Special Topics in Calamity Physics

From Publishers Weekly:

(Marisha) Pessl's stunning debut is an elaborate construction modeled after the syllabus of a college literature course—36 chapters are named after everything from Othello to Paradise Lost to The Big Sleep—that culminates with a final exam. It comes as no surprise, then, that teen narrator Blue Van Meer, the daughter of an itinerant academic, has an impressive vocabulary and a knack for esoteric citation that makes Salinger's Seymour Glass look like a dunce. Following the mysterious death of her butterfly-obsessed mother, Blue and her father, Gareth, embark, in another nod to Nabokov, on a tour of picturesque college towns, never staying anyplace longer than a semester. This doesn't bode well for Blue's social life, but when the Van Meers settle in Stockton, N.C., for the entirety of Blue's senior year, she befriends—sort of—a group of eccentric geniuses (referred to by their classmates as the Bluebloods) and their ringleader, film studies teacher Hannah Schneider. As Blue becomes enmeshed with Hannah and the Bluebloods, the novel becomes a murder mystery so intricately plotted that, after absorbing the late-chapter revelations, readers will be tempted to start again at the beginning in order to watch the tiny clues fall into place. Like its intriguing main characters, this novel is many things at once—it's a campy, knowing take on the themes that made The Secret History and Prep such massive bestsellers, a wry sendup of most of the Western canon and, most importantly, a sincere and uniquely twisted look at love, coming of age and identity.

I'm about half-way through, and I'm finding it hard to put down so I can get back to other things in my life, like sleep.

New Book

Does anyone have any suggestions for the next book? Something old, something new????

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Eric Sanderson has lost his memory - he can’t remember anything about his life or who he is. He has been attacked by a force that he can’t see and that might only exist in his own mind. A note left by his pre-amnesiac self, the First Eric Sanderson, instructs him to phone Dr Randle, a psychologist. Dr Randle tells him that, since the death of his girlfriend Clio, he has been suffering from a rare dissociative disorder.

The First Eric Sanderson has authored a series of letters which help Second Eric Sanderson to piece together what has happened. It seems that since Clio died in Greece three years ago, the Second Eric Sanderson has lost all memory of his life and personality. The Second Eric Sanderson is also being pursued by a conceptual shark that moves though language and human interaction. The only way to stave off the attacks of this Ludovician shark is to utilise a series of diversionary tactics and to camouflage himself as someone else.

Eric Sanderson needs answers and to find them, he needs to recover his own memory, find out what happened to the First Eric Sanderson, what happened to Clio in Greece and how to kill the shark that is pursuing him. And so our narrator, the Second Eric Sanderson, is on the run and trying to piece things together before he loses his mind again to the shark.

Is Anyone Interested?

Personally, I miss this thing we were doing. I'd like to get it started again. My suggestion is that we just start with a new book. I was thinking of reading The Raw Shark Texts. I know Laziest has already read it, so maybe that's not fair, but I'm thinking we could at least get one post out of this. Two, if you consider the fact that I've read and commented on every book in here (so you know I'm good for it.) What do the rest of you think?

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-Jonathan Safran Foer

From Publisher's Weekly

"Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's "charring effect." It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty."

Here we go, turn the page.

Back to the Beginning

We've gone all the way through and we're back to me again. I'm really not sure what to pick. I'll make a couple of suggestions and see what you think. I have to be honest, since time is somewhat tight for me right now, I'm going to cheat and suggest the book I just finished or the one I just started.

My first suggestion for the next book is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.

The second suggestion is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Check out the links and get your votes in.

Willful Creatures: Stories - - By Aimee Bender

Joy Press - The New York Times

"A fabulist in the tradition of Angela Carter, Bender creates contemporary fairy tales, cushioned by goofy humor and a deep tenderness for her characters, that aren't always as dark or as sinister as they initially appear. Her twinkling, chatty prose style carries the reader effortlessly over the road bumps of implausibility. Stories in this collection alternate between absurd scenarios imbued with recognizable human pathos, and apparently ordinary tales pitched at an oblique angle that reveals their true strangeness."

GO, My Bibliophagists, GO!