AJ Dunn Reads

  Monogamy By Sue Miller   Graham and Annie are both on their second marriages, now married to one another. Annie believes they have the perfect life, though lately she suspects something is wrong with Graham. She gave up her budding art career as a photographer to stay with him in the town where he opened a bookstore. Throughout the years she has come to terms with that decision. But Graham has been hiding a secret. He has been seeing another woman. Annie knows that Graham had been sleeping with other woman during his first marriage, which was for him an open one. Though his first wife divorced him because she did not want that life and he refused to change. When Graham dies in his sleep, Annie learns about his affair and goes through the steps of grief in coming to terms with losing him, losing her image of him, and the life she gave up for him. Did she really know him at all? This was my first experience with Sue Miller and I loved this book. The writing was beautiful and the story

  Dracula By Bram Stoker   My first time finally reading Dracula! Jonathan Harker is on his way to Transylvania to assist Count Dracula with his home purchase in England. While there he encounters Dracula's strange habits and is visited by three women who seem intent on having their way with him. He explores the castle and discovers his worst nightmares. He is a prisoner, it seems, to a very dark force. Back in England Lucy, Mina Murray's friend, starts exhibiting strange behavior due to unaccounted for blood loss. Mina, Jonathan's fiance, worries about him. She hasn't heard from him for a long time. Doctor Seward takes care of Lucy, but has to call in a friend, Doctor Van Helsing, when Lucy's health continues to go down hill. Van Helsing suspects he knows what is happening. Local children start to go missing and show up claiming they were playing with a woman. Several of Lucy's admirers converge to solve this riddle. Seward, along with two others (Arthur and Qu

  Betty By Tiffany McDaniel   Betty Carpenter is one of eight children (two who die young) and grows up with her family in poverty in Breathed, Ohio. She is part Cherokee and her father teaches her all about the traditional ways. Like him, she is intensely interested in the natural world. She is also a budding writer. Betty lives with her parents (Landon and Alka) in a run down house after moving around the country for a time. Her much older brother (Leland) is in the army, but her other siblings live at home, two older sisters (Fraya, the motehring type, and Flossie, the budding star), and two younger brothers (Trustin, the artist, and Lint, a stuttering and fearful rock collector). In her household, Betty looks different than her siblings. She is dark and looks like her father. She is fully aware of this difference and it plagues her. She has to learn to accept herself and to make a way for herself. While growing up Betty has to navigate those who will discriminate against her becaus

  McGlue By Ottessa Moshfegh   My first experience with Moshfegh, McGlue is about a man who is accused of the murder of his best friend. He is being held on a sailing ship awaiting his fate. He doesn't remember the murder and is an alcoholic. Through the story he recalls meeting his friend, who kept him drunk, but also looked out for him. As he begins to sober up, McGlue starts to remember. This was a great novella. It was dark, gritty, immersed in the filth of living in a body. I found the writing to be razor sharp. Moshfegh does not worry about the reader feeling uncomfortable. She is a writer's writer, telling the tale in all of its messy grandeur. These are characters you will not like, right up to the end. The setting is so immersive you can almost hear the water lapping at the wood and smell the rankness of McGlue's prison. I loved it. This is an easy 4 stars. I'm excited to read more of Moshfegh's work.

  One of Us By Craig DiLouie After a plague epidemic creates a series of kids with genetic mutations, most parents who give birth to them give them up to various orphanage homes around the country, where they grow up and are educated. The majority of the populace despises these kids who have strange deformities or appear animalistic in nature. These kids are also put to work for some of the "normal" people. As a result of the misunderstandings and hatred, some of the plague kids want to rise up against it. And many of them are starting, during puberty, to exhibit powers well beyond mere deformities. After some of them are killed by the home's principal, and others are sent away to become government guinea pigs/slaves, a murder occurs and is blamed on Enoch Bryant, one of the plague kids working on a farm. The other plague kids know this is not true, and when Enoch is murdered they decide now is the time to rise up. This was an interesting book, and not exactly what I was

  Maurice By E.M. Forster   Maurice Hall is conventional by all standards in his Edwardian society, except that he is gay. As he grows up he tries to deny the fact, but then falls in love with a boy from school and they form a romantic relationshi9p that ends when Clive marries, denying his feelings for Maurice. Maurice focuses his energies on work, unwilling to believe that Clive doesn't love him. But he eventually falls for someone of a lower class and finds that he can truly be happy if he denies the conventionality he has relied on his whole life. This was a beautifully written story, my first experience with E.M. Forster. It was moving and I could fully identify with Maurice's struggle, particularly when Clive denies him and Maurice is afloat with his feelings. I liked the class discussion, and was particularly happy when Maurice decided love mattered more than his standing in society. It was an excellent book, elegant and emotional. 4 stars.

  Needful Things By Stephen King   A new store pops up in Castle Rock, Maine called Needful Things where you can always find what it is you need. The store is run by a man named Leland Gaunt who has a way of knowing what his new customers need from his store. Some of them want to feel better physically, some want to feel better about themselves, some just need fulfillment. Through the objects they find there, Leland strikes bargains with them. In exchange for what they get he asks them to play "pranks" on others in the community. These pranks lead to violence, turning neighbors against neighbors. Sheriff Alan Pangborn has to deal with all of this, discovering that Needful Things is the common denominator in all that is going wrong in Castle Rock. He has to meet this evil force head on. I really liked this story, which included a lot of characters and character mentions from previous Castle Rock stories. The premise of "buyer beware" and "you get what you pay fo

  Strangers By Dean Koontz Several people around the US experience fear-based phenomena in their daily lives, and they are all blocking out a particular series of days. When they start to remember things, they converge on a motel in Nevada to exchange stories, which leads their memories to come flooding back. They all were witness to an event that has been covered up. A couple of them have gained supernatural abilities as a result of the event. When the full details come to light, they make a plan to uncover this event and get it out in the open. But the people who brainwashed them and repressed their memories know what they are planning to do and work to stop them from accomplishing this goal. This was a suspenseful story that slowly builds tension through the ensemble cast's various fears and memories. I enjoyed the plot and the characters, who were all different and contributed to the story in their own important ways. It was a story that asks if we are ready for life beyond wha

  Where the Red Fern Grows By Wilson Rawls My yearly re-read of this lovely book, which follows Billy Colman as he lusts after a pair of hunting dogs, saves up money to get them, teaches them how to hunt, and has his adventures with them before the sad conclusion which claims both lives of the dogs. I, of course, cried my eyes out. Now that I have personally known the love of, and for, a pair of beautiful dogs it hit home in a different way. I'll always love this story. 5 stars, naturally.

  Beneath the Scarlet Sky By Mark Sullivan This story follows Pino Lella, an Italian teenager, who becomes enmeshed in World War II when he is enlisted as the driver for a high ranking German official. Pino is sent to a mountain getaway/school by his parents in order to keep him safe when the bombing reaches his Italian city. There, he helps to get Jews across the border to Switzerland to escape the Nazis. Afterward, when he returns home and is at the age of enlistment to be drafted into the war effort, he is noticed by General Leyers, who asks for Pino to become his driver, taking him around Italy to various appointments and battle positions. Pino saves Leyers's life a couple times, even though Pino himself is against the Nazis and is working undercover as a spy, relaying information to his uncle who is part of the resistance movement. Throughout the story Pino is forming a romantic relationship with Anna, who is the maid to Leyers's mistress, and a woman he asked out on a dat

  The Time Traveler's Wife By Audrey Niffenegger This is my best friend's favorite book and everyone raves about it, so I was glad to finally get to it.  Henry DeTamble is a time traveler who has no control over his disappearances, which seem to result from feelings of high stress. He appears in a few reoccurring places throughout the years. Most often he appears to Clare Abshire throughout her life, from the age of 6. When he first comes to her he is in his 30s and knows she is the little girl version of his future wife. Henry spends his time with Clare teaching her things and dodging her questions about the future. When she sees him in her own time at the age of 20 (Henry is 28) she hints at the fact that she has known him for a long time, even though he is just meeting her for the first time. So begins there love affair and the tangling up of their stories throughout the years, which results in the devastating reality of Henry's condition, a reality they hope will not be

  You Love Me By Caroline Kepnes This is the third book in the YOU series. Joe Goldberg is out of prison, but he has been exiled away from his child, who he has with Love Quinn. His in-laws bought him a house and told him to stay away. While there Joe meets a woman at the library where he volunteers. Her name is Mary Kay. She is a librarian and Joe quickly learns everything about her, falling in love yet again. This time Joe is determined to be good. Mary Kay introduces him to her friends, but fails to tell him she's married. Joe hopes Mary Kay will realize she loves him as much as he loves her and will remove the obstacles in her life that keep them apart. Pretty soon these obstacles start dying, but Joe hasn't killed them. In this book, Joe is being watched and followed by a man hired by the Quinn's. Joe has to dodge this man and keep him happy, finding an ally against the Quinn's. Until Love calls him back, where Joe has to fight for his own life. When he is able to

  Kudos By Rachel Cusk Kudos is the final book in the Outline trilogy. Faye is out to promote her book in Europe. Like the other books in the trilogy, Faye is told various personal stories by several people she meets: a man on the plane, interviewers, fellow writers, and her son. Through these stories deep human questions are explored about love, family, justice, art, politics, and sorrow. The difference in Kudos is that Faye has more of a voice of her own. She expresses more opinions vocally than in the other two novels. It seems like the people she has met are far more interested in talking about themselves than in getting to know her, which is interesting given the "plot" of the book. Rather than talking about her work, the interviewers tell her stories and talk about themselves. Some time has past for Faye, who has remarried, though we aren't told anything about how that came to pass. Her children seem to be with their father a lot, and he seems to neglect to be wi

  Station Eleven By Emily St. John Mandel Kirsten Raymonde is a little girl on stage when the lead actor in the production of King Lear she is acting in dies onstage. This marks the beginning of the end of civilization as she knows it. A flu is spreading like wildfire, killing most of its victims within a few hours. Twenty years later Kirsten is part of a traveling troupe of musicians and actors making their way from settlement to settlement. At one of these settlements they encounter a man named The Prophet whose ire they draw, and who begins to threaten the troupe's existence. Station Eleven moves back and forth through time, tracing the beginning of the flu pandemic and the twist of fate that connects the novel's characters. I really liked this book, which unfolded elegantly by revealing slowly what the connections were between all of its various elements and characters. It had a good level of tension and a mystery at its core. The writing was wonderful. St. John Mandel had

  The Kite Runner By Khaled Hosseini When he was young, Amir spent all of his time playing with his family's servant boy Hassan. Amir likes to think of himself as smarter than Hassan, though Hassan shows himself to be much wiser than Amir in most ways. Hassan also sticks up for Amir, drawing the ire of another group of boys. During a kite festival Hassan runs down the prized kite for Amir, but runs into these boys who hurt him in a traumatic way, which Amir witnesses and does nothing about, pretending he didn't see it. This incident causes a schism in their relationship, leading Amir (in his guilt) to frame Hassan for a theft in order to have him removed from the household. Hassan and his father leave. Amir has a lot of jealousy for Hassan because of the favoritism Amir's father Baba shows Hassan. When the Taliban start to assert control over Afghanistan and Amir and Baba have to leave the country, they make their way eventually to the US where Amir grows up and marries. Th