The Outlander tells a story of a widow being chased through the mountains of the northwest by her creepy ginger headed twin brother in laws. She is unapologetically mad – she sees visions and hears voices and is generally unkempt. She survives although she probably shouldn’t, mostly based on the generosity (or naivety) of strangers.

This book is a fast, exciting read. I couldn’t put it down once I got started (although it stayed on my to-read stack for longer than it should have).

400 pages
4/5

I thought this book would be full of stories about restaurants, but instead it is full of kitchens. And it is not so much a book of stories about kitchens as it is an unflinchingly honest memoir of Gabrielle Hamilton, from childhood to her current life as chef/owner of Prune, a high-end restaurant in NYC. I got a little bored about halfway through the book, but it picks up again, and I’m glad I finished it.

304 pages
3/5

I’ve been hearing about this book for years, but never really felt compelled to read it. Now that I’m finished with the “enhanced” version (which includes articles from the New York Post & Freakonomics blog), I owner what took me so long. It’s a fairly easy read, reminiscent of (but not quite as fascinating as) Predictably Irrational. If this sort of thing is interesting to you, check out the you are not so smart blog.

151 pages (not counting the notes or bibliography)
3/5

Yeah, I know this isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, but I think this 928 page book counts in my quest to read 52 books this year. This book is an extremely helpful primer to Filemaker Pro and a great reference guide, even if you’ve been using Filemaker Pro for years.

928 pages
4/5

Columbine is a well-written and thoughtful analysis of the events leading up to the 1999 high school shooting. The book is written by a journalist who covered the tragedy for the Denver based Rocky Mountain News, and refutes many of the myths that were prevelant in the news: that the two killers were part of a “TrenchCoat Mafia”, that they were bullied, that they targeted Christians, jocks, or guys wearing white hats, that they were social outcasts, etc. etc. In fact, the Columbine attacks were planned by a sociopath and his depressed sidekick. The book lays out a timeline for the planning of the attacks, and also tells the stories of survivors and family that I had not heard before. It’s an interesting read if you remember Columbine as an incident and not a town, and probably even if you don’t.

432 pages
4/5

Most of The Passage takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, where glowing zombie-vampire monsters (zompires? vambies?) roam in packs, looking for anything that can be devoured. The beginning of the passage takes place before the monsters are set loose, and that’s the part of the novel I found most entertaining. The characters are interesting, and I wasn’t really sure how the characters were going to come together – but when they did it was very satisfying. (In a literary sense, anyway).

The rest of the novel is a little slow (except for the very end, of course), and full of characters I found it hard to care about. I didn’t like the ending – it felt like a precursor to a sequel rather than a standalone book. As it turns out this book is the first in a trilogy (even though it’s long enough to be a trilogy of it’s own) – so I’ll see what happens with the next two in the series.

782 pages
3/5