Hello! I have been remiss in posting here lately, so this is a little bit of a catch-up post. Since the last time that I posted here, I have been subbing a lot and reading a lot, so I have seven novels and novellas to write about. Because of the sheer amount of books I have to cover, I won't be writing all that much about any of them, but regardless of that, it should be a fairly long post.
Sakuri
Jacob Henzel
This was a book that I found for free on Amazon.com, though I think that it was a special offer that day, and then proceeded to read five or six months later. Though I haven't read any since starting this blog, I really like reading light novels, or usually fluffy Japanese novels that have four or five manga-style illustrations and sometimes get turned into anime. However, none of those have been quite as much like an anime as this Western novel was. To be fair, the sort of anime it resembles is an early to mid-90s hour long OAV, like they'd run on Friday nights on the Action Channel, right down to the quirky characters, gratuituous technobabble, bizarre sci-fi set pieces, and somewhat rushed ending with an odd and vaguely preachy last minute twist, but things could certainly be worse than that. Much like those OAVs, I can't say that this is one of the finest pieces of literature that I've read in my life, and I'm not sure that I'd recommend it to friends who weren't into that sort of anime, either. If Sakuri sounds like it would be up your alley, though, and you can get past a few typos in the Kindle edition, it's an entertaining novel.
The Vampyre: A Tale
John William Polidori
As I'm sitting here and trying to remember all of the stuff that I've read for the past couple of weeks, I am having a lot more trouble remembering this 19th century vampire novella than I am remembering the contemporary homage to sci-fi anime, which I don't think speaks well for the author, who happened to be Lord Byron's doctor. It isn't a bad story, really, but compared to a lot of other vampire stories, even from the 1800s, it's a little boring. It's still worth reading if you're interested in that sort of thing. Since it was the first story of its sort, it has some historical significance, and it's short enough that even if you do get a little bored, you'll be done with it soon. Plus, the foreword and afterword on the Project Gutenberg text of this, which are trying to convince the reader that Lord Byron probably isn't as awful as they've heard he is, are pretty interesting.
Monsters: A Bloody Love Story
S.M. Reine
This was a novella that I found for free on Amazon.com, and my second piece of Halloween reading. I think that the subtitle's classification of it as a love story may be misleading, since, despite the two leads having something of a romantic connection, it's more of an incredibly bloody action story. I certainly don't have any problem with that, and had read that it wasn't a mushy romance or anything of the sort in the largely positive on-site reviews, but I'm not entirely sure that it's a good thing to finish a book and be reminded more of Daybreakers than anything else in pop culture. Still, if you want to read a vampire story with a tough heroine and a vividly described de-gutting, I can't think of anything else that would fit that description.
Flash Gold: A Steampunk Novella
Lindsey Buroker
Like a lot of the other stuff I've been talking about today, this was a free novella that I'd downloaded from Amazon.com. I downloaded it the day that I bought my Kindle and, out of some inexplicable suspicion of free contemporary novels, didn't read it until just the other day. Since I'm not an expert on steampunk literature, I can't really compare Flash Gold to any other examples of the genre, but I can definitely say that it's the most charming novella that I've ever read in which a character has a bag of disembodied heads. It was interesting enough to make me want to read the rest of the series, which I suppose is the best thing that a free book can do, and, if you're also interested in reading it, it was still available for free as of last week.
Doctor Who: The Angel's Kiss
Justin Richards
When I'm doing a reading catch-up post on a blog and the most specifically targeted novel that I'm writing about is not the homage to 90s sci-fi anime, I feel like there may be a problem with my reading choices. Doctor Who: The Angel's Kiss is a fake pulp novel prequel to a book that the Doctor was reading in one episode of Doctor Who, starring a character from the show under a psudonym as she battles enemies from the show that the book never takes the time to explain. If you just read that description and thought, "Oooh, is that a book about River Song fighting the weeping angels?" and don't mind that it takes less than an hour to read, then my recommendation does not matter and you'll probably go and buy it anyway. If you are not a fan of Doctor Who, however, I don't see how this book would make any sense at all. At times, it's very good at emulating the style of pulp novels, and at the very least, it's not boring, but I can't say that I liked it all that much. I read the Kindle edition of this novel, available from Amazon.com.
Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle
Ishin Nishio
Earlier in this post, I mentioned that I was a fan of light novels, which don't get translated into English and sold in stores that often, so when I see them for sale cheaply, I tend to buy and stockpile them, since it's a lot more practical to spend five dollars on a book to get my dork fix than it would be to pay 30 dollars for an anime DVD. Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle was one of those impulse buys, and after my negative experiences with the Book Girl series, I didn't expect much from it. The first three-fourths of the novel, however, were very entertaining, and though the central murder mystery didn't seem to make much sense at all, it moved quickly, seemed to be well-translated, and was full of characters that were likable, interesting or both. In the last fourth of the book, however, things really seemed to stumble. The ending did not really make the murder mystery make a lot more sense, but the explanation of it and the detail that it goes into would make Sherlock Holmes walk into a room, smack the protagonist in the face, and tell him to get on with it so that the readers could get on with their lives. As if it weren't already plodding enough, the initial explanation of what happened is then followed by a second explanation of more stuff that happened and why everything in the first explanation was incorrect. At that point, I almost threw my copy of the book across the library I was sitting in and smacked my head against the desk. Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle isn't a bad book, really, and I'm at least curious about the second novel in the series, but I have never read something that grinds itself to a complete halt quite like this does.
Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings
Annie Hamilton
In a case of complete whiplash, I followed all of the contemporary and not quite critically lauded sci-fi that I'd been reading with a 1916 romantic comedy, though I can't say that the writing quality of Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings was any better or worse than what I'd been reading before it. It does have some entertaining parts, and the lead couple in the novel, which is not a spoiler because it would be nearly impossible to read this and not expect them to get together, fits together very well. The fact that it is sugary enough to make you vomit and unapologetically decisive about what a woman's place is, however, right down to one character complaining that all modern women think about is trying to get their right to vote, makes it very difficult to recommend. If you would like to read it, though, I found it on Project Gutenberg.
I've finally caught up on writing about what I've read here, so I'm done posting for now! Currently, I'm in the middle of reading Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World by Fanny Burney, so I'll probably write about that in the next few days. So far, it's very enjoyable, but in an 18th century novel, I never can tell what could happen to needlessly infuriate me and cause me to spend several paragraphs of text complaining about it.
