Ready Player One

Ready Player One By Ernest Cline Rating	Published [2011] First Sentence "Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest."
Publisher's Description: In the year 2044, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines—puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them.    But when Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade's going to survive, he'll have to win—and confront the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.
Dear Reader, This book is one of my top ten favorites. I listened to it on Audible. It was narrated by Will Wheaton who played Wesley Crusher on the 1980s-90s Star Trek: The Next Generation. This book is a geek-fest for anyone who relished and rolled around in their youthful obsessions. Most interestingly the plot surrounds the history of video gaming. It also takes place in a future dystopian version of the world. I like that Cline make the destruction of the eco-system as the reason why the world is so messed up. Plausible and important to continue to bring the fore-front of readers minds'. I also love that he has virtual reality as the world in which everyone chooses to live their life. With the way that our current world is so engrossed in our technology it makes evolutionary sense that we will end up inside the technology. Those who have ended up on the outskirts of the cool crowd and who played (or still play D&D) and embraced their nerdiness, can completely relate to the main character, Wade Watts/Parzival. I learned so much about how video games evolved since Cline used-semi-historical fiction to build the world of Ready Player One. I also enjoyed the love story between Parzival and Art3mis. Teenage love with the high stakes of the contest. Art3mis is also an equal on this playing field with her knowledge and dedication to what may seem nerdy, I can relate and admire that with my own store of Star Trek, World of Warcraft and Buffy knowledge. I appreciated that the author had the protagonist, Wade utilize his new found money from sponsorship move into the city and set up his studio apartment with security and tech to allow him to maintain his quest. I like that they have a system in which a pizza can be delivered to you through a door slot without ever having to have human contact (if so desired.) Without going into to spoilers, because the movie version is quite different than the book version, I like the undercover lengths that Wade undergoes to achieve his goals and eventually win the contest. Commentary on Movie vs Book. I enjoyed watching the movie in the theater. The trailers had really painted an amazing job on the amount of pop-culture references and Easter eggs and music choices to represent the world of James Halliday. I was disappointed in something such as how quickly Wade and Art3mis meet IRL in the movie since that was really the last 10 pages of the book. Shoto and Daito - uhhh he's not 11 year old kid, why do they speak English so fluently and the consequences are a little more depressing that what happened in the movie. Odgen Morrow's role in helping the kids towards the end of the movie was much more believable than what they had his character do in the movie. Overall I liked the book more than the movie- but isn't that usually the case? Yours, Marsha

Support Shelf Notes! Purchase your copy of this book here:

My Sunshine Away

My Sunshine Away M.O. Walsh 4.5 / 5	Published 2015 First Sentence "There were four suspects in the rape of Lindy Simpson, a crime that occurred directly on top of the sidewalk of Piney Creek Road, the same sidewalk our parents had once hopefully carved their initials into, years before, as residents of the first street in the Woodland Hills subdivision to have houses on each lot.”
Publisher's Description: It was the summer everything changed...  My Sunshine Away unfolds in a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, cauldrons of spicy crawfish, and passionate football fandom. But in the summer of 1989, when fifteen-year-old Lindy Simpson—free spirit, track star, and belle of the block—experiences a horrible crime late one evening near her home, it becomes apparent that this idyllic stretch of Southern suburbia has a dark side, too. In My Sunshine Away, M.O. Walsh brilliantly juxtaposes the enchantment of a charmed childhood with the gripping story of a violent crime, unraveling families, and consuming adolescent love. Acutely wise and deeply honest, it is an astonishing and page-turning debut about the meaning of family, the power of memory, and our ability to forgive.
Dear Reader, This book caught me so off guard. But it hooked me almost instantly. I fell in love mostly with the nostalgia of it; it's strange to see people writing about the childhoods of MY generation, now! I am so used to reading of those of my parents, and while I do have a soft spot for the '50s and '60s, I have to say it was really moving to read about the '80s. Granted, the narrator was slightly older than me, but not by enough that it really mattered. He painted this incredible image of the innocence of growing up in that era, and how it was shattered by events like the explosion of the Challenger and, in the book, the rape of a neighborhood girl in a place where such things just did not happen. I did not grow up in a neighborhood like the one Walsh describes, but I knew of them well: burgeoning developments where young parents moved in order to raise their families near their peers. At one time, I was quite jealous of my schoolmates who would talk of running around with the other neighborhood kids in a pack, exploring or playing Kick the Can or Capture the Flag until dinnertime. I grew up on a street which was not designed as a neighborhood, one which did not have many other children. We didn't have that same experience. While now I wouldn't change my childhood for anything, I know there were times when I was younger that I wish I'd experienced the camaraderie. So this book was especially interesting to me in how it managed to capture my "nostalgia" for something I never even personally experienced. But it did so quite well. I felt like I was one of the neighborhood kids, running around with the rag-tag gang, experiencing their discoveries, joys, and sorrows along with them. Overall, this book is at its core a story about the transition out of innocence. The narrator grows from harboring a pure, unadulterated boyhood love into puberty, where love becomes commingled with adult lust, and everything changes. Those times are difficult and confusing for all of us, and we often find ourselves unmoored during that transitional stage. To have the loss of innocence of a neighborhood girl - the very object of his crush - become intertwined with simply trying to grow up? That just made everything worse, particularly when the narrator himself became a suspect in the rape. Throw into the mix several other innocence-obliterating situations, and this book truly explored the depths of the often aching pain of growing up. And I have to say, I have a serious soft spot for those sorts of stories (Stand By Me or The Outsiders, anyone?). This book is also, as many others have pointed out, a love song to Baton Rouge. I did not grow up in the South, but I really loved this depiction of it. I love that the author was willing to examine in depth both the happy and darker sides of his hometown. He wrote with as much joy of the late summer night crawfish bakes as he did pain at the neighborhood’s loss of innocence. Walsh clearly loves his native state, and the reader loves it through his eyes. (It made me wonder often how much of this tale was the author’s own, and how much fiction.) I clearly can’t write enough about what moved me so in this book - perhaps I am just going on in an attempt to pin it down, myself! In any case, let me just leave you with one of my absolute favorite parts of the book, one which others might overlook because it is found in the Acknowledgements section: “The first person I’d like to thank is you--anyone who took time to read this--for your generosity and spirit. Thank you for reading every single book you’ve ever read by any author from anywhere. It’s important.” How great is that?? I think I love this author. I look forward to seeing more from him. Yours, Arianna P.S. I also love the title...it evokes for me the (haunting, if you think about it the right way) sound of a young child singing that line solo...

Support Shelf Notes! Purchase your copy of this book here:

Hardcover:

Kindle:

Anatomy of a Misfit

Anatomy of a Misfit Andrea Portes 3.5 / 5	Published 2014 First Sentence "Pedaling fast fast fast, this is the moment."
Publisher's Description: Outside, Anika Dragomir is all lip gloss and blond hair—the third most popular girl in school. Inside, she's a freak. A mix of dark thoughts, diabolical plots, and, if local chatter is to be believed, vampire DNA. After all, her father is from Romania. Everyone else in Nebraska is about as American as an apple pie . . . wrapped in a flag . . . on the Fourth of July. Spider stew. That's what Anika is made of. But she keeps it under wraps to maintain her social position. One step out of line and Becky Vilhauser, first most popular girl in school, will make her life a living hell. So when former loner Logan McDonough shows up one September hotter, smarter, and more mysterious than ever, Anika knows she can't get involved. It would be insane to throw away her social safety for a nerd. So what if that nerd is now a black-leather-jacket-wearing dreamboat, and his loner status is clearly the result of his troubled home life? Who cares if the right girl could help him with all that, maybe even save him from it...? Logan. Who needs him when Jared Kline, the bad boy every girl dreams of, is asking her on dates? Who? Andrea Portes's emotionally devastating debut YA novel lays bare the futility in pretending to be something we're not and the value in finally celebrating all that we are—inside.
Dear Reader, Whoah. This book took me in so many directions. I was loving it at first, then meh, then I laughed, then I cried...but, ultimately, what I liked most about it was that it was kind of an anthem for high school, one which tries to point out (as many have before) that we shouldn't let the popular kids dictate what we do and who we like. And yet...I don't know how well that lesson is ever really learned IN high school. After? Of course. But, during? These kids are stuck in a forced social environment for 40+ hours each week. Of course they are going to be affected by what their peers think, and how they fit into the social hierarchy. They don't understand how little it will matter later - they haven't gotten to "later" yet. It sucks, but that is real life. But, I digress. Let me first say why I even picked up this book: it was the Big Library Read offered by Overdrive, which means that while normal Overdrive selections are limited to a certain number of checkouts (and thus you are often relegated to a hold list), this book was available to as many people wanted to read it, anytime - I think the concept was that it would foster a sort of community book club type thing. This lasted for the month of October; of course, I was too slow to get to the book "on time", but I still wanted to check out what all the fuss was about. I'll admit, I am a sucker for some good high school fiction, be it in book or movie form. Which is funny, because I'm not really into YA in a big way - I just like taking a look at the battleground that was secondary school, especially now that the scars are long healed over & I can view it all with some distance. I guess I find it fascinating, like an anthropology study. That, and I also enjoy me some good pop culture, for sure! So this book was a good cross between Mean Girls and Heathers - and, it did NOT advertise this in the least, but it took place in the '80s! It was so understated; I kept second-guessing myself, but the lack of electronic devices and the cultural references resting solidly in 30+ years ago resolved the issue for me. I liked that (understated) aspect of the book, and Anika's smart and snarky demeanor - she reminded me in many ways of Veronica Mars. She saw through people's facades and really tried to be a good person. But she could really get on your nerves at times, too, with her inner commentary and the way things unfolded. I just guess that despite this being a theme of every single worth-its-salt '80s movie, I still don't buy "the girl who everyone overlooked until some 'totally hot' guy thought she was worth his time" - that's not how life works. Eh. It was still a good book in that while that unlikely scenario DID play out...it wasn't, ultimately, the meat of the story. While this book had an ending that, again, was reminiscent of Mean Girls (much self-reflection in front of the entire student body), it was still well done and brought tears to my eyes for those who don't make it out of high school nearly as unscathed. One thing I am left wondering about: was the title a reference that I entirely missed? I kept thinking "Anatomy of a Murder", but I highly doubt this book was referencing a Jimmy Stewart movie from the sixties - the only connection being that both involved high school students, if I recall correctly? I keep thinking this must be an allusion to an album title that I not recalling...please, Reader, help me out if you have any ideas! Because otherwise I CANNOT figure out why this book was so titled. Anyway, hey - the BLR did get me talking, though, didn't it? Which I guess was the entire point. Thanks, Overdrive! Yours, Arianna

Support Shelf Notes! Purchase your copy of this book here:

Hardcover

Kindle

Ham: Slices of a Life

Ham: Slices of a Life Sam Harris No Rating	Published 2014 First Paragraph "When I was nineteen years old, while helping my aunt Betty reorganize her kitchen cabinets, I discovered a beaten and worn plastic Mary Poppins cup and saucer marooned in the back corner of an ignored shelf. They were issued in 1964, the year of the movie's release. My aunt told me they'd been intended for me when I was little, but my father had returned them to her because I was 'too obsessed with Mary Poppins and singing and dancing.'"
Publisher's Description: For fans of David Sedaris and Chelsea Handler, these stories and essays about friendship, celebrity, growing up and getting sober will have you laughing and crying in equal measure.With a wry style that evokes comparisons to Carrie Fisher, David Rakoff, and Steve Martin, Sam Harris proves that he is a natural humorist. Even The New York Times, in a review of one of his musical performances, called his stories “New Yorker-worthy.” Brilliantly written, these sixteen stories span Harris’s life from growing up gay in the buckle of America’s Bible belt to performing on Oprah’s first show after 9/11. In “I Feel, You Feel” he opens for Aretha Franklin during a blizzard. “Promises” is a front-row account of Liza Minnelli’s infamous wedding to “the man whose name shall go unmentioned.” In the title story, “Ham,” he describes how he was upstaged by a young child actor, unknowingly addicted to the spotlight. Taking on issues as diverse as addiction, fame, and parenting with his hilarious and deeply human voice, Harris’s entertaining tales trace an arc of personal triumph that is universally accessible and inspiring.
Dear Reader, I never do this. I could barely bring myself to. But: I had to abandon this book at the 47% mark - it was just too much work for me to finish. I kept forcing myself back to it, and I have so many other books I want to read. It was cute but not really up my alley, and SO not similar to David Sedaris, as it was marketed. I think it was a good memoir and great for someone who is dazzled by stars, but I just wasn't getting much out of it. Perhaps I will return to it someday, but for now - I have to abandon it for the sake of other books. I hate giving up on a book. But I have to be more picky for the time being. When you keep checking the percentage-done on your Kindle, you know you ought to move on... Yours, Arianna P.S. Full disclosure: I received this via netgalley in exchange for an honest review. And I'm not rating it here, since I did not finish it.

Support Shelf Notes! Purchase your copy of this book here:

Paperback:

Kindle:

Eleanor & Park (review by Arianna)

Eleanor & Park Rainbow Rowell 3.5 / 5	Published 2012 First Sentence "He'd stopped trying to bring her back."
Publisher's Description: Two misfits. One extraordinary love. Eleanor... Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough...Eleanor. Park... He knows she'll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises...Park. Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.
Dear Reader, I read this a while ago, but it's taken me some time to get around to writing a review.  I guess because I didn't love OR hate it, really, so my dispassion helped me avoid considering it really at all.  I actually did LOVE reading it, weirdly enough.  It was an engaging story which I couldn't stop listening to.  The audiobook was read by two different voices (Eleanor's and Park's) and it was well done by both the (I think they were) teenaged readers.  The story was really interesting: Eleanor is a new girl who was considered a serious "weirdo" in the 1980's by her schoolmates, who connects with quiet but cool Park over comic books and music.  I loved the premise, of course - I was certainly never the "cool kid" in high school, so I understand Eleanor's situation (although I was lucky never to be treated as poorly as she was!).  I loved the idea of the two bonding over the kinds of things I love.  I loved that they were two misfits who found love with each other, and how they supported and cared for each other so well, despite all of the obstacles to their being together.  And I don't really know what I didn't love about this book, but there was definitely something.  As much as I could really relate to a lot in the book, I just couldn't connect to it on the level I wanted to.  There was something holding me back.  And that's why I haven't been able to review this well - because I can't really pinpoint my feelings towards it.  I would definitely recommend this book to people, too.  I just can't express why I would, save from that it's about the 80's and mix tapes and teenage romance and how you feel at that age that you can save each other from the rest of the world.  I'm gonna change this to a 3.5, at least (I had it rated as a 3 before).  I'm sorry that I can't really review this one well.  (Maybe part of it was the build-up from others who had read and enjoyed it - almost nothing lives up to the hype, I've found, and my expectations are probably always too high.)  I'd still definitely recommend reading it.    Yours, Arianna P.S. Amber's review of this book was WAY more articulate than mine, and actually explains why she felt the way she did about the novel.  I think she's right - it started off GREAT, but didn't stay great, and that's really where the problem lay with it.  I think the ending was ultimately also great, but the middle had some blah-ish parts.  Plus, she's right: having to be dragged back to the feeling of teen angst and super-dramatic relationships might just have not worked as well with those of us who were lucky to survive it and move past it, haha.  Thanks, Amber!

Support Shelf Notes! Purchase your copy of Eleanor & Park here:

The Marriage Plot

The Marriage Plot Jeffrey Eugenides 3.5 / 5	Published 2011 First Sentence "To start with, look at all the books."
Publisher's Description: A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011 A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011 A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title One of The Telegraph’s Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011 It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,” real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old “friend” Mitchell Grammaticus—who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
Dear Reader, This book was NOT what I was expecting, which was an awesome thing.  I hadn't read thing one about it (or, at least, I don't recall anything I did read about it!), and apparently even when I picked it up as an audiobook on CD, I didn't even read the blurb on the back - I just went by the author's name, of whom I am a fan from having read his earlier Middlesex.  I really enjoyed his writing style in both novels, and his often unique approach to the world. This book was a complete departure from his earlier work, which took place in Detroit around the 1960s (but stretched three generations back in order to tell the story).  This one, on the other hand, began with the graduation of the class of 1982 from Brown University, in Providence, RI.  I love that Eugenides selected this time period, not only because I am a child of the '80s (and felt some nostalgia, even though the characters were certainly before my time), but also because it evoked a time of entirely different communications - before cell phones, computers, and the internet - which made for a very compelling story.  In fact, I'm not even sure the story could have happened the way it did were it set further in the future - much of the way life works out for Madeline and the rest can be attributed to the way they are forced to communicate: over the telephone, through hand-written letters, and in person.  And as much as I love my technology, it's a time I also miss: I am still a writer of letters and a fan of typewriters (although it's been years since I used one!).  In any case, I appreciate how the author selected this era: it was modern enough for the way life unfolds for the characters, and yet long ago enough that it evoked a twang of nostalgia for a bygone time. How could it have been told in any other time?  The graduates find themselves lost, entering the adult world at the time of a severe recession (another way I related strongly to this book!).  They are uncertain of what they want to do with their lives; this really was the first generation who was told they could do and be anything, and who felt that subsequent sense of drifting at sea when they didn't feel as if their futures were certain.  One character works at a scientific laboratory which (among other things) explores the relatively young field of genetics, and struggles with the newness of diagnosed mental illness combined with the administration of experimental medications.  Another decides to travel abroad on almost no money in order to see the world; this is no longer the purview only of the rich and spoiled children who graduate from Ivy League universities, but of all liberal arts students.  All of the characters find themselves struggling to self-identify (some with their sexuality, some with their vocations, some with their religion); they spar with the legacies of their parents and yearn to define themselves separately. I am not sure I really liked any of the characters entirely, but they were all very human, and you wanted to embrace them, flaws and all, as real people.  There were plenty of surprising moments in the book, but most surprising of all was that this was not a love story.  The title made me worry that it might be (I thought it might mean that the book outlined a scheme to get two people hitched).  Then the explanation of what "the marriage plot" actually referred to (the way Victorian-era novels revolved around getting a woman married off, as if she were nothing as a spinster) also threw me, as I thought this might be a modern-day take on the idea.  Which, I suppose, ultimately it was - but the ending will surprise you.  It did me, and pleasantly.  It certainly took an outdated ideal and updated it in a very real and appropriate way, I think.  And with enough of a modern twist that it ended up being a pretty feminist novel, I think. These characters and their stories will stick with me for a while to come, I think, which is always the mark of a good writer, to me.  If you can create these characterizations who come to almost feel like people you used to hang out with, then you've done something right. Yours, Arianna

Support Shelfnotes! Purchase your copy of The Marriage Plot here: