Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (2012)

Endearing, quirky novel that flips back and forth through time and continents and several different narrators. 

From a development girl in present-day Hollywood to a tiny Italian village on the sea and its young hotelier and his actress guest to the producer who connects them both, this is an awfully fun and well-written novel. 

What other novel includes the Donner Party, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Cleopatra, Italian wiseguys and Richard Burton? 

Full of interesting insights into Hollywood new and old, theater, music and, of course, love!

Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson by Judy Oppenheimer (1988)

Shirley Jackson is one of my Adored Authors.  She was a fascinating writer and was an even more fascinating person.

Her short stories and novels are uncanny and unsettling, while also being dryly humorous. Her domestic, humorous stories are completely delightful as well and give no indication of her being anything more than an ordinary, frazzled housewife--certainly not the well-regarded writer that she was. 

This book about her life tells her story vividly. She was incredibly complex psychologically, and lived her life to the fullest in some ways (drinking, smoking, socializing, eating) and not to others (borderline agoraphobia).  Plus, her relationships with her husband and her children--fascinating.  I loved reading about her life as an author, particularly the response to The Lottery when it was printed in the New Yorker.  To this day, it generated more mail than any other story before or since (at least in 1988 it did).

I loved these quotes that, for me, sum up why Jackson's work is so compelling to me:

"It was Shirley's genius to be able to paint homey, familiar scenes like this, and then imbue them with evil--or, more correctly, allow a reader to see the evil that had been obvious to her all along, even in sunny Burlingame. One felt the presence of a grinning skull behind the cover of surface gentility, homemade biscuits, shining floors, and this is what made the tales to disturbing. Shirley never had to search for exotic locales or strange characters. You see, her stories seemed to nudge lightly, insistently at the reader, it was right here, right in front of you all the time." (p. 101)

And:

"That feeling Shirley could give readers--that the earth had suddenly slipped out from under them--worked just as well for hilarity as for terror, it turned out.)  (p. 120)

"King [Stephen, of course], in fact, dedicated one of his books, Firestarter, 'to Shirley Jackson, who never had to raise her voice.'"

Beautifully said, Steve!

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion (2011)

  

I picked up this zombie romantic comedy purely because they made a movie of it and the trailer looked cute.  By the way, isn't that cover great?

This is a very endearing zombie romantic comedy--yes, zombie romantic comedy--that tells the story of R, a zombie wandering around in a zombie vs. survivalist humans world.  The story is told from R's point of view, and there are many laugh out loud moments.  When he eats the brain of a young human and falls for his girlfriend Julie, it gets a bit more serious.

But throughout, it still has lovely touches of humor. Marion does a beautiful job of getting inside R's head and still showing what he looks and sounds like from the outside.  It's thoughtful and philosophical about the end of the world in a way that most zombie, post-apocalyptic novels don't bother with--certainly not zombie movies anyway. R, Julie and her friend Nora are very endearing characters as are the complex leaders of the humans.

Really a great book and rather gentle and sweet for a book about zombies. The book was blurbed by Josh Bazell, which is an excellent readalike in tone and humor.  Interestingly, Isaac Marion is publishing The New Hunger, the prequel to Warm Bodies only as an e-book right now. 

To the Moon and Back by Jill Mansell (2011)

Oh, I just adore Jill Mansell. She's my favorite writer of the moment. I love her complex, realistic characters, her complicated family and romantic relationships, and her light and dry humor. And I adore the British setting--with just enough realistic details to make me all nostalgic for London. Sigh!

Oh, did you want to know what this book was about? Here you go: 

Ellie lost her husband tragically and suddenly a year ago. Tony, her handsome, actor father-in-law convinces her to move into his lovely flat in Primrose Hill. Ellie makes friends with her kooky neighbor Roo, and gets a job as an assistant to the handsome investor Zack. She starts to date her late husband's best friend and things ensue. With Mansell, though, it's really about the charm of the writing and the characters more than any plot details. Plus, I think Jill Mansell writes people falling in love better than anyone else I've ever read. Lovely!

Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny by Nile Rodgers (2011)

I LOVED this book.

I picked it up because of a rash of reading memoirs by members of the band Duran Duran (it's true--dang nostalgia) and they kept referring to Nile Rodgers in such glowing terms. I thought it would be interesting to read what he had to say about them. Not much, as it turns out, and I almost returned this book, but I read his captions on the photo spread and liked his sense of humor so I read it. Example:

"Here I am with the band for my second solo album, filming a video for our single, 'State Your Mind.'  A black man fronting a big-haired white band was a novelty then, but not the popular kind."  

The book starts in the late fifties in Greenwich Village, where Rodgers lived with his mother and white stepfather, who were heroin junkies. His fascinating childhood includes stops in the South Bronx, Alphabet City, South Central L.A., time spent in a sanitarium for ill children, and includes fascinating family and friends as he travels through the Beat Generation and the rise of Black Power, then the hippie movement. 

He has a vision of a new kind of black/white funk music, and sees tremendous success with his band Chic, only to be cast out and scourged when the Disco Sucks movement takes off. He produces some of the most iconic albums of the 1980s (David Bowie's Last Dance, Madonna's Like a Virgin, Duran Duran, and way more) and manages to do it all while doing a lot of drugs. He finally cleans up his act, starts a foundation that does great work, and in the last two pages of the book, gets a diagnosis of advanced cancer.

 In the last paragraph, he talks about his family's many secrets and how he'll keep this one (his diagnosis) from them. It may not turn out to be such a big deal, he says.

 MAN! This is a freaking awesome book. He tells his amazing stories with a lot of humility and a lot of humor and no self-pity and no arrogance. The amazingly vivid characters of his family members and his relationships with fellow musicians will definitely stick with me. SUCH an awesome book. So many bits of great language and humor are in this book that I can't quote them all, or I'd be typing out the whole book.  I will tell you that I loved his description of himself skipping school and "kicking back like Dean Martin with a cocoa martini."  Love.  SO much love.

Sweet Evil by Wendy Higgins (2012)

In a vast world of paranormal teen lit, this is an unexpectedly great novel (recommended by an actual teen). Yay!

Our heroine Anna Whitt has extremely sharp senses, but has never understood why. As the novel begins, she finds out that she is the daughter of a fallen angel (and a non-fallen angel) and her life is about to change.

Higgins creates a beautifully constructed world and peoples it with realistic characters, including the hot son of another fallen angel to whom Anna finds herself overwhelmingly attracted.  Great, realistic situations and complex, believable characters. Although incredibly readable and enjoyable, it ties in quite sneakily and successfully with adolescent issues (heightened senses stand in for raging hormones, complex parentage for feeling special, and peer pressure as an actual job).

Note for completists:  This is the first in a planned trilogy; parts two and three are not yet published, but certainly worth checking out.

Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by Emma Straub (2012)

Elsa Emerson was born and raised in Wisconsin, where her family runs a summer theater company.   She grows up around theater and actors, and becomes an actress herself.  She marries another actor and heads off to make their fortune in golden-age, studio system Hollywood. She has a couple of kids, gets discovered by a studio head and becomes a minimal star--now known as Laura Lamont.

She struggles between her identities and faces all sorts of challenges. It's basically a women's picture, like Mildred Pierce, and is a pretty good rags-to-riches actor story that doesn't end when the stardom does.  The story follows Elsa/Laura from ingénue-you're-going-to-be-star-baby to mature actress to dipping her toe into television, the whole time watching Hollywood change as she does.

I really liked some of the characters and the story takes some unexpected turns which are awfully interesting, but the passivity of the main character at times left me slightly cold.  Although I didn't love it while reading it, the more it sits with me, the more I like it and the more it lingers with me.  I love the scope of her life and her career, and how she changes as Hollywood changes--a story that just isn't told very often.

The Cranes Dance by Meg Howrey (2102)

Although the title sounds like a nature book, and as though it's missing an apostrophe, this is a fabulous novel about Kate, a New York City Ballet dancer, and her complicated relationship with her sister, a fellow dancer who has recently had a nervous breakdown and moved home.

The subject matter is serious, but narrator Kate is incredibly witty and deconstructs ballet hilariously. Her synopsis of Swan Lake is deliciously funny. In addition to being funny, it actually provides great insight into the mind and body of a ballet dancer and the art of dance. Not to mention the complex relationship of sisters, especially competitive sisters.

Snarky, hilarious, poignant--I really, really enjoyed this novel to the point that I'll be looking up other works by the author and even works by authors who blurbed this novel. Books like this are total diamonds in the rough; interesting, engaging novels hidden away in a flood of trade paperback original novels with enticing covers.

People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry (2012)

Subtitled: The True Story of a Young Woman who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up.  If you aren't sold already, just based on that awesome title and subtitle, here's what the book is about:  In 2000, a young British woman named Lucie Blackman was working as a hostess in a club in Tokyo when she disappears completely.  I mean, completely.

This true crime novel is fascinating on a number of levels.  First of all, it's got great literary credentials as Richard Lloyd Parry was the Asia editor of the Times of London.  Parry explores the 'water trade' and the complex hostess and hospitality culture in Japanese society.  He gets in depth with the complex relationships between Lucie's parents and family and friends.  He also provides an interesting look at the Japanese criminal process, and how very different it is from the American process.  And the book is just flat out suspenseful and gripping.  It's one of the best true crime books I've ever read.

Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979)

Written in the mid-1970s and set in contemporary times, Kindred is about Dana, a black woman in her 20s who is mysteriously pulled back in time to the antebellum South to keep saving the life of a man she eventually finds out is one of her ancestors.  Dana keeps getting pulled back and forth in time--sometimes alone, sometimes with her white husband--and her life keeps intertwining with that of her ancestor and the slaves he keeps on his plantation. 

Provides a fascinating look at the lives of slaves, as well as life for any black person in the antebellum South.  In addition, it's a very interesting look at the relationship between Dana and her husband and their life in the 1970s.  Although it sounds a bit grueling, it's also compulsively readable and amazingly well told.

In the edition I read, there was a fascinating critical essay by Robert Crossley that provided more context.  Despite being so much of its time period, the novel itself does not seem dated at all.  It's still a fascinating novel with a lot to say.