I read this over several days during the first week of the month — commuting, a sunny lunch break, and one evening to finish it up:

The Christmas Rat by Avi

From the jacket: “He is one weird Christmas visitor — his hair and moustache an unearthly white-blond, his voice a gruff rumble. He fills the apartment doorway. From two metal cases he produces what a boy would expect from an exterminator: Toxic roach powders and poisonous fog bombs. But a crossbow?”

My take: Eric, a middle-schooler living in New York City, is home for Christmas break. His parents are both working, his friends have either left town or are sick, and he’s already discovered his presents tucked under his parents’ bed, leaving him bored and restless. He’s got nothing to do but sit around the apartment, which puts him at home when the exterminator arrives.

The man, ex-Army, bears a crossbow, keys to every lock in the building, a blood-red business card, and a seeming hatred of all things pestilent. Anjela “Anje” Gabrail tells Eric to keep an eye out for rats around the building. When Eric sees one in the basement and calls Anje, the man invites him to help do some recon work and find the rat’s nest, so as to best destroy the problem. Lacking other distractions, Eric agrees, but later he begins to have second thoughts. Unfortunately, the game is on, and Anje is not one to back down.

Will Anje get his “man”? Or will the rat still be scurrying around the building come Christmas morning? Ultimately, Eric is going to have to decide which side of the battle he’s going to come down on, and it will take all of his focus and resources to ensure victory.

The story is probably a little intense for those children under the age of eight, but fair game for the rest of us. Plus, I will say that although I recognized the book as an allegory early on, it wasn’t until I read the author’s note at the end that the final bit fell into place for me. Clever.

Pages: 135

The first book finished in 2012:

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick

From the jacket: “Ben and Rose secretly wish their lives were different. Ben longs for the father he has never known. Rose dreams of a mysterious actress whose life she chronicles in a scrapbook. When Ben discovers a puzzling clue in his mother’s room and Rose reads an enticing headline in the newspaper, both children set out alone on desperate quests to find what they are missing.”

My take: I loved The Invention of Hugo Cabret when I read it nearly two years ago. I loved the cover when I saw it at the bookstore and bought it for myself based solely on that feature while it was still new in hardcover, which anyone who knows me in real life will tell you is something I never do for authors I don’t already love. So when I learned that Brian Selznick was writing a new book, I vowed to read it, too.

Rudi and Sarah and I got to hear Selznick talk about his second book, Wonderstruck, at the National Book Festival this fall, and it sounded truly promising, especially for a stand-alone sophomore work.

But then work happened this fall, and I essentially stopped reading and sort of fell into a book slump. So when Rudi surprised me with a copy for Christmas, I was utterly delighted and started reading it in restrained little chunks the very next day.

Wonderstruck takes what Selznick did with The Invention of Hugo Cabret — combine words and art in a singular way that defies easy characterization into a genre of literature — and expands on it. In this work, he tells parallel stories within the two styles of storytelling, eventually drawing them together into a single, comprehensive tale.

Ben, whose story arc comprises the text portion of the novel, is a twelve-year-old boy in small-town Minnesota 1977. He has been living with his aunt and uncle and their family since the sudden death of his single mother three months earlier. His prized possession from earlier days of happiness is a wooden box containing a collection of small items that have meaning for him. One stormy night, he discovers a secret his mother kept from him and sets about unraveling it, with nearly disastrous results.

Rose, whose portion of the book is told through illustration, is growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey, 50 years earlier. She has a view of New York City from her window, a bedroom filled with books and models of skyscrapers, and an obsession with the life and career of silent film star Lillian Mayhew.

Told in concert and interspersed over varying numbers of pages, Rose and Ben’s stories will overlap in unexpected places and ways. And, eventually, the lives of these two children born a half century apart will bring them both to the same place — New York’s American Museum of Natural History — in their quests for answers.

Charming and masterful, Wonderstruck offers you essentially a movie inside the cover of a novel. Do not let the book’s size scare you off, as it will only take a few delightful hours to read it start to finish, and when you close the cover with a smile, you’ll be tempted to begin again, or, at the very least, flip back through to better appreciate the detail that went into the pictorial portion of the novel. A recommended read for … well … everyone.

Pages: 637

It’s only been a week since the dawn of 2012 and already I’m behind on my book reviews. Please know that it is the fault of civil engineering and the need to understand the different types of drawbridges that got in the way, and I can’t see that being a repeat problem. (Procrastination, on the other hand, will be a relentless foe.)

Rest assured that I’ll be writing about Wonderstruck on Monday. And later in the week I’ll share thoughts about The Christmas Rat and Ivy + Bean. But for now, I’m turning in.

Jar City by Arnaldur Indriðason

From the jacket: “When a lonely old man is found dead in his Reykjavík flat, the only clues are a cryptic note left by the killer and a photograph of a young girl’s grave. Inspector Erlendur discovers that many years ago the victim was accused, but not convicted, of an unsolved crime, a rape. Did the old man’s past come back to haunt him? As Erlendur reopens this very cold case, he follows a trail of unusual forensic evidence, uncovering secrets that are much larger than the murder of one old man.”

My take: Both Nan and raidergirl3 recommended the Erlendur series to me when I was seeking out Icelandic fiction to read prior to our trip, and the folks at Goodreads concurred, giving it one of their better ratings for Icelandic books. However, life being what it was, I didn’t get a chance to start it until we found ourselves sitting in Keflavik Airport for several hours the morning of our arrival. But the deserted canteen provided the perfect spot to be sucked into the riveting world of Inspector Erlendur of the Reykjavik police force, called in to investigate the apparent murder of an elderly man.

Erlendur and his two detectives search the man’s apartment and eventually turn up an old photograph, which turns out to be of a young girl’s grave. Despite his underlings’ scoffing at his hunch that the picture is important, Erlendur insists on learning more. As they follow leads, they discover that many years earlier, the girl’s mother accused the dead man of raping her after he escorted her home from a party. But both the child and her mother are now dead, so they couldn’t have murdered the man, could they?

Jar City reminds me of the Swedish Wallander series (or, at least, the tv versions of them), and there is more than a passing similarity between the two Scandinavian policemen. The scenery in both is stark, the tone tends toward the darker side of police procedurals (although not as bleak as I’d feared), and the lead characters are both a bit of a mess, having destroyed all of the relationships they’ve ever been involved in, in part, you assume, because of their devotion to their jobs. In the case of this novel, Erlendur is long-divorced with two grown children, both of whom battle addiction. His daughter, Eva Lind, claims she’s trying to get clean, but she shows up at his apartment acting strangely.

Erlendur must juggle both his personal life and his work life to try and make sense of either. But while neither is going to sort out easily or painlessly, you can’t help but root for the grizzled Icelander to come through in the end.

Pages: 290

The Physics of Imaginary Objects, by Tina May Hall

From the jacket: “The Physics of Imaginary Objects, in fifteen stories and a novella, offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception. Weaving in and out of the space that connects life and death in mysterious ways, these texts use carefully honed language that suggests a newfound spirituality.”

My take: I picked up this slim volume from the library’s new book shelf by accident, mistaking it for another book whose title I can’t now recall. I kept with it because of its haunting, lyrical use of language. Hard to categorize, it’s probably less stories as the blurb suggests but instead a thematic collection of prose poems focusing on love and loss.

Because many of the pieces were somewhat distressing or disturbing, I can’t say that I liked the book, but I equally can’t say that I did not. I found myself entranced by it, pulled in inextricably as if caught in the book’s gravity, compelled to read page after page as if in a trance. If dark prose compressed into a few pages of lyrical narrative is your thing, I’d recommend this for its beauty.

Pages: 160

Cats Are Weird and More Observations by Jeffrey Brown

From the jacket Powells’ blurb: “Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown’s drawings perfectly capture the humor and quirkiness of cats in all their strange and charming glory. Following the success of Cat Getting Out of a Bag, this all-new collection of color and black-and-white comic strips loosely follows the adventures of a pair of cats as they explore the world around them, indoors and out. Adventures include taking a nap, licking a shoe, attacking dust particles, hiding in cabinets, pouncing on fallen leaves, confronting the vacuum cleaner, patrolling the yard, and purring up a storm — all adorably rendered in Brown’s immediate and irresistible style. Sure to delight anyone who lives with cats and appreciates their sweet and batty behavior, this beautifully packaged gift book is the cat’s meow.”

My take: A Christmas gift from Sam hand delivered when he came to town earlier this fall, this graphic novel is the sequel to the beloved Cat Getting out of a Bag.

While I didn’t find this one quite as charming as the original, it still offered delightfully illustrated vignettes of a pair of cats doing catlike things. “Resistance Is Futile” portrays a cat demonstrating who the boss is to a pile of papers placed on a desk. “The Look” is familiar to anyone who has ever tried to avoid moving for fear of disturbing the cat dozing on their lap. And, honestly, “Evidence of Cat Ownership or Why Cats Can’t Have Nice Things” hit just a little too close to home in our present Age of Corey.

Overall, a sweet collection of feline-friendly comics and a pleasant way to spend an hour.

Pages: 108