Busy, Busy, Busy...but still some time to read

Lauren Oliver's new book, Delirium, comes out in Feb 2011. Love is a disease, but you can't be "cured" until you are 18, so kids must be protected during the dangerous period prior to the cure. The cure will keep you "happy and safe forever." At the beginning of each chapter, Oliver takes famous quotes and bible passages and turns them on their ear for this new world when love is illegal. Regulators, invalids, the Wilds, sympathizers. No matter how you fight it, love will find a way.

On a totally different note, Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory about Pat Tillman, is disturbing, but like Delirium in one key way. In both books, governments, sure they are right, will go to great lengths to move forward their beliefs. In an aside, I was reminded about the meaning of snafu from soldiers in the 1940's (appropriate word for events in this book): Situation Normal; All F**ed Up.

Hadn't read any of Michael Chabon's books previously, although they've been on my list. Drawn into The Yiddish Policemen's Union and had to really read this closely. It's a complex mystery set in Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the 1948 collapse of the state of Israel. The end of the "temporary" haven is fast approaching and different players are looking to move in. Chabon has a way of inserting wonderful descriptions that made me go back and re-read them (did that really say that!??!). Great book.