Worth A Read

Well our mini book club is underway and thus far we have read The Lovely Bones & The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. Our third book was chosen by S and is A Prayer For Owen Meany, the book the movie Simon Burch was based off of. So while I was on Amazon buying that book the other day I decided to load up and score myself some free shipping and purchased a whole slew of books that I hope to get through this year. Here's what I nabbed....

A Prayer for Owen Meany John Irving

Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsson

Once you start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there's no turning back. This debut thriller--the first in a trilogy from the late Stieg Larsson--is a serious page-turner rivaling the best of Charlie Huston and Michael Connelly. Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch--and there's always a catch--is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues. Little is as it seems in Larsson's novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don't want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo. --Dave Callanan

Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines Nic Sheff

Nic Sheff's powerful memoir of drug abuse and alcohol addiction is written in a brutally honest style that makes it difficult for anyone else to narrate. Happily, narrator Paul Michael Garcia delivers a strong and commanding reading that perfectly expresses the rawness of Sheff's most personal recollections. . . Endlessly memorable, Sheff's memoir is brought to life in a reading that captures the essence of his downfall. --AudioFile

A Reliable Wife Robert Goolrick

Set in 1907 Wisconsin, Goolrick's fiction debut (after a memoir, The End of the World as We Know It) gets off to a slow, stylized start, but eventually generates some real suspense. When Catherine Land, who's survived a traumatic early life by using her wits and sexuality as weapons, happens on a newspaper ad from a well-to-do businessman in need of a "reliable wife," she invents a plan to benefit from his riches and his need. Her new husband, Ralph Truitt, discovers she's deceived him the moment she arrives in his remote hometown. Driven by a complex mix of emotions and simple animal attraction, he marries her anyway. After the wedding, Catherine helps Ralph search for his estranged son and, despite growing misgivings, begins to poison him with small doses of arsenic. Ralph sickens but doesn't die, and their story unfolds in ways neither they nor the reader expect. This darkly nuanced psychological tale builds to a strong and satisfying close. (Mar.)

I also am in the process of reading 29 Gifts by Cami Walker while I await my Amazon shipment.

29 Gifts Cami Walker

Just a month after her wedding, 31-year-old Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; two years later, she was bitter, isolated, and addicted to both pain medication and self-pity. In need of help beyond drug detox, Cami takes the advice of a South African healer: give away something every day, for 29 days. Walker soon learns that being mindful of giving also means being open to gifts from others, and that gratefulness and mutual generosity is the key to a better, more rewarding life. Glimpses into Walker's day-to-day difficulties-work, family life, constant therapeutic treatment and addiction recovery among them-crop up among the stories of her daily gifts, grounding the work (based on Walker's Web site) in personal details. But the meat, an admirable reworking of The Secret (in that it should actually help someone, at least gift recipients), speaks largely to those already initiated into the cult of positivity.

I'll make sure to keep you all posted on what's worth the read, hopefully it will be all of them!