A Widow for One Year by John Irving

John Irving is one of those writers that people are always like "OH MY GOD YOU HAVE TO READ HIM!!!" which is strange, considering I have tried to read The World According to Garp about 3 different times and could never get into it. Thankfully though, I was able to get through Widow in about a week (I'm a fast reader when I want to be...thanks to the WGA strike!) A hefty 500+ pages, this is a story about a very dysfunctional and sexually charged family of writers who live on the East End of Long Island. Overall, this was a pretty good read, although for some reason, Irving had this weird compulsion to keep bringing up how spectacular Ruth Cole's breasts were. At any rate, the story had a nice pace to it, some international travel, gratuitous sex scenes, and a happy ending. Sometimes, you can't go wrong with that.

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"Proof: the Science of Booze" by Adam Rogers

Proof: the Science of Booze caught my eye when I was looking for something new to read in the science section--specifically in the topic of chemistry. Adam Rogers presents a book that is a comprehensive look at the science behind alcohol and the mystery of why it has the effect that it does...all leading the reader to the grand conclusion of: "we still don't know." Serious examination and studies all lead to the same result of "we know what it does but we don't know why." So why would anyone be interested in a book that takes eight chapters and almost 250 pages to tell you that much about alcohol? Well, for starters there's a ton of information that is just downright cool to learn about; like the physiological effects of what is happening to your body during a hangover, a molecular explanation about what yeast is doing to the sugars and why it is vital to the final product, or a history of prohibition that you wouldn...

"A Banquet of Consequences" by Elizabeth George

Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley mystery series is probably one of my favourites in the style of English detective stories. It's the series that I keep returning to, when I slip into a reading rut and can't focus on reading something new, particularly to the first book in the series A Great Deliverance. While there are lots of decent mystery series circulating now, the first book in George's Lynley stories has a certain grim insistence about it that keeps drawing me back to it. And in her latest contribution to the series, George has written a story that in many aspects parallels her first--however, these parallels did not become immediately apparent until the climax of the story. One of the things that I like best about Elizabeth George's writing is that she realises that a lot of times, the supporting characters can have better story potential than the main title character. She uses this to her advantage in almost all of the Lynley seri...

Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwell

Ok, here it is,,I did not like this book. (cries) I wanted to because I love Patricia Cornwell. First off the book was 512 pages(oy my eyes). The story took half a book for me to get interested in it. Scarpetta is brought into a case where a woman is murdered and the cops are looking at her boyfriend as being the killer. She is brought in to examine the bf (um,,ok). I miss the days when Scarpetta worked in the lab and actually worked as a forensic medical examiner . I can't bring myself to write much about the story because there wasn't much of a story. And at the end of the book I still don't know who killed who. When the book is this big you have trouble keeping track of all the characters in it. Read and decide for yourself.

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