Crusie, Jennifer - Bet Me

I thoroughly blame Jennifer Crusie for my three short hours of sleep last night ;).

Unfortunately, that led to an awful day at work -- pissed off, tired, just seeing the stacks of books to shelve made me walk to the bathroom so I could kick the wall in sheer frustration. Then I fell off the freaking ladder, at which point all I wanted to do was sit on the floor, cry, and chuck books at people.

Back to the book... fun, frothy, and highly enjoyable.

I love how Crusie writes about completely un-gorgeous characters and then makes them gorgeous. Min's overweight, and not in that slightly chubby way that feels like the writer is cheating. In Calvin's point of view, she's just lush -- a woman who should eat butter instead of going on Atkins diets.

ETA: I just realized Atkins is ok with butter. Or something. Oh well.

Bet Me's a little less serious than her later stuff has been, but it's just so enjoyable. I thought the emphasis on fairy tales was maybe just a little bit overdone, but in the end, didn't mind at all. Plus, I like how Min worries about happily ever after, because that was always my question as a kid.

And how could I not like Min? She eats! And not just eats, she eats like me! I was drooling through most of the book, and I don't even like chicken marsala or doughnuts (then again, never had Krispy Kreme). I just loved how she loved food, because food makes me happy in a sort of elemental way that very few things do. And she wears the shoes I would wear if 1) I had nice feet and 2) I never had to walk, ever.

I liked her friends, especially Bonnie and Roger and just how they knew, which was a nice contrast to Liza and Tony, who didn't get perfectly matched up, which would have been too cute. And I liked how the inlaws thing never quite worked out.

Lots of fun. Just thinking about it puts me in a better mood.

Links:
- coffeeandink's review
- rilina's review
- rachelmanija's review
- sophia_helix's review

Spufford, Francis - The Child That Books Built

A good read just because it let me revisit reading as a child. Spufford is very good at re-invoking that devouring sort of reading that I went through as a kid, the almost physical impossibility of letting go of a good book, and how sometimes, my book was more real to me that what was going on.

He read Tolkien and Narnia and E. Nesbit, like me, but he went on to sci-fi, while I kind of glommed on fantasy.

Some great bits in here, for me, especially the parts on learning America through books and having this strange, jumbled impression of modern America mixed with a sort of America from the turn of the century or from the sixties, taken entirely from books (Boxcar children, etc.), that made living in the real America so strange. Meatloaf was one of the most foreign things I could imagine. And learning vocab from books, how gradually the blank spots of unknown words would slowly clarify into hazy definitions. I still remember I learned "enigmatic" and "annihilation" from Elfstones of Shannara ("enigmatic" in particular drove me crazy, because that was the one way Terry Brooks described Allanon).

It was just interesting seeing how much our childhood reading experiences matched up and how they didn't.

And it made me remember the sheer, almost unworldly, joy I took out of reading as a kid -- not that I don't enjoy it now (obviously), but nothing ever quite matches that period in which you've just found something and must get your hands on every single book possible. I read voraciously, without discriminating between good or bad, and over time, it gradually narrowed down so I would spend hours in a bookstore trying to make sure I bought the right book so I wouldn't have wasted that time.