jodiwilldare's reviews
1520 reviews

I’m the type of reader who doesn’t often read reviews of books that I want to read. I read all kinds of reviews of books that I’ve never even heard of, but if the book is on my list I wait until after I’ve finished it to read any reviews. This nearly killed me a few months back when I was reading Philip Roth’s Indignation and saw that David Gates had written a review of it for the NY Times.

The same can be said for Jim Harrison’s The English Major. Even though I’d never heard of the book the minute I read the subhead on a LA Times review from October. It said this:

read the rest on MN Reads

Too Cool to be Forgotten is a slender little graphic novel by Alex Robinson about Andy Wicks and his inability to quite smoking. Andy, 37, has tried everything he can think of to quit smoking. After years of failure he tries hypnosis at the urging of his wife.

Andy’s not so keen on this method, but goes for it anyway. Once the hypnosis is underway Andy finds himself transported back in time to 1985, a few days before he smoked his first cigarette. Andy, ever the smartie-pants decides that it’s his mission to redo things and not take that first puff, thus curing himself of the smoking curse.

Read the rest on MN Reads

Saying that I really, really loved Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life makes me feel a little bit creepy. There isn’t much happy in the life of our unnamed narrator who talks about her life while being locked up in an asylum that has apparently been abandoned.

Unnamed Narrator has not had it easy. She was found in a shoe box near an orphanage as a baby and spent her childhood bouncing from foster home to orphanage and back again. She’s often homeless and has the hapless luck of ending up in the company of people who want use and abuse her — physically, mentally, and sexually. It’s kind of horrifying, and yet the book is tender and beautiful at the same time.

Read the rest on MN Reads

I admitted to Kurtis Scaletta yesterday that I approached reading Mudville with more than a little bit of trepidation. It’s one thing to review a book my some faceless entity, but I had exchange a few e-mails with Kurtis, giving him a face and personality.

After admitting my fear, I thanked him for writing a good book. Mudville is a charming novel for what are dubbed middle grade readers about a boy named Roy who loves baseball.

Read the rest on MN Reads.

I was none too pleased that the same week I decided to finally read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice a bunch of yahoos decided to release (or write, or something) a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I do not like zombies. I like robotos. Robots are better than ninjas and pirates and zombies all put togther.

Also, zombies are dumb and hipsters love them. Hipsters ruin everything with their stupid fetishes — like bacon and cupcakes.

But this isn’t about zombies or hipsters, this is about Jane Austen’s book which I want to call pre-Edwardian chick lit. I have no idea when or what pre-Edwardian is. However, I do know what chick lit is, and this is totally it. Of course it’s like the great great great grandmother of chick lit, which makes it kind of cool.

Read the rest of the review on MN Reads.

I’m pretty late to the Malcolm Gladwell fanclub, but after reading Outliers I feel pretty nicely ensconced. It’s not often that I read non-fiction, I tend to find it a little dry and too teachy. While there’s a lot to learn from Outliers, the writing is so conversational and smooth that you feel like you’re being talked to rather than lectured.

The basic premise that Gladwell sets out to prove is that genius is not based solely on rugged individualism, but that situations and opportunities play a large role. For instance, did you know that something like 40% of the top youth hockey players in Canada were born in January, February, or March? Weird, eh?

Read the rest on MN Reads.

I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking because in his answers to the 6 questions we always ask, Bill Tuomala said he would take Joan Didion out to Jax. Plus, I vaguely remembered hearing great, great things about this memoir Didion wrote following the death of her husband.

Read the rest on MN Reads

What has always drawn me to the short stories of Mary Gaitskill is that she spends a lot of time writing about the struggle women have with their intelligence and their sexuality and how giving into one always feels like subverting the other. This is a struggle a lot of intelligent women have because giving in to sex means turning off your brain and that’s scary. Plus, it can get you into a lot of trouble.

Don’t Cry, Gaitskill’s third short story collection, isn’t about struggle. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what it’s about. Not that collections are about any one thing, but usually have a sort of common theme that ties the stories together (like a record comprised of different songs).

As an avowed Gaitskill fangirl, I find myself floundering a bit when it comes to talking about this book.

Read the rest on MN Reads

Leif Enger is one of those Minnesota writers I’ve always wanted to read but never got around too. Part of the fear was the old-timey western sort of themes that seem to run through his books. I’m not an old-timey western kind of girl. But you know, sometimes it’s good to branch out from your comfort zone.

I’m glad I took the chance on So Brave, Young, and Handsome, Enger’s roadtrip book about a novelist with writer’s block and a train robber bent on apologizing to the wife he abandoned decades ago.

There’s something charming about older gentlemen taking off from their homes in search of that something missing from their lives. Enger’s book, which came out a year or so before, reminded me of The English Major by Jim Harrison. Both have older men (and by older I mean men past the bullshit 20/30something angst that plagues so many novels) traveling across the country and getting into some kind of trouble.

Read the rest on MN Reads