let's review "national bestseller"s here! :D

[underground]

judging from several posts that i have read (in threads like "10 books you can live without" and "your guilty pleasure"), i'm sure some of you are getting the shivers. but since "national bestseller"s are everything i've been reading lately, i thought it'd be interesting to see the opinions of some of you non-elitists about these books. :p

bee season by myla goldberg -- 3/5
in the beginning i thought the "bee" in the title would be more literal, but i guess i was confusing it with the secret life of bees by sue monk kidd (which i'm going to pick up anon :D), so i was pleased to find out that it's really about a spelling bee competition. i love spelling and words and everything about them; it may be a secret, yet-to-be-admitted fetish of mine. i love seeing the words that elly, the main character has to spell.

however, after the national spelling bee contest, the book seems to go downhill. the book suddenly is not really about spelling anymore and goes to talk about rather creepy subjects. because since the start i cared mainly about the theme of spelling bee and almost none about the characters, i continued reading without much interest. elly seems to go from a quiet, somewhat-likeable girl to a not-very-likeable girl. saul goes from a bad guy to a well-meaning good guy, which somehow i just can't accept. moreover, the focus seems to shift to miriam, a character that just doesn't appeal to me from the start. every time the narration centers around her, i wish i could be reading about aaron instead--and i don't like aaron much either.

this book also has its flaw stylistically. some authors can get away with writing a literary book that includes modern-day conversations, but goldberg's conversation sometimes can be too modern that the book doesn't feel like a "literary" novel. also, there are sentences that just don't sound quite right. for example, a paragraph begins with something like "so-and-so are walking here and there." allow me to be unreasonable because i can't provide any reasons, but it just doesn't sound right.

***
that's all i have for this book. anyone care to comment on the following? :p
- the da vinci code by dan brown ;)
- angels and demons by dan brown
- the life of pi by yann martel
- the lovely bones by alice sebold
- oracle night by paul auster
- me talk pretty one day by david sedaris
- extravagance by gary krist
- balzac and the little chinese seamstress by dai sijie
- old school by tobias wolff
- the kite runner by khaled houssini

please feel free to add the books i haven't mentioned. :)

[Satine]

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Neffinegger

4/5.

The book starts out pretty slow. I almost gave up after about 25 pages but kept plugging along. After the slow start, the book is nearly impossible to put down. A bit lengthy (over 500 pages) but you would never know it by how well it reads.

Henry, a librarian, involutarily travels through time to different stages of his past and future. He gets himself into all kinds of trouble along the way, but the main plotline of the book is centered on his relationship with Clare, whom he meets when she is 6 years old and he is in his 30's, and he knows that she is to be his wife. Clare is a 'normal' person and comes to know Henry as her special friend, and as she grows older she falls in love with Henry and they are married.

Life between a normal person and a time-traveler is difficult at best, but Neffinegger does an excellent job of conveying the emotions of the two main characters throughout the story. When you close the book at the end, you are satisfied with the result.

Although this book is considered fiction there are sci-fi undertones, but more than anything this is an unconventional love story that is worth taking the time to read. All in all, great book.