For Book Week. I am reading a book by National Book Award finalist, Laini Taylor, and Daughter of Smoke and Bone has renewed my hope and faith in fiction. It’s the story of Karou, an art student in Prague. Karou has just discovered that her first boyfriend, Kaz, cheated on her with a mutual acquaintance.  She has broken up with him, but he isn’t taking no for an answer. He shows up to her art class as, surprise, the nude model she has to sketch. However, Karou was given a beaded necklace of wishes by her guardian, Brimstone. These beads represent the smallest available wishes, and with them Karou can make minor wishes. Some of her previous wishes have included the blue hair that flows straight from her scalp and the bushy eyebrows that she wished on a romantic rival — and in this case, Karou is so incensed that she uses her wishes to make her ex itch in some embarrassing places. She straddles two worlds: the world of mortals and the world of wishes and chimera. This book thrills me and I haven’t even read a quarter of it yet. Taylor spins an incredible otherworld full of women who are part snake and messengers who are part crow and part bat. This is the world of the chimera, creatures that appear to be the composites of several different types of animals. Brimstone sells wishes and he raised Karou. “[His] arms and massive torso were the only human parts of him, though the tough flesh that covered them was more hide than skin. His square pectorals were riven with ancient scar tissue, one nipple entirely obliterated by it, and his shoulders and back were etched in more scars: a network of puckered white cross-hatchings. Below the waist he became else-thing. His...

Reading this book, I was reminded of being halfway through a bath; It’s warm, but cooling off, you’re already clean and at this point just sitting in your own dirty water. Ok, mostly it’s just the luke warm thing. I Married You for Happiness, a novel by Lily Tuck (who won the National Book Award for 2004’sThe News from Paraguay) is about more than just happiness and marriage. It’s about the depth and breadth of life itself. Even with that whole menu of experience to choose from, I found myself getting bored reading the thing. Let’s start with the details. IMYfH begins when Nina discovers her husband, Philip, has died very unexpectedly in the upstairs bedroom while she was making dinner. Instead of calling the police or for an ambulance, Nina cracks a window and sits next to the bed, where Philip has expired, and spends the night sipping her way through a bottle of wine. (Shock and grief make a person do weird things, so this actually does seem entirely feasible to me.) The book takes us through a night of her reminiscing about their entire life together, the highs, lows and the mundane. We are occasionally returned to the room where Nina sits and Philip cools, to see her current state, before she hops onto another memory stream and rides it for 8-10 pages. I really enjoyed the idea of this book. To travel through the life of a married couple in memory was like finding a new treasure each time Nina came to a new memory. Honestly, I liked the painful and dull memories as much as I did the happy ones. That was so very real-life. In my own life, I try to find the happiness in the day-to-day, because...