February Reading Choices

Here are the choices for Maggie's month:

I'm With Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks, Edward Ugel

Ugel (Money for Nothing), freelance writer and Huffington Post blogger, opens his newest memoir with an evocative and eye-grabbing lead sentence ("I'm haunted by mirrors") as he allows us to follow the fat as it melts. He begins with his Bethesda, Md., family life, explaining how he became a freelance writer after he was fired in 2006. Snoring and sleep apnea sent him off to the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, where he learned he had to drop from 263 pounds to 213, which he saw as a monumental challenge: "Starting a real diet after so many years of eating anything I wanted was akin to turning around a cruise ship." Ugel's task becomes clear as he documents battles lost at lunchtime, candy binges and secret eating: "Every bite tasted like failure." As he visits a health club, gets a trainer, plays racquetball, starts a food journal, does daily workouts, and meets with a nutritionist, the pounds vanish. Recalling embarrassments, triumphs, and defeats, Ugel shares intimate moments of his struggle. After much denial and shame, confronting emotional and psychological issues while fighting his "inner demons," he eventually was stepping on the scales with a Rocky-like determination. When he details the delights of food, one can get hungry just turning the pages. (Publishers Weekly)

Firelight, Sophia Jordan

Descended from dragons, the draki's ability to appear human protects them from hunters. Jacinda lives with her pride in the Cascades, but she chafes under her special status as the only fire-breather in hundreds of years. Recklessly breaking the “no-fly” rule, she attracts hunters; mercifully, one hunter, a beautiful boy who looks upon her with wonder, lets her escape. After this, the pride intends to hobble her rebelliousness, and Jacinda is forced to flee. But while twin sister Tamra, who never manifested and was shunned, is happy with the move, Jacinda feels only anguish within Nevada's desert climate. Then she meets Will and, despite recognizing him as the same draki hunter, feels herself come alive. Jordan's compelling addition to the supernatural star-crossed lovers theme is equal parts taut suspense and sensuous romance, with visceral writing and believable relationships among characters, particularly among Jacinda's family. A foreshadowed twist and a thrilling confrontation in the end pages leave Jacinda heartbroken and in trouble, and readers will howl for more. Grades 8-12. --Krista Hutley

Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann

Colum McCann has worked some exquisite magic with Let the Great World Spin, conjuring a novel of electromagnetic force that defies gravity. It's August of 1974, a summer "hot and serious and full of death and betrayal," and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious. A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers. This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives--a street priest, heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, young artists, a Park Avenue judge. All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging. And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later. You might find yourself paused, considering the universe of lives one city contains in any slice of time, each of us a singular world, sometimes passing close enough to touch or collide, to birth a new generation or kill it, sending out ripples, leaving residue, an imprint, marking each other, our city, the very air--compassionately or callously, unable to see all the damage we do or heal. And most of us stumbling, just trying not to trip, or step in something awful.

But then someone does something extraordinary, like dancing on a cable strung 110 stories in the air, or imagining a magnificent novel that lifts us up for a sky-scraping, dizzy glimpse of something greater: the sordid grandeur of this whirling world, "bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants." --Mari Malcolm