Nothing Right - divorced mom helps her teenage son raise a baby he fathers after the baby's mother shows no interest.

Party of One - a sister meets up with her sister's lover to plead with him to let her sister break up with him instead of vice versa, because Mona might crumble, she is so delicate.

OBO - grad student falls in love with her professor's wife, goes home with them for Christmas, stakes out a spot in the enormous house to follow all the action, she makes her move on the woman when her professor leaves for a conference (and to meet his lover, who doesn't show up).

Falsetto - Michelle goes back to Wyoming to care for her younger brother Ellton after their parents end up in the hospital post-car wreck. Her boyfriend (Do Whop, from "Do What?" that he always says) tags along, and he cooks, cleans, and tries to cheer them. As soon as he enters her childhood home, she knows it is all wrong, that his handsomeness and being into her blinded her from the truth. She sends him away after a few weeks and deals solo with her intuitive brother and her dead parent.

Kansas - pregnant woman cleaning up a mess post-drunken party (she is not hungover, everyone else is), lets her niece take her other daughter to school. The niece runs away with the child, taking her grandmother with her. No one thinks to notice if the grandmother is gone. They have a boring road trip and then come back and sleep on the trampoline.

Biodegradable - A woman indulges in an affair while traveling, finds she is in love with the new boyfriend's farmhouse, and when he puts it up for sale, leaves him.

DWI - begins with a retelling of a woman feeding her brother his last meal, a weenie cooked in the Easy-Bake oven that he chokes on. Then she finds out her lover has died in a car wreck, and feels that she killed him too, simply by wishing it, because he was leaving her.

Shauntrelle - a woman leaves her husband after having an affair with a young bachelor who has no desire to build a life with her, which she discovers only after she's broken things off with her husband. Nowhere to live, she moves into a furnished apartment with a roommate, a woman in Houston from New Orleans while her house is being renovated and doing some reconstructions on her body while she's there. The apartment they move into has a phone where people call for Felicia, the answering machine has a deep throated man named Ray, and one night a woman pounds on the door demanding to see Shauntrelle. In the end, the roommate goes back home, and the woman leaves the furnished apartment headed for who knows where.

Or Else - a man lures women to his "family's house in Telluride", but it is really the house of a family he was childhood friends with but never grew out of his love for. He gets a ride to the perfect spot to be hitchhiking to Telluride and passes up several rides until they come along, as he knows they will. His last attempt on the house, they are interrupted by the return of the family early, for a wedding.

We and They - A hippie family adopts two black children and raises them along with their own, in conflict with the Pierce family across the street, the ultra-Catholic & rich Pierces. Otis & Angel, the two children, orphaned when their dad was jailed for killing their mom, which Otis may or may not have witnessed. Otis is welcomed into the family, but Angel perpetually scowls and is unlikeable. Fast forward, Otis is a senior in high school, Angel is 15. The narrator recounts a night when Angel's only friend, Candy, is invited to dinner. Candy is a 50+ year old woman who lives on the other side of the tracks. Angel is outed as being pregnant with a Pierce son's child. She then marries and moves into the opulent house across the street.

People People - Martha the morbidly obese sister who leaves her think tank after spilling the secret of the long affair between two of the cohorts, goes to live with her sister Elaine in Houston for weeks, where Elaine's husband Eddie has his own secrets from Elaine, including the possibility of an affair of his own. Martha spills that Eddie is working on a comedy bit for his stand-up act that talks about Elaine's breast implants. Elaine stops eating food when Martha is around, her secret project is her own body, pride in how she look in comparison to her brainiac sister.

Fatty, a rotund child abused by his father, heckled for breaking his mother's "flower" when he was born, abandoned at the train station and resorting to theater work to support himself as a teenager. Eventually he deigns to get into pictures, joining the Keystone studios for Keystone cop movies, where a lot of the footage was stumbled upon (oh, there's a fire? let's go film our actors along with real firemen). He learns the craft of directing there, gives Chaplin his Little Tramp bit, befriends Buster Keaton. Eventually the first actor to pull in $1M a year (in 1918), has a custom Pierce-Arrow car built for him with flush toilet.

He married Minta, his first love, and found that he was unable to perform his husbandly duties. Which is ironic, considering the crime he was accused of and vilified for. He owns the Vernon Tigers, a Pacific Coast League baseball team. He started his own film company, Comique, had the idea for pie fights after he threw something at his wife. At the top of his game, September 1921, he goes to San Francisco during the height of Prohibition for a vacation.

In San Francisco, he books 3 rooms at the St. Francis for himself and his two friends, Lowell Sherman and Fred Fischbach. Fred hooks up with a bootlegger and comes back to the hotel with Virginia Rappe and Maude Delmont. Virginia is well known to Fatty as a woman who tears her own clothes off and goes crazy when drinking. She is found laying in Fatty's bed as he presses a cold champagne bottle to her nether regions to bring her around. This is construed as rape and murder, as she later dies from a ruptured bladder. Supposedly, this all happened because of a botched abortion, so she arrived at the hotel already a dead woman.

Hearst newspapers fanned the flames of hate, the nation turned against Fatty. He endured 3 trials (the first 2 ending as mistrials after the jury couldn't unite) before being acquitted. Most of Fatty's films have not survived, being lost or deliberately destroyed.

The graphic novel includes self-referential images of its own creators talking about creating the novel, debating whether to end it on a sad note of Nazis taking over Europe, or to leave hope with the form of Alan Turing, who takes things to their logical conclusion, birth of computers, etc.

Favorite scene: The Onion Cellar, a nightclub in Düsseldorf where Oskar and his jazz band play when the crowd gets too rowdy; the owner hands out onions that the audience cuts and weeps over. The only way they are able to cry now. One night they get out of control, Oskar leads them on a drum solo through their childhoods, which in turn nets him a concert deal.

* Sütterlin script is the name of the German Gothic script that all German books seem printed in
* Frequently switches between 1st and 3rd person narration, even in the same paragraph.
* His grandmother's 4 layers of skirts providing refuge to his grandfather in the potato fields, then Oskar in his own time.
* Oskar teaches himself to read after stealing bits of Rasputin & Goethe from a kindly lady who reads to him.
* Oskar has a glass-shattering voice that he wields in Danzig towards the end of WWII along with a gang of youths called the Dusters.
* Bebra is a midget employed by the SS office for propaganda, he becomes Oskar's mentor/master. They meet up several times through Oskar's life.
* "What novel - or what else in the world - can have the epic scope of a photograph album?"
* "I'm just a man taking a walk with this dog I borrowed to take a walk with."
* "Barbaric, mystical, and bored." ... "You have given our century its name."
* When Oskar is part of the freak troupe entertaining the German army, they have an encounter with Lankes, an artist whose wartime duty is to make concrete bunkers. The troupe writes this poem, On the Atlantic Wall, with the line "the trend is toward the bourgeois-smug."
* German title: Die Blechtrommel

Then we know him as a prisoner, whiling away the days and seasons, waiting for his trial, making time pass by remembering his old life. The trial begins, and he is scrutinized by a packed house of interested parties, including a woman who sat at his table at Celeste's dining establishment, whom he describes as a robot, ordering her meal then immediately calculating the cost and laying it on the table before the meal arrives, ticking off radio programs she wants to hear. I cannot figure out her significance, why does she appear at the trial?

A great re-read. Hat tip to PClan for the reminder about this one.

I can't decide if the overt Harry Potter vibe is a big wink-nudge-aren't-I-clever attempt by Grossman, or just delusional parody. Quiddich is mentioned, as are hippogriffs.

Graduation day, everyone gets a demon tattooed into their back to help them in a big fight if needed. Quentin & Alice head off to Manhattan where the magical trust fund keeps them in booze and drugs for as long as they need. Penny turns up one day, clutching some magic buttons that take them to Fillory, the land Quentin has been obsessed with since reading the books as a child. They get into some scrapes, magic battles ensue.

This book runs off the rails about 100 pages from the end. I could swear there's some section that says, "We need to get some unicorns up in here." It tries to be modern, hip, ironic, and magical at the same time, and falls flat with a pretty weak ending.

Vomitous. Do not waste your time.

Steinbeck intersperses chapters on the Joad family with overarching looks at the time; roadside grills not happy about the Oakies that pull up, hungry, begging for water, the waitresses giddy for the truckers that swing by on a regular basis. Ma Joad is the glue of the family, keeping them going during the migration to California, and keeping them together as best she can during the time post-crossing when they are hated and harassed by deputies. Along they way, they lose Grampa and Gramma to death, Connie (Rose of Sharon's hubby) to walkabout, and elder brother Noah to wandering. Rosasharon is heavily pregnant, and gives birth to a dead baby at the end, but the milk in her breasts keeps a starving sick man alive whom they stumble upon in a barn when trying to find shelter in the rain. Damn, Steinbeck, you go for the gut.

Tom Joad just released from prison, takes up with ex-preacher Cary, both of them turning into "reds" who try to agitate for worker rights. Al Joad the mechanic-wannabe, who just bemoans his lack of opportunity to go work for a garage, live in a room in the city, and see movies.

There are lots of well-quoted passages from this book, used in union-boosting literature today. This piece struck me, related to the title:

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates - died of malnutrition - because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

15 year old Duras pops on a silk handmedown dress from her mom, some gold high heels, and a man's fedora and attracts the attention of a fellow ferry passenger. He insists on giving her a ride in his limousine back to her boarding school. A torrid affair ensued. She insists that he take her family to expensive restaurants, where they ignore him completely.

A ragtag bunch of sailors leave Glouchester, MA late in the swordfish season and head out to find a major catch off the coast of Newfoundland. Later in the book, other boats enter the story so that they can be rescued. US Coast Guard rescue missions fly out to rescue various boats, and end up needing to ditch their helicopter and get rescued themselves.

* I was surprised by his role in uniting the North and South post-Civil War-- posting bond for Jefferson Davis' release from prison, funding Vanderbilt University, marrying his southern cousin Frank.
* He progressed from Staten Island ferries to steamboats to railroads, created Grand Central station and is immortalized in the frieze outside it. Grand Central cost $6.5M in 1870. Is this why we no longer have grand buildings built? We no longer have titans who can afford it?
* He created wealth on an unimaginable scale, 1 out of every 20 dollars in circulation belonged to Vanderbilt.
* Horace Greely loaned money to Cornelius' gambling addicted son
* Vandy was the first person to truly take advantage of Wall Street and its then lack-of rules (hello, insider trading)
* Stiles' writing style heavily overused foreshadowing, beating us over the head with dramatic "this will be important later" ends of paragraphs.

Fresh off watching the entirety of Arrested Development, I gave in to the temptation of overloading on David Cross and got his book. But put it down, go rent Arrested Development, buy Cross' standup albums, and leave this book where it belongs-- at the store.

* Millenium magazine, founded by Blomkvist and Berger (occasional lovers), headed for financial trouble after Blomkvist indicted for libel after publishing a story about financial thug Wennerstrom.
* Henrik Vanger, old industrial tycoon, hires Blomkvist to write his family history to disguise the true nature of his assignment: to discover who killed Harriet Vanger, his niece, back in 1966.
* Lisbeth Salander, the goth hacker with photographic memory, subjected to horrors by her state guardian but who knows how to extract payback.

His philosophy is about questioning why we do certain things, trying to get farmers to spend less time working and more time writing haikus.

The Civil War crashed upon him immediately into his first term. South Carolina ceded from the Union before he took office. Other states followed suit. While Lincoln was anti-slavery, he had to hold back some of the abolitionist furor to keep border states in the Union and to assuage popular opinion until the right time.

"I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of providing that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail we will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves."

I never knew that the plot to kill Lincoln also involved the attempted assassination of Secretary of State Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson. Seward was attacked at home and recovered, Johnson's attacker got cold feet and never attempted the assassination.

Great book, 700+ pages that pull you through the meat grinder of the Civil War and political infighting during that time.