Kylie's Book Log

I almost forgot I meant to do this at the end of each month.

Best Book of the Month: The Night Watch, Sarah Waters
Runners-Up: The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier; After, Francine Prose
The Don't Bother Award: The Fermata, Nicholson Baker
Recommendations of Specific Books to Specific People Who May or May Not Read This Journal: rolypolypony should read Alice MacLeod, Realist At Last, and I think amyura might like Saying Grace, maybe. Also, he might kill me for saying it, but I get the feeling mitdasein might like The Fermata more than I did. (This is not meant as an insult, really - perhaps I would do better to phrase it as "I would be interested to see if mitdasein would like The Fermata any better than I did." That's more what I mean anyway.)
Number of Books Read This Month: 17

Anything else that should go in this post? I can't really think of anything.

Book: 3
Title: Saying Grace
Author: Beth Gutcheon
Genre: General fiction, women's fiction
One-sentence summary: See below.
Why did you get this book? This is another one I read because I ran out of books while I was at my parents' place. It's actually a reread - I first read it ages and ages ago, and barely remembered it. When I moved to college I left it at home, I think out of some vague sense that it wasn't the sort of book a Harvard student should be seen to have on her shelf. (If you are thinking I was a little shit, well, I probably was, but keep in mind I was also terrified...)
Do you like the cover? It's all right. A pastel-y sunrise-y thing.
Did you enjoy the book? You know, I really did. This is another women's lit book, and sometimes that genre bores or annoys me, but I liked this one a lot. It's about a private middle school in California whose principal is dedicated to a bunch of now-passe ideals, the main one being that children should be encouraged to live up to their own potential and value their own role in the world without any exterior comparison to or competition with other children. Kind of ironic that I left this one at home because I thought the Harvard students would laugh at me, really. Anyway, it gets into the interior lives of several of the students and teachers at the school and delves much more deeply into the principal's life, twinned with her attempts to hold the school together in the face of an alpha-dog-type school board president. Some of the little vignettes from the students' and teachers' lives are interesting, but there's one subplot in particular that's really chilling. I kept wishing she'd write another book based entirely around that subplot, though I suppose it works best in small touches.
Was the author new to you and would you read something by this author again? I read Still Missing ages ago as well. That was a book about an abducted boy that seemed written to be made into a TV movie, and, indeed, it was. As for reading something else by her, I actually went to Amazon to try and see if any of her other books appealed to me, but none of them did. Thank God for that Search Inside the Book feature.
Are you keeping it or passing it on? I would like to keep it, but I think I accidentally left it at my parents' place. Whoops.
Anything else? Hmm. Don't think so.
Scale of 1 to 10: 8
Number of pages: 320
Total pages for the year: 1072