Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

This book is: the most fun you’ll ever have witnessing the Apocalypse.
Other elements: angels, demons, condensed milk, dogs, aging mediums, talkative Satanist nuns, the nature of humanity, impending doom, hijinks.
Read it: if you enjoy wry humor. If you giggle at any of the quotes below.
Overall rating: 9.75/10

It wasn’t a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but that’s the weather for you. – Page 4

The powers below have decided it’s time for the End of Days. A demon named Crowley is perturbed; he lives in the human world and is rather fond of it. He faces the uncomfortable realization that he really would rather not bring about the apocalypse, but direct disobedience is risky when you’re an agent of Hell. He delivers the human-shaped baby Spawn of Satan (aka the Antichrist, Destroyer of Kings, Lord of Darkness, etc) safely to its human foster family and then goes to see an old friend.

On the whole, neither [Crowley] nor Aziraphale would have chosen each other’s company, but they were both men, or at least man-shaped creatures, of the world…. Besides, you grew accustomed to the only other face that had been around more or less consistently for six millennia. – Page 31

The demon and the angel come to a deal: they will both keep an eye on the baby Destroyer of Kings and each attempt to influence the child, hoping to cause a standstill. This continues for 11 years, until the collaborators must face an unpleasant discovery. The child they’ve been focusing on is entirely human and the Spawn of Satan is missing. Everyone panics.

MORTALS CAN HOPE FOR DEATH, OR FOR REDEMPTION. YOU CAN HOPE FOR NOTHING. ALL YOU CAN HOPE FOR IS THE MERCY OF HELL.
“Yeah?”
JUST OUR LITTLE JOKE.
“Ngk,” said Crowley. – Page 255

The reader is introduced to a new plotline: an idyllic, isolated town with a group of childhood friends led by the young Lord of Darkness himself, who has grown up free of supernatural influence. He is called Adam and enjoys circuses, winning computer games, and playing with his dog. As the fateful hour approaches, Adam begins to feel new things within himself and comes to the realization that he is not an average 11-year-old. Hijinks ensue as vast ranges of people/creatures try to find Adam and either thwart or join in the fun of the apocalypse before it’s too late. Everything becomes immensely ridiculous and extremely entertaining.

One aspect of this book I particularly enjoy is the footnotes. One begins “Note for Americans and other aliens:” (page 32) and another, even more direct, “NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS:” (page 78). These notes explain mysteries like Milton Keynes and the original British monetary system. It does wonders for the ego to find footnotes in a novel that sound like they were put there just in case someone exactly like you came along.

Now, because it is genius and it gives you a good sense of what to expect, here’s a longer excerpt:

In fact the only things in the flat Crowley devoted any personal attention to were the houseplants. They were huge and green and glorious, with shiny, healthy, lustrous leaves. This was because, once a week, Crowley went around the flat with a green plastic plant mister, spraying the leaves and talking to the plants. He had heard about talking to plans in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it was an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. He put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley.

In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn’t look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants.

“Say goodbye to your friend,” he’d say to them. “He just couldn’t cut it…”

Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuous around the flat.

The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. They were also the most terrified. – Page 225

As you may have surmised, I think this book is wonderful and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone.* It’s very silly – but clever and well-written enough that it’s an engaging story rather than just a book-long joke. There is also meaning behind the madness; beneath the puns and chaos there’s a real statement about the nature of humanity and the importance of balance between opposing forces to maintain equilibrium. It made me laugh a lot and then it made me think a little, which is often what I’m looking for in pleasure reading. I anticipate keeping this one on my shelf for years to come.

* Anyone who isn’t offended by books that satirize religion.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

This book is: a disappointment.
Other elements: circuses, vagueness, mist, confusion, mysteries, stripes, clocks, incorporeal fathers.
Read it: if your love of description outweighs your desire for a coherent story.
Overall rating: 5/10

This book has a great title, a beautiful cover, an intriguing description, and volumes of positive press. It has a a 3.99/5 rating on Goodreads, with 127,824 reviews. That’s largely why I decided to read it, despite the lukewarm review of a friend of mine whose literary opinions I usually agree with.

I’m not saying I hated this book. There were elements that I enjoyed – specifically, the description of the different elements of the fantastical titular circus. The author has an incredible imagination and, when she chooses to focus, can describe things marvelously.

There were a number of these moments in the book, when I would sit up and think “oh, there’s what everyone’s so excited about, I guess it must be time for this to get good!”. It never happened, though. There was no glue holding the bright moments together.

The story is murky. I think it’s possible that the author was trying to make the experience of reading the story mirror the experience of wandering through the mysterious circus – which I can understand as a goal, but it did not work in practice. There was too much mystery and too much distance. I didn’t feel as though I were gazing at something magical and appreciating it for the enigma that it was, I felt as though the movie I was watching was out of focus and I couldn’t change the TV settings. The story wanders around through both time and location, jumping back and forth until you have no clue as to when and where you are except for the chapter titles (which I stopped reading because I was so annoyed that I needed to depend on them).

Every character in the novel is an enigma. The reader is never let inside any of their heads enough to really understand or bond with them. Actually, it was worse than that. There were two different points in this novel when I realized that two characters who I’d thought were the same person were actually two different people. Such an error really shouldn’t be possible once, let alone twice.

There is a spoiler of sorts in the next paragraphs. If you don’t want to risk knowing what happens, stop reading now.

My #1 complaint about this book is this: despite all of the mystery in the details, the plot at the center of this book was so predictable that I was almost surprised when there was no twist. The fate of the two main characters was precisely what I expected it to be from the first chapter – no, from when I read the summary of the book at the library. Girl and boy in opposition to each other fall in love. For either to win, the other must die. Almost 400 pages of mysteriousness and it’s all wasted on another incarnation of the Romeo and Juliet double-suicide story.

The story is also rife with details that didn’t make any sense. For example: Why does Marco hide his true face if nobody knows what he looks like, anyway? Why does Bailey get to the circus so late that he misses it if he genuinely intends to join it and is so familiar with its routines? How can a boy who knows nothing about magic anchor a series of illusions so complex that they were going to end up killing an accomplished practitioner of magic? And what was the deal with Celia’s mother?

I like things to make sense, and I need to care about the characters in a story to care about the story. This book didn’t make sense and it didn’t make me care. By the end, my main motivation for picking this up was to finish it so that I could move on.

Has anyone else read this? Did you like it more than I did? I know it was pretty popular for a while.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.

This book is: a love story with several different love stories happening around it.
Other elements: old Hollywood glamor, scenic Italian coastlines, curses, Richard Burton.
Read it: if you’re in a romantic mood (or a bubble bath. I read most of this in a bubble bath.).
Overall rating: 7.75/10

An isolated Italian village; a provincial, idealistic young businessman; a stunning American actress with a dark secret, an ex-soldier turned aspiring writer/drunk…are you getting a feel for this story already? This novel is set party in the past and partly in the present (and several times in between). It’s similar to the genre of movie that came into existence after the success of Love, Actually – it follows several plot lines which turn out to be interwoven. The plot lines in this book are not all equal, however. There’s a definite hero and heroine who are the center of the action.

After the funeral, he begged his elderly mother to return to Florence, but the very idea scandalized her. “What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he is dead?” – Page 4

It’s not innovative or life-changing, but it is thoroughly enjoyable. I mean…romance, intrigue, and surprise appearances by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor? Sign me up.

Bender pondered the wine in his hand. “A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.”
“That’s only three.”
Alvis finished his wine. “You have to do disappointment twice.” – Page 62

I could see myself rereading this mood again if I was in the mood for something exactly like this book. It really is the prefect book to read in the bubble bath – it’s warm, simple, it makes you feel good, it’s pretty to look at, it doesn’t take a lot of effort. The writing is pleasantly engaging and easy to read, and the characters are vibrant and interesting.

He had a gone-to-seed superhero look, with blocky, side-parted hair and a square jaw, and an athletic body just starting to swell with middle age. Men have a half-life, she thought, like uranium. – Page 208

The only part I actively disliked was near the end, when the author interrupts a dramatic moment to give a summary of dramatic things that happened to all of the peripheral characters – I was irritated to be taken away from the scene at hand, which I had been really enjoying, and the recap felt rushed and cheesy. It also went on way too long. I was interested to hear what had happened to the other characters, especially the ones I’d particularly liked, but I didn’t want to hear it in what was effectively a pages-long list. That part took a lot of the momentum out of the ending for me. From there on out, it felt like I was reading a summary of the end of the book rather than the actual end of the book.

It’s still worth reading, though, especially if the summary sounds fun to you. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book to anyone with an affection for grand romance and the glamor of the golden age of Hollywood.