Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Book: Warm Bodies

Author: Isaac Marion

Why I Read It: My little sister loves romance movies and I love zombie books, so this was the perfect entertainment for us to share. We agreed to read the book and then see the movie together.

First Line: "I'm dead, but it's not so bad."

First Impression: Huh. I am genuinely surprised by how funny this guy is. I'm liking the zombie sense of humor.

Last Impression: Oh, so close! There was a great idea here but just not enough follow through. They keep saying they are going to change the world, but have no ideas, no direction and no clue that it is already happening.

 

Ratings

Overall – 3 Resting Heart Rate As a huge zombie fan, this felt like a combination of the movies Fido and Wasting Away, with a little bit of Shaun of the Dead sprinkled in. I love the dialogue about humanity. What makes us human? Is it the desire to connect with one another or the blood in our veins? Here it's the desire to connect and embracing the idea that love can heal all wounds; even being undead. It's not on the same level as other zombie texts, such as World War Z, but it's playful and unique. 

Characters – 4 The main character, R the zombie, is definitely a 5 for me, but Julie, her father and other main characters were 2s and 3s, so we're settling on 4. R is an engaging, funny and refreshing protagonist. Everyone else is mainly around to keep him company.

Story –  3 The story was a bit typical for the zombie overridden post apocalyptic world. She's the daughter of the deranged general running the zombie-free zone, he's a zombie. It's not stretching very far beyond the typical tragic archetypes, but it works.  

Narration – 4 I loved the language. I was not expecting much in terms of elegant phrasing from a teenage zombie love story, but Marion continually surprised me. The tone was somber yet light-hearted and felt genuine. The main character, R, related social faux pas, the daily routine, and emotional experiences of the zombie world.

Read Again? No. There is only enough substance for one read through, but it was a great read.

Tell Others to Read? If they are zombie or romance fans, yes. If not, then no. 

Excerpt: "No one I know has any specific memories. Just a vague, vestigial knowledge of a world long gone. Faint impressions of past lives that linger like phantom limbs. We recognize civilization - buildings, cars, a general overview - but we have no personal role in it. No history. We are just here. We do what we do, time passes, and no one asks questions. But like I've said, it's not so bad. We may appear mindless, but we aren't The rusty cogs of cogency still spin, just geared down and down till the outer motion is barely visible. We grunt and groan, we shrug and nod, and sometimes a few words slip out. It's not that different from before.
     But it does make me sad that we've forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else's, because I'd like to love them, but I don't know who they are."


Excerpt content property of Simon and Schuster.

Signs and Symbols by Vladimir Nabokov

For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind.

Desires he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world.

After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.

At the time of his birth, they had already been married for a long time; a score of years had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Her drab gray hair was pinned up carelessly. She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike other women of her age (such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she presented a naked white countenance to the faultfinding light of spring. Her husband, who in the old country had been a fairly successful businessman, was now, in New York, wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real American of almost forty years’ standing. They seldom saw Isaac and had nicknamed him the Prince.

That Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong. The subway train lost its life current between two stations and for a quarter of an hour they could hear nothing but the dutiful beating of their hearts and the rustling of newspapers. The bus they had to take next was late and kept them waiting a long time on a street corner, and when it did come, it was crammed with garrulous high-school children. It began to rain as they walked up the brown path leading to the sanitarium.

There they waited again, and instead of their boy, shuffling into the room, as he usually did (his poor face sullen, confused, ill-shaven, and blotched with acne), a nurse they knew and did not care for appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life. He was all right, she said, but a visit from his parents might disturb him. The place was so miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid or mixed up so easily, that they decided not to leave their present in the office but to bring it to him next time they came.

Outside the building, she waited for her husband to open his umbrella and then took his arm. He kept clearing his throat, as he always did when he was upset. They reached the bus-stop shelter on the other side of the street and he closed his umbrella. A few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle.

The School by Donald Barthelme

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that ... that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems ... and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean.

And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it.

So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes – well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that ... you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.

With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably ... you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe ... well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander ... well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.

Fun Facts About The VNSA Booksale

The 57th annual VNSA booksale is just around the corner (Feburary 16-17) and hopefully your bookshelves are excited to receive all the new treasures. To get you even more excited about this year's fabulousness, here are some fun facts about the VNSA booksale and all of its awesomeness.
 

1. It's not just for books. The VNSA sale has AV, audio, music and games.
2. The trademark owl was drawn by Family Circus cartoonist Bill Keane.
3. Members can't buy at the sale. It's true. They're participating for their love of literature. Thank them. Hell, even hug them. You wouldn't believe how much time they've put into this day. Each member works in their section all year, so they have touched each title numerous times and are willing to help attendees find just what they're looking for. "We do the damnedest to get people the book they're looking for," says VNSA volunteer Michele VonKampen. I believe it.
4. It might seem like madness but it is actually a large-scale exercise in organization. There are 27 separate categories. Study the map before you go and know the difference between sections. For example "fiction" is anything 2003 or newer, "good reads" is 2002-1960 and "treasures" is anything 1960 or older. For the collectors items, stop by "rare and unusual." This is where I purchased my first first edition and I love it dearly.
5. The different colored aprons are for different levels of participation with the booksale. Blue is for newbies, green is for 25+ years and orange is for 35+ years.
6. Last year there were 1099 James Patterson books. Just imagine how many others are waiting to be discovered there this year.
7. Any book VNSA thinks may not sell (overabundance of the title, less than pristine condition, etc) gets donated beforehand. Every book gets a good home :)

Now go impress your friends with your new found trivia and get even more stoked for this year's sale! Even more details can be found at the VNSA Book Sale Facebook page.

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennes- see and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind.

Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal.

"Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head.

"Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."

Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children's mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar.

"The children have been to Florida before," the old lady said. "You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee."

The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, "If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?"

He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.

"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said without raising her yellow head.

"Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" the grandmother asked.