Plan to read and send to a fellow bookcrosser (tuff517) as a surprise RABCK. This bookcrosser has been particularly nice to me and I am so happy that I have one of the books from her wish list to offer her.

RELEASE NOTES:

Interesting but very morbid book. Sending off in today's mail.

Awww! Sent to me by narfinmagic, thank you so much!

Wow. This book was so much better than the movie [as is usually the case]. How a community could pretty much just watch as one family destroys itself is a little sad, but not unrealistic. The whole story is just a sad one. There's not much anger, just a lot of sadness. I don't think anyone really wanted to stop it, either. It was too incredible a show to put to an end. What was missing? What started the decline? I don't know that I'm that interested in it. A sad story, wonderfully told. Thanks so much for sharing, narfinmagic!

RELEASE NOTES:

Taking to tonight's monthly powwow.

I saw the release note for this one and thought about emailing the owner to call dibs. But I still managed to run off with it. My husband, morphy, also wanted it (as I found out later) so one or the other of us is going to read it first. Thanks for the book!

2005 Book #13: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
I picked up this book only because the title was unusual and I'd known it had been making the rounds as a popular book not too long ago. It wasn't until somewhere in the middle of the book that I got to a certain scene that I realized that I'd watched a portion of the movie and hadn't realized what movie I was watching. It was one of those things that I flipped to in the middle of a boring weekend afternoon or something like that.

As for the book itself, I can't say that I was moved much or impressed much by it. It's written in some weird style by someone who was around at the time of the "virgin suicides" and it's sort of in a reporter/scientist/historian way and yet none of the above. I found that technique annoying and I felt like it wasn't letting me get involved with the people of the story. I didn't really get to know the narrators other than that they had been kids that were there and they worshipped the girls in the story.

However, since they themselves didn't get much involved with them I didn't get to know the girls much either. How am I supposed to begin to care for these characters committing suicide if I can't even distinguish between the characters? Eugenides came a little close to communicating to me a little of the girls through the scenes where the narrator(s) "talk" by trading songs over a phone line without the girls' parents knowing about it, but I would've rather they just had an actual conversation instead of the hazy communication of intimating what they were going through using song lyrics that were inaccurate at best.

So in the end, their deaths are just sort of a blur and you say the appropriate things like "that's a shame" and then you move on. That's pretty much the way I felt about this book. It wasn't torture to read it, but it didn't really do much for me and so I've read it, I think the suicides are a shame, and I'm moving on.

Thanks for passing this along, Snergy, I'll try to get to it soon.

2005/36

This book had a really intriguing title, and it had gotten a lot of good reviews, so I was excited when I saw a copy of it was being released at my local gathering of Bookcrossers. Synergy (who showed up in person) snapped it up first, but she was kind enough to give me second dibs.

I admit I was surprised when I read Synergy’s less than stellar review of it, but I still fully expected to like it myself. Truth be told: I was pretty disappointed, too. Although I’d give the excellence of the prose an 8, I’d only give the plot and pacing a 5.

This is the story of the Lisbon family. The Lisbon family collapses as first one daughter attempts at and ultimately succeeds in committing suidice, and then the overbearing and impotent parents endure each of her four sisters following suit in less than a year’s time. It is told retrospectively by a collective group of neighbor boys, who have been obsessing over the sisters for 20 years. I kept reading on to find out more about the sisters characters, and insights into their psyche's, but that wasn't part of the story. Everyone was indistinguisable, and I guess that’s kind of the author’s point -- that and the mystery of it all, but personally, I didn’t really feel the need to explore that theme for a full 256 pages. I wanted more meat and potatoes, and less voyeurism. Perhaps some more dialoge and less tangents about, say, the extraneous sexual exploits of that Trip Fontaine, could have helped to move it along more. But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong -- maybe I am missing some superbly subtle pyschological drama -- but I just didn't get it.

I must say, with a book this boring, I'm not particularly inpsired to go rent the movie, either. **Still perplexed by what books hollywood chooses to turn into movies**

Well, this is ready to go back to Morphy now.