The Last Lecture

by Randy Pausch

{ 2008 | Hyperion | 224 pgs }

I hate to say this, but I wasn’t wowed by Pausch’s famous lecture and the book based on it. Call me hard-hearted, but it just didn’t feel nearly as moving as I expected.

(Seriously, this is coming from me; don’t you wonder if there’s something wrong with me now?)

In the tradition of professors giving their final classroom lectures before retiring, Pausch contemplates the most important things in his life as he faces fatal pancreatic cancer. Of course, all the basics were there – family, following your dreams, being true to yourself – but it wasn’t profound.

Yes, you may call me a horrible person.

(If you want a moving book, try Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Album instead.)

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

by Tiffany Baker

{ 2009 | Grand Central Publishing | 341 pgs }

To start off, isn’t that a great cover? I had this book on my list before I saw the cover, but surely I was just the tiniest bit influenced by the art.

Truly has a pituitary gland problem that makes her grow at an alarming rate, to alarming sizes – from her birth as a 12+ pound baby to a gargantuan woman. She narrates the story (from a semi-omniscient point-of-view [is semi-omniscient a real term?]), spending the first half describing her relationship with her dainty, delicate sister Serena Jane, and later describing her life once Serena Jane marries the town doctor. There are a number of themes in the plot, and I confess not all were to my liking, but the book as a whole was extremely captivating. For a story with little action, it was definitely a page-turner.

The Princess and the Hound

by Mette Ivie Harrison

{ 2007 | HarperTeen | 416 pgs }

I apologize for not writing reviews until now – a downside, for me, is that I don’t have as good a memory of the books as I would have earlier…

Harrison’s book The Princess and the Hound was not at all what I expected. It isn’t told by the princess: she isn’t introduced until a fair bit into the book. Instead, the narrator is the prince who is betrothed to the princess. Yes, surprisingly, the storyteller in a vaguely romantic medieval fantasy novel is male, written by a female author. And it was good storytelling! I suppose the most basic premise of the book is that this kingdom has forbidden communication between humans and animals – in the past, there were some who practiced “animal magic,” but those days are gone (in part because of a wicked king who…well, I won’t give it away). And not only are they gone, they’re lost in legend. So you can imagine the trouble it would bring if the current king married a woman who could – and did – speak to animals.

And then we add in the storyline of the princess, Beatrice, and her hound. Beatrice is notoriously cold, her only relationship being a deep friendship with her hound. I’ll just say that I was rather thrown off by Harrison’s plot; she set everything up so that I could easily predict what was coming next – and then I turned out to be wrong. It was brilliant. Harrison included extremely subtle hints and foreshadowing for both the obvious and the surprise plots, which meant things still made sense even after I was caught off guard.

I might say that the book had too many loose ends tied up too neatly, but here my memory fails me. It could have been the opposite, that I had lingering questions left unanswered. If it is the latter, Harrison has followed this book with The Princess and the Bear (2009). I plan to read it.