Summer Part 3: 45 and 46

45: Truth and Beauty: A Friendship
Finished: August 2011
Pages: 257

I am astonished in myself that I was able to get so far behind in my blogging that I totally forgot about two of the actual good books that I read this summer while I was in Newport, RI. My friend Anna gave me this book for my birthday this year, and I had been putting off reading it for quite some time because I knew the basic premise of the story and didn't really want to read it until I was good and ready. This is the lovely portrait of a friendship from the point of view of Ann Patchett, and discusses the friendship that she had with the writer Lucy Grealy, a woman with a bleak and tragic personal history who, for a while, overcomes the despair and depression and with whom Patchett shares a deep and abiding love. They epitomize the expression that friends are the family you choose. Not an autobiography or a biography, it instead is the story of their intertwined lives, the moments that they share both together and apart, through success, and failure, drugs and alcohol, love and hate, life and death. It was excellent and the ending of the book left me haunted.

46: Graveminder
Finished: August 2011
Pages: 336
An excellent plane read, the story centers around a small town where the dead will rise up from their graves if they are not given the attention that they deserve. As Kathy put it, "Not charming, ghostly poltergeist havoc, but ghastly cannibal zombie havoc."
Obviously some terrible and terrifying things begin to happen when the old graveminder is murdered and the new one doesn't know what to do. It takes a really long time to figure out what is going on, and the supernatural implications. I never really felt like it was explained in a way that I was comfortable. There is also a sort of love story, the relationship between Rebekkah and Byron is one of fate and is more than a little obnoxious as they stumble around each other. The narrative speed was one that I think was helped by the fact that I was on a plane and needed to distract myself from the fact that I was so high up in the air. An interesting premise, I was reading an advance copy that had many typographical errors that I hope were fixed before it was released. I also don't think that it was particularly "adult fiction" but rather normal YA fiction with slightly older, but not more mature, characters.

Good Reading,
Caitlin