first two that much.
Conicidentally, Stephen King has a blurb on the front of this Breed book, saying it’s the best horror novel he’s read since Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.
I never read American Psycho but I got my impression of it from Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s review, where she sums it up as an indictment of its copyeditors because in addition to being disgusting, boring, and implausible, it’s internally inconsistent with a main character who the author can’t seem to remember if he knows how to cook or not. There’s a feeling sometimes that “oh it’s satirical” excuses all kinds of carelessness, but it doesn’t really. As the deportment teacher in A College of Magics (that I was re-reading last week) says, you have to flout the standards in a way that shows you do it from knowledge and not ignorance.
I’m currently reading Scholar by L. E. Modessit. His writing style reminds me of Dick Francis’s in that his books all seem to have the same structure and similar protagonists, men who are almost implausibly (but not quite) so quietly competent yet subject to sense of obligation so they end up doing stuff for others who need their help, getting into serious trouble and then finding their way out. Usually also having some kind of low key romance with an equally competent and understated counterpart love interest. Modessit’s often start out younger and less sure of themselves than Francis’s, because Modessit wants to make a series about him where Francis mostly preferred stand alone books, but it’s the same basic guy most of the time anyway. And the pleasure of reading it is seeing the same story play out in a new setting with new characters and the details of how, by doing what was the best choice available to him at the time, the character digs himself deeper into a problem and then finally gets out, doing usually a great service to the folks he was helping and giving the ones causing the trouble some comeuppance by the end.
Scholar is a bit unusual only in that the main character is less principled and more of a vigilante than most of Modessit’s protagonists are (and his do tend more toward that direction than Francis’s, who tend to live in a society more ruled by law, which seems to be the only reason). Quaeryt commits several avoidable self-defense-ish murders and a few assassinations of people who seem to him to be oppressing others. And he has hardly a scrap of remorse about it either. He’s not quite a Psycho as he is well intentioned, but he combines a sense of obligation to fix things with a power that lets him kill entirely unnoticed, and a lack of emotionally direct conscience. So that’s kind of creepy.
Speaking of creepy, I really enjoyed two recent Stephen King novels, Lisey’s Story and Duma Key. Each has a really well developed main character who is an older person, retired or widowed, and their encounters with the supernatural are well portrayed and entirely engaging to read.
I wondered if that were the case - but was too lazy to verify…
You could try The Book Depository. Free shipping anywhere in the world.
Sorry, just checked. Not available yet from there.
Finally I’m almost finished with* The Casual Vacancy* by J.K. Rowling. Boring, so very boring.
Next up- Doctor Zhivago.