Ever

Ever
$12.00
Blake Butler brings off sentences that at once estrange & seduce, their phrasing & pacing like some 21st-Century resurrection of the Middle English, constructed w/ an ear to assonance & buried rhymes. From the second page of EVER: "In the light my skin was see-through -- my veins an atlas spanned in tissue." Not much later, more pugnaciously: "Streams of night might gleam like glass. The dirt would swim with foam." Appreciation of this small, scary miracle depends on appreciation of such beveled gems, the bits & pieces of which it's composed. Myself, I might as well've been knocked from my horse on the road to Damascus, & what floored me is also a miracle of compression. EVER contains only occasional full pages of prose, indeed it features a central sequence on which there are no more than a few lines per page, & it has interstititial designs to boot, faint gray hints of Gorey, breaking up the novella still further. Yet I find gleanings of story enough to sustain me. EVER tracks a soiled Alice (unnamed, actually) through the looking-glass & way beyond, drawn on by a force she can't understand, & that may eventually destroy her. But first she travels through room after room of a phantasmagoric home. Sample: "The next room was made of wobble. Magnetic tape streaming from the rafters, bifurcating blonde split-ends. Cashed." (& the rest of the page runs blank... inviting meditation, perhaps?) Strange as EVER's house-tour is, though, it nonetheless recalls a classic turn of the mind, the psychological phenomenon sometimes called "the dream of rooms." Such dreams can occur at any age, but they're most common near the end of life, as a person revisits all the arenas of experience. Garcia Marquez makes brilliant use of this phenomenon, for instance, when he anticipates the death of Jose Arcadio Buendia in 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE. A more compatible figure for Butler's well-paced nightmare, however, would be Beckett's Malone, since if this girl too is dying, it's of some illness or wound she can never understand, in a place she can't say how she reached, & yet it's these very same gaps of self or soul that help her achieve a perverse assumption to heaven -- & the reader's along with her.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (Script)
$7.50
I read this book years ago, and I am letting my fourth and fifth grade students read it. They are laughing and enjoying the Herdman family and feel sorry for the their classmates and neighbors. As I remember there is a play script also.

Ever
$16.99
First for anyone looking for another book set in the same universe as Ella Enchanted, Fairest or the Princess Tales collection should look away now. This is a stand alone book with no ties to any other book she has written. Which is both in its favor and against it I think.

And yes my main gripe about it during the Read-a-thon was the fact the girl on the cover is depicted as brunette with blue eyes (never happens...no wait Sarah MacLean's cover for The Season has a brunette with blue eyes, also named Alexandra and that's how she is in the book!) I enjoyed the book well enough. I think if it hadn't been back and forth with the view points I would have liked it better. We have the story from two POV's, Kezi and Olus. While this helps give us better understanding of their two different cultures, it also brought me out of the moment while reading.

Of the two sides I think that Kezi's is the more developed. We definitely learn more about her people's culture, but mostly we learn about the differences in their religions (or the religion that follows Olus) and how blind faith can be. I found those discussions interesting since on the one hand Olus is a God--he has powers far beyond mortal means, is immortal and is worshipped. On the other, as Kezi points out, none of his fellow Gods are omnipotent or all-seeing. They are also subject to Fate, just like mortals as well. Kezi's God however is said to be omnipotent and none can thwart his will. I found it interesting at the end the task that Kezi takes upon herself after all is said and done.

In the end I enjoyed the book, but would have liked it better if it had been from either one first person POV or a third person POV. The back and forth distracted me quite a bit.

The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History
$26.00
What would have pushed this book up to five stars was an appendix along the lines of "CDOs and CDSs for Dummies." The author tries to make the general idea clear, but his explanations left me wanting a lot more. Unlike another reviewer, I am not under any delusions of being able to make those sorts of trades on my own. I just wanted to understand more thoroughly why Paulson made the moves he did, when he did.

Other than that, I recommend the book highly. It gives a detailed portrait of a skilled and courageous investor, who defied the conventional wisdom in order to reap huge profits, including helping to convince Wall Street to create an entirely new category of investment.