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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
velveetahead has commented on (8) products
Post Birthday World
by
Lionel Shriver
velveetahead
, May 09, 2009
Irina McGovern is an American children’s book illustrator living in London with her long-time boyfriend Lawrence that might as well be her husband. He is a solid, dependable man who isn’t very romantic or passionate. They have their routines and that’s pretty much what their life has become–a series of routines. That includes having dinner with another couple each year on the husband’s birthday. He’s a famous snooker player in London who is almost past his prime named Ramsey. Lawrence is fascinated with snooker and Ramsey. Irina is pretty bored by the annual dinners until one year after Ramsey gets a divorce and Lawrence is out of town on a business trip, he convinces Irina to keep the annual birthday dinner date with Ramsey. Ramsey is passionate about snooker, drinking and life. After a night of a bit too much flirting and drinking, it comes down to a moment where Irina could kiss Ramsey or leave before things can’t go back to how they were. That is where the book splits to follow what happens depending on the decision Irina makes in that one moment. From there on out, each chapter alternates between the two different paths. I was surprised how each chapter veered so wildly from one another, but each version would still end up at the same big events throughout the years in Irina’s life. I could not decide which life was better. All of the characters were so well written. They were fully formed with quirks and flaws. You would love a character one moment and then couldn’t stand him or her the next. I would think one choice was the best one, but then there would be a downside to the situation Irina would find herself in. Then the other one would seem better, but it would also have downsides. No one choice seemed like the best one and the ending brought both sides together in a way that completely made sense. It was a great character book and I highly recommend it.
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In The Flesh Books Of Blood 5
by
Clive Barker
velveetahead
, August 24, 2008
I had read a lot of Clive Barkerâs short stories when I was younger, but forgot which ones I had read since I hadnât read them all. I couldnât remember if I had read In the Flesh or Inhuman Condition since they both started with the same letter. While reading this one, none of it was familiar until I got to the second of four stories, called âThe Forbiddenâ. It is the basis for the Candyman movies. I never saw the movie, but the story stuck with me since it was very creepy and gross. When I read it, the movie had not been made, but one scene in it became ingrained in my brain. A woman who is doing some graduate school research on a very poor neighborhood. She goes into an abandoned house to find drawn on the wall an extremely disturbing face laughing, but the doorway was being used as the mouth. It was so descriptive that when I had an assignment in my junior English class to describe a room that another person in the class would have to guess who it belonged to, I described that room. No one guessed it was the room of a psychopathic killer, but instead thought it was a messed up teenager. :) The first story in the book, called âIn the Fleshâ, didnât do much for me. It had supernatural and horror elements to it with a guy who had questions about good and evil and where sin comes from. Then he gets a cellmate who just isnât quite right. I think when I first started reading Clive Barker, I was attracted more to his horror stories, but as I got older, I enjoyed his fantasy stories more. The first one was more in the horror realm, but beyond the final twist and the âcityâ that he dreams about, I didnât care much about the crazy cellmate. I actually could have enjoyed the entire story if the cellmate had been left out, even though I guess it was the point of the story, I just didnât care for that half of it. I actually enjoyed each story more than the last one so I did enjoy âThe Forbiddenâ more, but my favorite part is still the room description. The rest of it was not as cool as I remembered. I did enjoy the third story, âThe Madonnaâ, that did have supernatural elements but it seemed more in the fantasy vein and I just loved it. It is about an abandoned bath house where naked women swayed some men to come to them, but the men might not have wanted to do it if they knew the consequences. My favorite story was the last one called âBabelâs Childrenâ where a women who loves to drive off the beaten path comes across a nunnery that isnât run by nuns, but has held some brilliant minds captive for years for some very twisted games. It was the most realistic story out of all of them, but you still had to suspend your disbelief about the games being played. With the way some things happen in the world, you wonder sometimes that maybe major world decisions are being made the way it is described in the book. I had a good chuckle about the absurdity of it.
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Great & Secret Show
by
Clive Barker
velveetahead
, May 31, 2008
Randolf Jaffe works in the Dead Letter Office in Omaha, Nebraska where he stumbles across people talking about the Art, which is something that exists in another plane of existence. He learns about Quiddity, which is called a dream sea where people float in their minds when they are born, when they fall in love for the first time and when they die. He wants to find out about this Art, so he leaves to find out more about. This leads to a huge battle between good and evil in a tiny California town where the residents do not know what to make of bizarre creatures that impregnate virgins, feed off of people's fears and dreams, and the threat of huge creatures trying to break through the plane of existence to bring hell on Earth. I tried to read this book many years ago, but didn't enjoy it back then. I think a lot of it had to do with that I loved when Clive Barker wrote about England in so many other stories. I was put off with almost all of it taking place in California since I did not view that as some exotic place and I became bored. I don't have that issue any longer, so I gave it another show in reading it. I loved it this time. It is a very big book, but it is an epic story and it needs to be long. I love how when other authors write fantasy and they create an entire different world that does not take place in any sense of the real world, but Clive Barker created this world in the middle of the real world. There were extraordinary beings interacting with ordinary people, and I enjoyed reading their reactions. My only complaint about it was after building up to what would be the final climax, there wasn't a great sense of urgency towards the end of the book. I didn't have my usual sense of trying to find out what was going to happen next, skimming over lines, forcing myself to go back and read slower so I wouldn't miss anything, but then going back to skimming so I could find out what happens next. Also, Barker has been very descriptive in other stories about horrors, but when he was trying to describe the huge, big baddies that were trying to break through, they didn't sound very gross or horrific. Even with those complaints, it wasn't enough to destroy my overall enjoyment of the book. Also, the very ending gave hope to the sequel (Everville) and another epic adventure.
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Dirty Job
by
Christopher Moore
velveetahead
, May 11, 2008
A man loses his wife just after she gives birth to their daughter and he discovers he is a death merchant that needs to collect soul objects after people die. I loved this book. I loved the way Christopher Moore constructs sentences. For example, instead of just saying that someone told someone else to hold on one second. Instead he writes, "Charlie was going to try to come up with some kind of answer when his cell phone rang and he held up his finger to pause time." I found the way he described completely normal, everyday situations in highly amusing and often comical ways. The main character is very identifiable since he is just an average guy who gets sucked into being a grim reaper, but doesn't know all the rules and not sure if he is doing anything correctly. While he stumbles around trying to figure that out, he has his young daughter to contend with who is a little bit odd, but he still thinks she is an angel, even when she brings hellhounds home as pets. It only gets better from there. Even with all the humor, the story was not just a light little story. There was thrilling aspects and a lot of suspense and tension in the major storyline and between characters. A lot of research was done about underworld aspects or a lot of imagination (if there was no research involved) about the entire underworld. It is a full-fledged story with humor to break through all the dark stuff. It really made me want to read other books by the author.
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Sharp Objects
by
Gillian Flynn
velveetahead
, May 11, 2008
A newspaper reporter at a small Chicago newspaper is sent on assignment to her old hometown in Wind Gap, Mo. to find out why young girls keep showing up dead. This was a really quick read. I found it very enthralling, especially the parts where the main character described why she cut herself when she was younger. I never understood cutting, so reading a character trying to describe why they say it and what they are thinking when they do it, helps to understand why young girls do it. That isn't the main part of the story, but just a subplot that really helps the reader get inside the main character's head while she is trying to work on the murder story for her paper in a town she did not want to return. She ran away to get away from her mother, but she was back living with her mother and her young half-sister that her mother adores, while also dealing with the haunting reminders of her dead younger sister that her mother obviously loved more than her. There is a lot going on in the story, but it is very well written. My only complaint was I saw who was committing the murders about halfway through the book. I didn't guess the full reason, but it wasn't surprising when I found out the full reason behind it. Gillian Flynn is a writer for Entertainment Weekly. She reviews television. I wonder if watching and reviewing crime shows gave her some ideas for the book, but from watching my fair share of them myself, I think that was what helped me guess the killer.
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Stardust
by
Neil Gaiman
velveetahead
, February 16, 2008
In old English times, young Tristan has fallen in love with the most beautiful girl in the village of Wall. She does promised him a kiss if he retrieved a fallen star, so he goes off searching for it. A quick read, written like the old fairy tales with flowery language. It reads as if it was written in the time that it takes place. It has the fantasy twist where beyond the Wall is a whole different world that most people in the village are not allowed to travel, but Tristan is able. He goes off having adventures, searching and finding the star, trying to get her back to Wall when she doesn't want to go with him and is angry that she fell in the first place. I enjoyed the star's spunk and unwillingness to cooperate with the young man trying to kidnap her, even though he didn't see it that way. He viewed her as an object and finally sees her as more than that, even though she isn't human, she still has feelings. Tristan was still likeable, even when he was so bull-headed and clueless that the girl he loved back home could care less about him. He grows up on his adventures, even though the entire book zips along really quickly. I would have liked if some parts were expanded upon more. I felt like parts of it were getting interesting and then it moved onto the next part. It wasn't a sudden jerk to a new topic, but the event would be wrapped up quickly or summarizes instead of told. Beyond that, it was a nice, sweet book.
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Survivor
by
Chuck Palahniuk
velveetahead
, February 09, 2008
Tender Branson is the last surviving member of the Creedish cult, but not for long as he has hijacked a plane which he intends to crash after he finishes telling his life story into the flight recorder. The book starts and ends with Tender Branson in the hijacked plane where he has nicely served everyone their last meal, landed the plane somewhere so everyone could disembark except the pilot who jumps out with a parachute later on so that Tender can die on the plane himself. He has been telling his life story into a flight recorder the entire book because that is what Fertility, a girl he is fascinated with that can see the future, told him to do. She hates her gift, but tells him about the future so that he can use it in his messiah gig, which he becomes sick of himself and eventually leads to the hijacking. The writing style is very similar to Palahniuk’s other books that I have read. There is a lot of repetition to make a point or to add humor, especially when Tender was made into messiah from agents and other media types. Throughout the story, there are injections of the best-selling prayer books that have his name on them, yet he never wrote. Prayers such as The Prayer to Delay Orgasm, The Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss, The Prayer to Silence Car Alarms. He has been turned into a messiah once all the other members of the Creedish cult have killed themselves in response to an apocalypse. The members they have sent out into society to make money to send back to the cult are supposed to kill themselves as soon as they hear the news of the deaths. It takes a while for them to all do it, but they finally do until Tender is the last one standing. The media hounds on this and make him famous. That is the second half of the book, which was amusing, but not my favorite part of the book. I loved the first part where we learn how the Creedish kids try to assimilate into regular culture, but not very well since they seem to be some kind of Amish knock offs. They are experts at cleaning and organizing things. Tender is a maid, cook, butler, gardner and general servant to a rich couple that he has never met in person. They leave him a journal of daily tasks he needs to complete and only communicate through the journal and speaker phone while at work or dinner parties. He knows how to prepare any kind of food and clean anything. The repetition technique was at work during that part of the book with the various cleaning tips, which I found to be hilarious and useful. Maybe someday, I’ll run into the need to get blood or some other stain out of various clothing and upholstery, and now I know how! The first part also has the side story about how a suicide help line phone number was misprinted in a newspaper story and gave his phone number instead. When people called, he didn’t tell them they had the wrong phone number, but would give them awful advice, like killing themselves. It is this dark, twisted humor that makes me like Chuck Palahniuk. It is also this section of the book where he mentions “suicide girls,” which apparently is where the website feature old school ’40s and ’50s pin-up-style photos of goth, punk and indie girls. He only mentions it in one sentence of the type of people who call the help line, but how it is a super popular phrase. Crazy.
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Night Watch Night Watch 01
by
Sergei Lukyanenko
velveetahead
, February 09, 2008
It is the first book in a trilogy. The book follows Anton as a worker in Night Watch, which is actually the good guys watching all the dark ones to make sure they obey the rules. The Day Watch makes sure that the light ones obey the rules too. They have to keep a balance between the two of them or the world will go all crazy. A dark magician has put a hex on a woman, and Anton is sent in to help remove it. He ends up falling in love with her since he’s an inexperienced agent since he was just recently promoted to the field from being an analyst. He feels more comfortable crunching numbers and makes tons of mistakes while fumbling through things. There are some things that were odd that I blamed on translation. The book is Russian. There were parts in the book where there was very odd translation and strange words being used that broke up the flow.
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