18. The Bookman's Wake

The Bookman's Wake (John Dunning, 1996)

I probably shouldn't have started with the second book in this series, but I guess I can go back to the beginning later. A colleague lent this to me because it's not only a mystery set in the Seattle area, but it's by a Denver author. The PNW and MW collide! I liked this a lot, too. Dunning, like most mystery writers I like, writes what he knows and it shows. He's a bookseller and so's his hero, Cliff Janeway. This story reminded me of Johnathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware mysteries a bit, in style more than theme. It's been a while since I read a 400+ page mystery, too. It seems like so many I read these days are half that length.

I'm sure I'll revisit Janeway again. Dunning has a great sense of just how far to take his readers into the intricacies of bookselling and collecting so they remain interested and don't get bogged down in tiny details irrelevant to the story. I dig that.

17. Exile

Exile (Blake Nelson, 1997)

I promise to stop reading Blake Nelson's books for a while. I just got on a roll ordering them from the library and his seem to be coming in faster than others in my queue. Moving on. Exile isn't a young adult novel, but it's similar to Nelson's YA work in theme and setting. Appropriately for National Poetry Month, this story centers around Mark, a spoken word poet from NYC who takes a position as poet-in-residence at a Portland college. I was a little confused because he called it Willamette, but that's really in Salem. It would be pretty difficult to get around downtown Portland on foot if you lived near campus an hour away. But I digress.

Exile is okay. I think it's telling that Nelson calls it his "difficult second novel." Girl was so good that he might have been trying to go in a completely different direction. He's right when he says it doesn't suck. Mark is a seriously messed up guy, and I found him both attractive and repulsive--maybe because I see people I've known in him. Like (too) many of Nelson's protagonists, he stumbles through life not really understanding what's going on around him or how he should behave or react. I guess it's a change from the standard precocious teens or hyper-witty and ironic twenty-somethings in books, but sometimes it goes too far. Mark is also in a state of arrested development, living like a teenager who acts on impulse and does what he wants without thinking of the consequences, while needing a real adult to take care of him. I liked this book, but Mark's realization that he needs to grow up comes kind of suddenly and seems a bit tacked on.

16. Everyone Worth Knowing

Everyone Worth Knowing (Lauren Weisberger, 2005)

Thinking I needed an airplane book, I picked this up at the grocery store when I was visiting my parents over Christmas/New Year. I ended up sleeping and listening to music on the plane and kind of forgot about it. It turned up again when I was trying to consolidate the piles of unread books I have scattered around the house, and I read it last night in an insomnia-plagued fit. While Weisberger kind of follows the same formula she laid out in The Devil Wears Prada, I actually liked this one better. TDWP seemed to drag and was pretty repetitive, but this book had a snappier pace and more interesting characters. It helped that Bette, the heroine of the piece, was much more likable than whatever-her-name-was in TDWP and that the love interest was a great guy. All in all, this is a fun book.

15. A Strange Day

A Strange Day (Damon Hurd & Tatiana Gill, 2005)

I love this comic. The "backward" says it all--that the book is for the teenagers we once were. Basically, it's the story of two kids who meet while skipping school to buy the new Cure album and end up killing time together and getting to know each other a little. Very sweet and well done. I especially love the way Tatiana Gill drew the characters. I hear this team has a new book coming out soon and I'm looking forward to it.

14. The New Rules of High School

The New Rules of High School (Blake Nelson, 2004)

This one's kind of more of the same Portland teen disaffection from Blake Nelson. It is a little different in that Max, the protagonist, is an overachieving good kid instead of a confused alternateen. The indie rock club element is there, but Max exists in the periphery of that scene. He's kind of a jerk, and there are some consequences for that, but it's not moralistic. Nelson is really good at capturing the awfulness of being a teenager and offering a little slice of a kid's life without making it too plot-driven. The little epilogue was kind of lame, though. I don't need to know what happens after Max graduates. I've always liked being left hanging a bit in Nelson's other books.

13. Heart on My Sleeve

Heart on My Sleeve (Ellen Wittlinger, 2004)

Ellen Wittlinger wrote one of my favorite books of all time, Hard Love. She has a knack for writing really believable characters who aren't perfect kids but make you really root for them to figure things out and grow as people. Heart on My Sleeve is told all in emails, IMs, letters, and postcards, and it works nicely. When done well, I really enjoy the modern-day epistolary device because it's a slick way to do roving stream of consciousness without confusing the reader. This is especially important for younger audiences. Not everybody can create such organic character voices like Wittlinger, though.

This story centers around a boy and girl who meet at an college visit at the end of their senior years and strike up a correspondance over the summer. They each also talk to their friends, sisters, and parents. A lot happens during the summer that I won't spoil here. It's really interesting to see how the relationship affects their separate lives and the people around them, and what happens when they meet again face to face after months of writing and thinking they know each other so well. Read this.

12. First Avenue

First Avenue (Lowen Clausen, 2000)

A colleague lent me this book after hearing I like Seattle mysteries. It's great. I was still a kid in Seattle in the 1980s, but I remember how gritty the 1st Ave area was back then. Clausen, who was a SPD cop himself, writes characters really well and captures the feeling of the rainy city,. A lot of the story takes place in cars or little businesses, giving the action an appropriately claustrophobic feeling. Officers Sam Wright and Kathleen Murphy are equally intriguing and not the typically emotionally damaged nior detectives, though Sam is necessarily a little mysterious. He also takes the lead in the story. All of the storylines--the murder, the lawyer girlfriend, the person from Sam's past--intersect a little implausibly, but the coincidences aren't so outrageous that it bothered me much. Now I have another author to follow.