Flashback Friday: Heart-Shaped Box

Posted in Flashback Friday by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight. If you’d like to join in, here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

Other than that, the sky’s the limit! Join me, please, and let us all know: what are the books you’ve read that you always rave about? What books from your past do you wish EVERYONE would read? Pick something from five years ago, or go all the way back to the Canterbury Tales if you want. It’s Flashback Friday time!

My picks for this week’s Flashback Friday:

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

(published 2007)

From Goodreads:

Aging, self-absorbed rock star Judas Coyne has a thing for the macabre — his collection includes sketches from infamous serial killer John Wayne Gacy, a trepanned skull from the 16th century, a used hangman’s noose, Aleister Crowley’s childhood chessboard, etc. — so when his assistant tells him about a ghost for sale on an online auction site, he immediately puts in a bid and purchases it.

The black, heart-shaped box that Coyne receives in the mail not only contains the suit of a dead man but also his vengeance-obsessed spirit. The ghost, it turns out, is the stepfather of a young groupie who committed suicide after the 54-year-old Coyne callously used her up and threw her away. Now, determined to kill Coyne and anyone who aids him, the merciless ghost of Craddock McDermott begins his assault on the rocker’s sanity.

I’ve just started reading Joe Hill’s new release, NOS4A2, so when it was time to pick a Flashback Friday book for this week, I couldn’t resist revisiting the author’s first novel, Heart-Shaped Box. What you need to know: A) Joe Hill can write, and B) Joe Hill can write seriously scary stuff. Heart-Shaped Box is a practically perfect horror novel, with a seriously terrifying bad guy and an unbelievably tense build-up to a crackling end.

I generally consider myself unflappable when it comes to what I read: Whatever it is, I’ll still sleep perfectly well at night, thank you very much. Heart-Shaped Box was definitely an exception to that rule for me. Leave the lights on for this one.

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers!

Note from your friendly Bookshelf Fantasies host: To join the Flashback Friday fun, write a blog post about a book you love (please mention Bookshelf Fantasies as the Flashback Friday host!) and share your link below. Don’t have a blog post to share? Then share your favorite oldie-but-goodie in the comments section. Jump in!

3May2013

Flashback Friday: Smoke and Mirrors

Posted in Flashback Friday by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight. If you’d like to join in, here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

My picks for this week’s Flashback Friday:

Smoke and Mirrors

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman

(published 1998)

From Goodreads:

In the deft hands of Neil Gaiman, magic is no mere illusion… and anything is possible. In this, Gaiman’s first book of short stories, his imagination and supreme artistry transform a mundane world into a place of terrible wonders — a place where an old woman can purchase the Holy Grail at a thrift store, where assassins advertise their services in the Yellow Pages under “Pest Control,” and where a frightened young boy must barter for his life with a mean-spirited troll living beneath a bridge by the railroad tracks. Explore a new reality — obscured by smoke and darkness, yet brilliantly tangible — in this extraordinary collection of short works by a master prestidigitator. It will dazzle your senses, touch your heart, and haunt your dreams.

I know I’ve said about a thousand times that I just don’t do short stories. Smoke and Mirrors is one of my happy exceptions. This collection includes pieces short and long, creepy and mysterious, and just about all are genius. In my humble opinion. My very favorites are Nicholas Was, a one-page story that will guarantee that you never think about Christmas in quite the same way, Snow, Glass, Apples, the most disturbing version of the Snow White story that I’ve ever read, and The Wedding Present, which is actually a wonderful story embedded in the book’s introduction.

Really, you can’t go wrong with any of the stories in this superb collection. And coming from a person who just does not get into short stories, that’s saying a lot!

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers!

25Apr2013

Flashback Friday: The Basil and Josephine Stories

Posted in Flashback Friday by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight. If you’d like to join in, here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

My picks for this week’s Flashback Friday:

The Basil and Josephine Stories

The Basil and Josephine Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

(Stories first written from 1928 – 1931; collection published 1962)

From Goodreads:

Fourteen of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-loved and most beguiling stories, together in a single volume In 1928, while struggling with his novel Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald began writing a series of stories about Basil Duke Lee, a fictionalized version of his younger self. Drawing on his childhood and adolescent experiences, Fitzgerald wrote nine tales that were published in the Saturday Evening Post about his life from the time he was an eleven-year-old boy living in Buffalo, New York, until he entered Princeton University in 1913. Then from 1930 to 1931, with Tender Is the Night still unfinished, Fitzgerald wrote five more stories (also published in the Post) that centered around Josephine Perry, Basil’s female counterpart. Although Fitzgerald intended to combine the fourteen Basil Lee and Josephine Perry stories into a single work, he never succeeded in doing so in his lifetime. Here, The Basil and Josephine Stories brings together in one volume the complete set, resulting in one of Fitzgerald’s most charming and evocative works.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is certainly having a moment, isn’t he? Between the soon-to-be-released movie extravaganza of The Great Gatsby and the newly published Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler, there’s an absolute Fitzgerald revival going on right now. Which got me to thinking… Yes, I read The Great Gatsby in high school, just like everyone else. I also, at various times, read This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, and Tender Is the Night. But the Fitzgerald work that has really stuck with me over the years is the collection of stories found here in The Basil and Josephine Stories. These stories, focusing on two young, privileged characters and their pursuits and struggles, beautifully convey a time and a society that continue to fascinate. This is one story collection that I don’t mind reading, over and over again.

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers!

Note from your friendly Bookshelf Fantasies host: To join the Flashback Friday fun, write a blog post about a book you love and share your link below. Don’t have a blog post to share? Then share your favorite oldie-but-goodie in the comments section. Jump in!

19Apr2013

Flashback Friday: The Pact

Posted in Flashback Friday by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight. If you’d like to join in, here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

My picks for this week’s Flashback Friday:

The Pact by Jodi Picoult

(published 1998)

From Goodreads:

For eighteen years the Hartes and the Golds have lived next door to each other, sharing everything from Chinese food to chicken pox to carpool duty– they’ve grown so close it seems they have always been a part of each other’s lives. Parents and children alike have been best friends, so it’s no surprise that in high school Chris and Emily’s friendship blossoms into something more. They’ve been soul mates since they were born.

So when midnight calls from the hospital come in, no one is ready for the appalling truth: Emily is dead at seventeen from a gunshot wound to the head. There’s a single unspent bullet in the gun that Chris took from his father’s cabinet– a bullet that Chris tells police he intended for himself. But a local detective has doubts about the suicide pact that Chris has described.

I initially picked up The Pact because I was drawn to the cover — that one right up there ↑ (a quick Google search shows several different versions, but the one on this page is the one that sucked me in and made me buy the book). The Pact was my first encounter with bestselling author Jodi Picoult, and although I’ve read several of her books since then, I still think The Pact is the best.

As a parent, I found this book devastating to read. It’s hard to imagine being on the receiving end of such a horrifying phone call — but from that shocking beginning, the book moves forward to reveal countless layers of family dynamics, expectations and failures, love and secrets. There’s a mystery to be solved, and a legal case to see through to a shocking conclusion. The truth about what happened to Emily is sad yet believable, and the tragedy of the young lives ruined is hard to shake even when you’ve finished the book.

Even many years later, The Pact has really stuck with me. If you’ve read it, please let me know what you think! And if you haven’t read it, and especially if you’ve never read any of Jodi Picoult’s works, give this one a try. But be prepared to be put through the emotional wringer. It’s a tough one.

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers!

12Apr2013

Flashback Friday: Brazzaville Beach

Posted in Flashback Friday by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight. If you’d like to join in, here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

My picks for this week’s Flashback Friday:

Brazzaville Beach

Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd

(published 1990)

From Goodreads:

In the heart of a civil war-torn African nation, primate researcher Hope Clearwater made a shocking discovery about apes and man . . .

Young, alone, and far from her family in Britain, Hope Clearwater contemplates the extraordinary events that left her washed up like driftwood on Brazzaville Beach. It is here, on the distant, lonely outskirts of Africa, where she must come to terms with the perplexing and troubling circumstances of her recent past. For Hope is a survivor of the devastating cruelities of apes and humans alike. And to move forward, she must first grasp some hard and elusive truths: about marriage and madness, about the greed and savagery of charlatan science . . . and about what compels seemingly benign creatures to kill for pleasure alone.

I remember exactly where I was when I read this book about six or seven years ago: on a family vacation, hiding away in an air-conditioned room, shushing everyone who dared talk to me (how rude!), and basically refusing to go act like a social creature while I still had pages left in this engrossing book. Interestingly, what I can recall most vividly about the plot of the book is not the human drama, but the animal drama. The chimpanzees at the heart of the scientific research in Brazzaville Beach are fascinating, and while the people parts were great too, it’s the chimp saga that has really stuck with me.

I’m surprised, actually, that I haven’t read more by William Boyd, despite friends who love his works and have highly recommended other of his books to me. Clearly, this is a situation I must correct! Meanwhile, I definitely recommend this book for its evocative African settings and its hard look at human — and animal — behavior.

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers!

4Apr2013

Flashback Friday: Replay

Posted in Flashback Friday by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight. If you’d like to join in, here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

My picks for this week’s Flashback Friday:

Replay by Ken Grimwood (published 1987)

From Goodreads:

Jeff Winston was 43 and trapped in a tepid marriage and a dead-end job, waiting for that time when he could be truly happy, when he died.

And when he woke and he was 18 again, with all his memories of the next 25 years intact. He could live his life again, avoiding the mistakes, making money from his knowledge of the future, seeking happiness.

Until he dies at 43 and wakes up back in college again…

And from Amazon:

Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn’t know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life. And died again. And lived again and died again — in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle — each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market. A novel of gripping adventure, romance, and fascinating speculation on the nature of time, Replay asks the question: “What if you could live your life over again?”

I loved this book. I’m always intrigued by a good time-twisting tale, and this one is a doozy. Given the opportunity to essentially live your life again, knowing everything you’ve already done the first time around and how it all worked out, what would you change? And would changing things make them better? Or just set you off on a completely different path?

I featured Replay in a “timey-wimey” blog post about six months ago, which you can see here. This books ranks up at the top of the list of terrific time-related weirdness in books. Check it out!

(Note: The Amazon synopsis above actually has it a bit wrong, but I’m not going to go into specifics. Read the book — then let’s talk!)

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers!

22Mar2013

Flashback Friday: Into the Forest

Posted in Flashback Friday by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight. If you’d like to join in, here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

My picks for this week’s Flashback Friday:

Into The Forest by Jean Hegland (published 1996)

From Goodreads:

Set in the near-future, Into the Forest is a powerfully imagined novel that focuses on the relationship between two teenage sisters living alone in their Northern California forest home.

Over 30 miles from the nearest town, and several miles away from their nearest neighbor, Nell and Eva struggle to survive as society begins to decay and collapse around them. No single event precedes society’s fall. There is talk of a war overseas and upheaval in Congress, but it still comes as a shock when the electricity runs out and gas is nowhere to be found. The sisters consume the resources left in the house, waiting for the power to return. Their arrival into adulthood, however, forces them to reexamine their place in the world and their relationship to the land and each other.

Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, Into the Forest is a mesmerizing and thought-provoking novel of hope and despair set in a frighteningly plausible near-future America.

Forget the glut of dystopian fiction currently being published — Into the Forest is the collapse of social structure done right. This story about sisterhood and survival is tense, dramatic, suspenseful, scary, and incredibly moving. The sisters’ relationship is dynamic, full of love and hate, and is ultimately the girls’ key to finding a future in a world that has fallen apart. I read this book years ago, but it has absolutely stuck with me.

Plus, this is the book that made me realize how ill-prepared I am for any sort of disaster on the epic-end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scale. For starters, I need to gain some knowledge about edible and medicinal plants, learn how to forage in the forest, gain some basic proficiency in self-defense, and start training for endurance running. As it stands right now, if the zombies show up, I’m toast.

Note: There are no zombies in Into the Forest — that was an irrelevant aside. What is relevant is that this is a terrific, unforgettable book. Check it out.

And an apology in advance from your humble Bookshelf Fantasies blogger: Flashback Friday will be taking a week off next week due to family travel plans. Join us on Friday, April 5th for the next Flashback Friday!

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers!

14Mar2013

Flashback Friday: It’s an All-Clone Two-fer!

Posted in Flashback Friday by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight. If you’d like to join in, here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

My picks for this week’s Flashback Friday:

The Boys From Brazil by Ira Levin (published 1976)

Joshua Son of None by Nancy Freedman (published 1973)

It’s a cloning two-fer! What was going on in the American psyche in the 1970s that made the topic of cloning both so fascinating and so frightening?

The Boys From Brazil is a very scary story about a secret plot to clone Hitler. Joshua Son of None is a not-quite-as-scary story about efforts to clone a Kennedy-esque US President. Both present cloning at a time when it was a new and hypothetical possibility, something out of science fiction dreams that only recently contained the first inklings of real, feasible scientific accomplishment. Both books address the role of upbringing and environment in human development: Is it enough to carry a certain genetic code in order to achieve the desired results, or does the cloned person’s entire life need to be recreated in order to give the genetic inheritance a chance to come to fruition?

When these two books were written, of course all of this was far-distant and purely speculative. Now, given our 21st century advances in genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, the science, at least, is possible, although the nature versus nurture debate remains. I would imagine that both books, while startling for their time, might seem a little less so now, although the central question remains: If we have the science to clone a great man, should we? And if the science exists to clone a monster, what could anyone do to stop it?

I remember being quite fascinated by both of these books when I first encountered them. I’d love to know how they’d strike a new reader today — scary or silly? If you’ve read these books and have any thoughts about them, share a comment!

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers!

7Mar2013

Flashback Friday: The Mind-Body Problem

Posted in Flashback Friday by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight. If you’d like to join in, here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

My pick for this week’s Flashback Friday:

The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein

(published 1983)

From Goodreads:

When Renee Feuer goes to college, one of the first lessons she tries to learn is how to liberate herself from the restrictions of her orthodox Jewish background. As she discovers the pleasures of the body, Renee also learns about the excitements of the mind.

She enrolls as a philosophy graduate student, then marries Noam Himmel, the world-renowned mathematician. But Renee discovers that being married to a genius is a less elevating experience than expected.

The story of her quest for a solution to the mind-body problem involves the prickly contemporary dilemmas of sex and love, of doubt and belief.

I read The Mind-Body Problem ages ago, but can still more or less quote one of the lines from this book which I found marvelous:

I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy.

That, in essence, is the heart of main character Renee’s struggle. She’s always considered herself an intellectual, but when she marries a bona fide genius, has to face some hard truths about herself, what it means to be smart, and what it means to love and be loved. Renee’s exploration of identity, success, love, and desire is both philosophical and physical, and always fascinating.

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers!

28Feb2013

Flashback Friday: Into Thin Air

Posted in Flashback Friday by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight. If you’d like to join in, here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

My pick for this week’s Flashback Friday:

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

(published 1997)

From Goodreads:

A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that “suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down.” He was wrong. The storm, which claimed five lives and left countless more–including Krakauer’s–in guilt-ridden disarray, would also provide the impetus for Into Thin Air, Krakauer’s epic account of the May 1996 disaster.

Into Thin Air is a non-fiction book that reads like a novel — part adventure story, part disaster tale, full of memorable characters involved in a once-in-a-lifetime challenge that ended in tragedy. Jon Krakauer participated in and then chronicled the 1996 Everest expedition that claimed lives, and describes in his book his own preparations for and experiences during the climb, as well as exploring the commercialization of Everest and the dangers that this has inevitably brought about. Into Thin Air is a remarkable account of bravery and hubris, a cautionary tale about the limits of adventure and the drawbacks of having more money than common sense, and a tribute to the beauty of the high peaks and the call of the mountains to the people who need to climb them.

I was completely fascinated by Into Thin Air, and while I’ve read other books by Jon Krakauer — a marvelous writer — this one, to me, packs the biggest punch.

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers!