Hello! Last weekend, I posted very excitedly about taking part in the Wicked Wildfire Read-A-Thon, since I thought that it would be cool to see how much I could read in a week while, at the same time, actually making use of this blog. I wouldn't say that my participation in the event was a complete failure, but at the same time, I didn't do very well, either. On Saturday and Sunday I read like crazy, doing one of the nifty challenges that My Shelf Confessions, the host blog, had posted, and then finishing two novels and a book of manga, but after that, I completely farted out on the whole thing. Still, three books in a weekend isn't awful, so here's what I thought of the books I read! I posted these reviews on Shelfari, too, but, due to the fact that I wrote most of these very late at night, have done some editing. As I'm sure you'll notice, though, I was fairly ambivalent towards the reading I did get done, which may have stopped me from going on with the read-a-thon with the enthusiasm I had on Saturday. Hopefully, however, I'll do better the next time that I participate in something like this!
The I.T. Girl
Fiona Pearse
I downloaded The I.T. Girl from Amazon on a whim, when it was free for a day, and can't say that it wasn't worth at least the effort that it took to download it. Some of the corporate intrigue was genuinely suspenseful, and Orla, the heroine, was a fairly likable character. I also really liked all of the tiny details and very British details of Orla's day to day life. For the most part, though, this book seemed a little dull. Orla's romance wasn't very interesting, and though I understand computers and coding, some of the play by play explanations of coding projects and bug searches got to be a bit much. CooperDaye, the fictional financial company that the book centers on, seemed to be a cartoonishly horrific company to work for, too, though Orla's problems there didn't render her unsympathetic.
While I didn't love The I.T. Girl, I'm not sorry that I read it. However, I don't think that it's going to have a long term home on my Kindle and, reflecting back on the novel, am not quite sure how I got through it.
Clover- Volume 4
Clamp
Since I've managed to drag out my reading Clover, which is a fairly light on text manga series, over a ridiculously long amount of time, I was really looking forward to reading this final volume and seeing how it all ended. However, I was a little disappointed to find out that this volume was a flashback, rather than the aftermath of Kazuhiko and Suu's story. The story in this volume, about the relationship between two brothers who are also Three Leaf Clovers (which I promise makes some sort of sense if you've read the rest of the comic) is well told and as pretty as ever, and, as a bonus, is interlaced with some incidental scenes between Kazuhiko and Oruha, as well as some of Suu's lamentations. I didn't really feel like this story had as much impact on the rest of the series as it should have, though, and wasn't entirely satisfied with this as an ending. As a whole, I did enjoy Clover, but this well-drawn and empty feeling story seemed to suffer from every problem that the series had in the space of one short book.
The Crystal Stopper
Maurice Leblanc
Even though I read the Arsene Lupin novels like crazy, considering they're entertaining and safely in the public domain, I think that the quality of them varies wildly from book to book. The Crystal Stopper, unfortunately, was not one of my favorites in the series. This may be in part because I read the entire book within a 24-hour time period, which I don't usually do. All of the complicated and contrived plot twists and problems started to run together, and it was a bit bothersome. Plus, I felt a bit like Clarisse, the romantic interest in this book, would have been okay with Lupin falling in a hole and never getting out if he'd managed to keep his promises to her before the accident occurred. Like the other novels in the series, however, The Crystal Stopper was never boring, and, as always, Arsene Lupin was both likable and vaguely reprehensible. Though I didn't love this book, reading it was a good way to waste a rainy Sunday.
If you're interested in reading The Crystal Stopper, too, it is available for free both at Amazon.com and Project Gutenberg.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Attempting to Take Part in a Read-A-Thon
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
3/26/2013- The Shadow of a Sin by Charlotte M. Brame
Yesterday, perhaps because I hate myself, I read The Shadow of a Sin by Charlotte M. Brame (though it is sometimes credited to Bertha Clay). It was a lovely Victorian melodrama about the young and fair Hyacinth Vaughn. The poor, sweet Hyacinth is raised in seclusion by her loving, but staid grandparents, and she longs to experience the brightness of life in the outside world. That's why she decides to elope with the first handsome young man to profess his undying love for her. Though Hyacinth repents of her rash plan before having the chance to go through with it, her plan to sin casts a sinister blot upon her young life.
Though there are plenty of things that I could complain about in The Shadow of a Sin, my biggest problem with the book is that Hyacinth Vaughn is one of the stupidest heroines in any novel that I've ever read. In her case, I'm not going to complain about how outdated the social mores depicted in this novel are, and I'm not going to say any more than this about how every book that I've ever read by Charlotte M. Brame has had at least one idiotic character in a leading role that could have solved every problem suffered by every character in a thirty second speech. I am, however, going to spew a couple of slight spoilers, so if you get upset about people ruining plot points in books from the 19th century, you may want to skip my next paragraph.
First of all, if you find a dying woman in a field, saying over and over again that a man is going to murder her, I think that Hyacinth's plan of, "Oh! My handkerchief is too lacy to bandage her wounds, so I think that I need to ask my boyfriend to lend me a better handkerchief, with his name on it, to leave on her body before we leave her lying in the field!" would not be the first one that sprung to the minds of many people. The fact that he also leaves his address with the dying woman is his fault, not Hyacinth's, but he wasn't in the novel enough for me to get infuriated with his character, so he doesn't get to be the subject of this rant.
Once all that is over with, if you have a fiancee who says that he'll love you no matter what, and you find yourself having to testify in court to save your last boyfriend from the gallows, it might be a good idea to mention this to the fiancee. Hyacinth does not do this. In fact, she runs screaming from the fiancee, assumes that her having a previous boyfriend will spoil his heart against her forevermore, goes crazy, and goes into hiding. At no point does it occur to her that, having saved someone's life, the new fiancee might be willing to forgive her for having spoken to other boys. If Hyacinth did assume that people weren't constantly willing to throw her in a ditch and ride away in their carriages, though, there really wouldn't be much of a story, though, so her mind-numbing stupidity is necessary to the plot.
The one thing that I can say for The Shadow of a Sin is that, although it is insane nonsense, it is interesting and fairly well written, like the rest of Charlotte M. Brame's work. I know that, whenever I start one of her books, I'll be ready to stomp my Kindle to pieces during at least one part of it. While her books are ridiculous, though, and involve foreshadowing as subtle as beating the reader in the head with a tree branch, most of the melodrama is actually pretty page turning. Since I'm not a reader of the Victorian era, I can't say for certain that her books seemed any less insane then, but I can see how they kept selling.
If you too would like to waste a day on The Shadow of a Sin, it is available as a shiny new eBook from Project Gutenberg. A Fair Mystery, another of Brame's books, was made available alongside it, but, for the sake of my own sanity, I'm going to wait a while until I read that one.
Though there are plenty of things that I could complain about in The Shadow of a Sin, my biggest problem with the book is that Hyacinth Vaughn is one of the stupidest heroines in any novel that I've ever read. In her case, I'm not going to complain about how outdated the social mores depicted in this novel are, and I'm not going to say any more than this about how every book that I've ever read by Charlotte M. Brame has had at least one idiotic character in a leading role that could have solved every problem suffered by every character in a thirty second speech. I am, however, going to spew a couple of slight spoilers, so if you get upset about people ruining plot points in books from the 19th century, you may want to skip my next paragraph.
First of all, if you find a dying woman in a field, saying over and over again that a man is going to murder her, I think that Hyacinth's plan of, "Oh! My handkerchief is too lacy to bandage her wounds, so I think that I need to ask my boyfriend to lend me a better handkerchief, with his name on it, to leave on her body before we leave her lying in the field!" would not be the first one that sprung to the minds of many people. The fact that he also leaves his address with the dying woman is his fault, not Hyacinth's, but he wasn't in the novel enough for me to get infuriated with his character, so he doesn't get to be the subject of this rant.
Once all that is over with, if you have a fiancee who says that he'll love you no matter what, and you find yourself having to testify in court to save your last boyfriend from the gallows, it might be a good idea to mention this to the fiancee. Hyacinth does not do this. In fact, she runs screaming from the fiancee, assumes that her having a previous boyfriend will spoil his heart against her forevermore, goes crazy, and goes into hiding. At no point does it occur to her that, having saved someone's life, the new fiancee might be willing to forgive her for having spoken to other boys. If Hyacinth did assume that people weren't constantly willing to throw her in a ditch and ride away in their carriages, though, there really wouldn't be much of a story, though, so her mind-numbing stupidity is necessary to the plot.
The one thing that I can say for The Shadow of a Sin is that, although it is insane nonsense, it is interesting and fairly well written, like the rest of Charlotte M. Brame's work. I know that, whenever I start one of her books, I'll be ready to stomp my Kindle to pieces during at least one part of it. While her books are ridiculous, though, and involve foreshadowing as subtle as beating the reader in the head with a tree branch, most of the melodrama is actually pretty page turning. Since I'm not a reader of the Victorian era, I can't say for certain that her books seemed any less insane then, but I can see how they kept selling.
If you too would like to waste a day on The Shadow of a Sin, it is available as a shiny new eBook from Project Gutenberg. A Fair Mystery, another of Brame's books, was made available alongside it, but, for the sake of my own sanity, I'm going to wait a while until I read that one.
Monday, March 18, 2013
3/18/2013- Gamers by Thomas K. Carpenter
I finally came across a book that's easy to summarize, which feels like quite an achievement. Gamers, by Thomas K. Carpenter, which I downloaded for free from Amazon.com, is a sci-fi YA novel and the first book in a series. It's about Gabby, an improbably brilliant young hacker who lives in a futuristic world in which life has been turned into a video game. Though she primarily uses her hacking skills to help her friends, rather than for selfish reasons, she becomes concerned upon discovering that the LGIE, a governing organization that keeps track of the game, has been digging around in her personal files. When Gabby decides to investigate this for herself, she discovers, ever so shockingly, that her lovely, idyllic life may not be all that it seems.Snarkiness aside, I thought that Gamers was a fairly entertaining book. It's nothing that I'd go crazy recommending to people, but it wasn't a chore to read by any means. The characters were likable, the world that they lived in was well thought out and littered with references to old-school gaming, and the story was suspenseful enough that it was easy to keep picking up for a few minutes of reading. I did, however, think that it had a few major issues.
My first problem with Gamers, and probably my biggest one, is that I'd feel charitable saying that it was a bit derivative. I don't want my finger pointing to be too specific, but the last chunk of the novel is about a high stakes competition where the students at Gabby's school are forced to compete in a ruthless game, where the losers may be killed and the winners are given grand rewards. This game is created by a ruthless agent of the aforementioned LGIE, it forces, at several points, the students to fight one another, and the stealthy, antisocial girl is named after an animal. No mass audiences sit and watch the Final Raid, as it's called, but it makes parallels between Gamers and certain other series easy to draw.
I had a couple of smaller problems with Gamers, but neither of them were nearly as distracting. One of them was that there were a few errors with grammar and verb tense, but, for me, those were only momentary issues. I also hated the cliffhanger of an ending, since, in the interest of getting people to continue with the series, it left absolutely nothing resolved. It's possible to end some aspects of a story while still keeping readers interested in the characters, but Gamers actively created new plot points in the last few pages of the book. It wasn't horrible, really, but it was frustrating.
Even though I may not seem to have the nicest things to say about Gamers, I did sort of like it. It wasn't boring, I didn't hate the characters, and, even though the vast majority of characters that lived there were doomed, the novel's world seemed fairly cool as far as dystopian societies go. If you're looking for a few hours worth of fluffy reading material that's appropriately perilous to the cast, you could certainly do worse than to read Gamers.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Showcase Sunday #1
Hello! The last meme type thing (though it seems a bit odd to call them that) on here was fun, so it seems reasonable enough to try another one! This one is called Showcase Sunday, and is hosted by the lovely blog Books, Biscuts, and Tea. In it, you're supposed to talk about all of the books that you accquired over the past week, whether they be physical books or eBooks. I'm going to cheat a little for this post, partially because I got a really cool book last Saturday and want to write about that. Also, if I counted the free eBooks that I racked up last week, both from special offers and public domain stuff, I would be working on this post for hours. Because of these things, I doubt if this will be a very good Showcase Sunday post. I've finished my introduction paragraph, though, so I might as well just go for it!
Drury Lane's Last Case, by Ellery Queen (which I know is a pseudonym), is the only book I took a photo of, because it's the only one that looks out of the ordinary. I got really excited about finding an old mystery novel at Goodwill, especially for $1.99, so I got it, despite the fact that it's in that plastic bag for a reason. It's in very readable condition, though, so as long as I keep it in that bag when I'm reading it, the whole thing should stay together. A few of the pages are coming out, but in chunks, so it's easy to deal with.
Sherlock Homes vs. Fantomas, by Pierre de Wattyne and Yorril Walker, was a Kindle purchase that I made to celebrate the fact that the University of Illinois Springfield raised no major objections to my attending grad school there. However, the fact that it's about both Sherlock Holmes and Fantomas meant that if I didn't get into their grad school, I would have purchased it to make myself feel better.
At the start of the month, I ordered a couple of used books from Amazon for a penny each, and the 18th Robotech book, The End of the Circle, is the one that showed up first. I heard it was a really strange attempt to tie up all of the loose ends that result from shoving three different TV shows together in order to create one, so I hope that, even if it doesn't end up making a lot of sense, it's at least entertaining.
Soulless, by Gail Carriger, is the last book on my list, and since I found it in a real life bookstore, I'm guessing that it's the least strange one to have on the list. I'd read about it before and thought that it sounded cool, though, since Victorian London and supernatural things are both cool, so I'm hoping it's good.
This week, I got far more books than usual, so I might try to keep track of the free eBooks that I get to include in a post next week. I'm done with this post for now, though, so I'm leaving this blog! Have a nice week, everyone!
Drury Lane's Last Case, by Ellery Queen (which I know is a pseudonym), is the only book I took a photo of, because it's the only one that looks out of the ordinary. I got really excited about finding an old mystery novel at Goodwill, especially for $1.99, so I got it, despite the fact that it's in that plastic bag for a reason. It's in very readable condition, though, so as long as I keep it in that bag when I'm reading it, the whole thing should stay together. A few of the pages are coming out, but in chunks, so it's easy to deal with.
At the start of the month, I ordered a couple of used books from Amazon for a penny each, and the 18th Robotech book, The End of the Circle, is the one that showed up first. I heard it was a really strange attempt to tie up all of the loose ends that result from shoving three different TV shows together in order to create one, so I hope that, even if it doesn't end up making a lot of sense, it's at least entertaining.
Soulless, by Gail Carriger, is the last book on my list, and since I found it in a real life bookstore, I'm guessing that it's the least strange one to have on the list. I'd read about it before and thought that it sounded cool, though, since Victorian London and supernatural things are both cool, so I'm hoping it's good.
This week, I got far more books than usual, so I might try to keep track of the free eBooks that I get to include in a post next week. I'm done with this post for now, though, so I'm leaving this blog! Have a nice week, everyone!
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
3/13/2013- Fast One by Paul Cain
Eventually, I'm going to read something that's easy to summarize for this blog, but today, I didn't manage it. Fast One, by Paul Cain, is a 1933 hard boiled crime novel about Kells, a criminal who gets framed for murder after refusing to help another denizen of the underworld, Jack Rose, with some trouble on a gambling boat, and has a rather strong reaction to it. After he gets double crossed over and over again, he somehow comes to the conclusion that he needs to be in charge of all of the gangsters in town. Once Kells achieves this, things escalate quickly, and he proceeds to get double crossed for over one hundred more pages.
Fast One really should have been an exciting book. There are gangsters, gambling, political conspiracies, some inexplicable episode in the middle with boxers, and enough dead bodies that I think a sheet of notes would be helpful in keeping track of all of them. For all that goes in the book, though, I was bored during a lot of it. The characters, other than a few that spend the entire novel in the forefront, lack personality and come and go quickly, making it somewhat meaningless when a more important character kills them off. Beyond that, there are so many nonsensical plots both by Kells and engineered against him that at some points, the book stops making sense entirely.
Though I have plenty of complaints about Fast One, it wasn't totally without its merits. Some passages, especially towards the end of the book, were actually quite exciting. It also had the perfect ending, one that was very logical and made it hard to imagine another way that the story could have possibly ended. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I have other, more outlandish pulp novels.
If Fast One sounds like it would be more your cup of tea than it was mine, an eBook of it can be found at Munsey's, which is a super-nifty eBook database for out of copyright novels. There are some bothersome typos in it, but nothing that affects its readability. Most of them are simple capitalization errors or strange bits of punctuation resting where they couldn't possibly belong.
Fast One really should have been an exciting book. There are gangsters, gambling, political conspiracies, some inexplicable episode in the middle with boxers, and enough dead bodies that I think a sheet of notes would be helpful in keeping track of all of them. For all that goes in the book, though, I was bored during a lot of it. The characters, other than a few that spend the entire novel in the forefront, lack personality and come and go quickly, making it somewhat meaningless when a more important character kills them off. Beyond that, there are so many nonsensical plots both by Kells and engineered against him that at some points, the book stops making sense entirely.
Though I have plenty of complaints about Fast One, it wasn't totally without its merits. Some passages, especially towards the end of the book, were actually quite exciting. It also had the perfect ending, one that was very logical and made it hard to imagine another way that the story could have possibly ended. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I have other, more outlandish pulp novels.
If Fast One sounds like it would be more your cup of tea than it was mine, an eBook of it can be found at Munsey's, which is a super-nifty eBook database for out of copyright novels. There are some bothersome typos in it, but nothing that affects its readability. Most of them are simple capitalization errors or strange bits of punctuation resting where they couldn't possibly belong.
Monday, March 11, 2013
3/11/2013- A Nest of Spies by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
I was going to start trying to start each of my posts here with a summary of the book that I was writing about, but A Nest of Spies, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, may not be the best book with which to begin that. This novel, released in English in 1917, is the fourth book in the Fantomas series, which I've written about here before. What I've read of the series so far is about a super-detective, Juve, and his journalist friend, Jerome Fandor (though his identity is way more complicated than that) going after the inexplicably resourceful super-villain, Fantomas. I'm not sure what I can say specifically about A Nest of Spies without inadvertently spoiling the whole thing, but am pretty sure that I can safely say that it's about a remarkably complicated plot against the nation of France in which, shockingly enough, Fantomas happens to be an instrumental figure.
Despite some slow parts in the middle, A Nest of Spies is a very entertaining novel. It is only barely plausible, and the number of footnotes that refer back to massively convoluted plot points from earlier in the series gets really ridiculous, especially towards the end. Having read the last three books, however, I thought that reading this one was quite fun. It had stolen bears, bands of anarchists, and a royal ball, with all of that just within the novel's final stretch, so I'm not sure what else I could have possibly expected from it.
As entertained as I was by A Nest of Spies, however, I can't deny that it had some issues. First of all, if you read this without being willing to keep track of the characters' extensive lists of aliases, you'll have to be prepared to get quite lost. Since the novel is about spies, some of that is unavoidable, and, to be completely fair, most of the characters keep their false identities down to just one. There were some points, though, particularly when I was reading late at night, where I had to backtrack like crazy to remember who I'd been told, particularly among the secondary characters, was pretending to be who or was working for who. Fandor's disguise, which becomes one of the central parts of the book, is clearly presented, but some of the others just get ridiculous.
My other problem with the book, which is more superficial, is with the disguises themselves. I'll grant that Juve and Fantomas get to be awesome at putting together disguises that no one could possibly see through, since I bothered to put "super" in front of both of their character descriptions. When it comes to Fandor, though, who admits that he's a bit iffy on the quality of his disguise, I feel that I can say without spoiling too much that, if he's spending days on end with someone he knows, and they're spending the night in a hotel room with him on top of that, they should probably be smart enough to recognize him, especially if slightly later in the novel, they can spot him on a crowded street. Since we're not supposed to believe that this character is a total idiot, I couldn't get past his or her apparent inability to recognize faces as anything but a major plot hole.
Even though I'm complaining a lot now, I did really like A Nest of Spies and am disappointed that I'm almost out of Fantomas books. If you'd like to read this one, or any of the other books in the series, for yourself, all five of the translated volumes in the public domain are available at both Project Gutenberg and Amazon.com.
Despite some slow parts in the middle, A Nest of Spies is a very entertaining novel. It is only barely plausible, and the number of footnotes that refer back to massively convoluted plot points from earlier in the series gets really ridiculous, especially towards the end. Having read the last three books, however, I thought that reading this one was quite fun. It had stolen bears, bands of anarchists, and a royal ball, with all of that just within the novel's final stretch, so I'm not sure what else I could have possibly expected from it.
As entertained as I was by A Nest of Spies, however, I can't deny that it had some issues. First of all, if you read this without being willing to keep track of the characters' extensive lists of aliases, you'll have to be prepared to get quite lost. Since the novel is about spies, some of that is unavoidable, and, to be completely fair, most of the characters keep their false identities down to just one. There were some points, though, particularly when I was reading late at night, where I had to backtrack like crazy to remember who I'd been told, particularly among the secondary characters, was pretending to be who or was working for who. Fandor's disguise, which becomes one of the central parts of the book, is clearly presented, but some of the others just get ridiculous.
My other problem with the book, which is more superficial, is with the disguises themselves. I'll grant that Juve and Fantomas get to be awesome at putting together disguises that no one could possibly see through, since I bothered to put "super" in front of both of their character descriptions. When it comes to Fandor, though, who admits that he's a bit iffy on the quality of his disguise, I feel that I can say without spoiling too much that, if he's spending days on end with someone he knows, and they're spending the night in a hotel room with him on top of that, they should probably be smart enough to recognize him, especially if slightly later in the novel, they can spot him on a crowded street. Since we're not supposed to believe that this character is a total idiot, I couldn't get past his or her apparent inability to recognize faces as anything but a major plot hole.
Even though I'm complaining a lot now, I did really like A Nest of Spies and am disappointed that I'm almost out of Fantomas books. If you'd like to read this one, or any of the other books in the series, for yourself, all five of the translated volumes in the public domain are available at both Project Gutenberg and Amazon.com.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
3/7/2013- Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Hello! I'm back in the high school library today, and I just finished reading another off-the-shelves lunch break book! Today's choice, Coraline by Neil Gaiman, went much better for me than Game Over (see my post from Monday) had. A few years ago, I saw the movie that was based on Coraline and really enjoyed it, which was why I decided to read the book. I can't remember the movie as well as I should, but I remember it well enough to know that the book is quite different. It's very short, so there are fewer characters and fewer things that happen, which isn't a bad thing at all. The basic story, about Coraline getting bored and wandering into an alternate world where she finds strange versions of her parents that want to stop her from leaving and replace her eyes with buttons, is pretty much the same. As the book is more streamlined than the movie is, however, that makes it even more creepy and disturbing. Without the minor characters and showy scenes, the whole thing focuses strictly on Coraline and how she manages to work through being terrified to solve some major problems, which is very effective.
It probably doesn't need to be stated directly, but I'd have a much easier time recommending Coraline to a student that wanted a quick book to read than I would Game Over. It may not have all of the Satan-opening-an-arcade murder flashiness, but by actually being about its main character and how she feels, it manages to be much more unsettling. Of course, it also helps that Coraline isn't nearly as idiotic as Game Over is, which didn't hurt matters. If I find another book even close to as interesting on my next high school library lunch break, I will be happy.
It probably doesn't need to be stated directly, but I'd have a much easier time recommending Coraline to a student that wanted a quick book to read than I would Game Over. It may not have all of the Satan-opening-an-arcade murder flashiness, but by actually being about its main character and how she feels, it manages to be much more unsettling. Of course, it also helps that Coraline isn't nearly as idiotic as Game Over is, which didn't hurt matters. If I find another book even close to as interesting on my next high school library lunch break, I will be happy.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Wishlist Wednesday #1
Hello! I sort of stole this from Topcho, at Bla Bla Bla Books, but Wishlist Wednesday sounded like a cool blog hop to participate in, so I wanted to give it a try! Wishlist Wednesday, which is hosted by the big and fancy book blog Pen to Paper, is where, once a week, you write about a book that you would very much like to own. As I am fantastic at wanting things, I figured that I'd be a shoo-in for doing well at this. Anyway, here is the lovely link button for the blog hop, followed by my actual entry. (I will also have you know that, being the advanced computer user that I am, it took me 10 minutes to make this button show up.)
Anyway, my one wanted book out of dozens for today's post is Fantomas in America by David White. (Here's a nifty website from the publisher that has a pile of information about the novel!) I have an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm for turn of the 20th century French pulp novels, and am on-purpose-slowly working my way through the five translated and available Fantomas novels, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, that are available in the public domain. (I got them from Project Gutenberg, but they're also free downloads for Kindle from Amazon.com. Either way, the text is the same, so it doesn't matter which eBook source you use.) Fantomas in America, however, is a 2007 novel about the titular supervillian coming to America, apparently after he was presumed dead in the wreckage of the Titanic, which is awesome, and causing all sorts of trouble. Rather than being a brand-new story, however, the book is based on a lost American silent serial from the 1920s, and also contains some stills from those movies. I only found out that this book existed last night, which means that it's in the front of my mind and easy to write about today, but at some point, I really hope to read it.
Anyway, my one wanted book out of dozens for today's post is Fantomas in America by David White. (Here's a nifty website from the publisher that has a pile of information about the novel!) I have an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm for turn of the 20th century French pulp novels, and am on-purpose-slowly working my way through the five translated and available Fantomas novels, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, that are available in the public domain. (I got them from Project Gutenberg, but they're also free downloads for Kindle from Amazon.com. Either way, the text is the same, so it doesn't matter which eBook source you use.) Fantomas in America, however, is a 2007 novel about the titular supervillian coming to America, apparently after he was presumed dead in the wreckage of the Titanic, which is awesome, and causing all sorts of trouble. Rather than being a brand-new story, however, the book is based on a lost American silent serial from the 1920s, and also contains some stills from those movies. I only found out that this book existed last night, which means that it's in the front of my mind and easy to write about today, but at some point, I really hope to read it.
I am not sure if that was a proper Wishlist Wednesday post, but it was fun to do, and I don't see myself running out of things to write about in posts like this anytime soon. Hopefully, I'll participate next week, too! Until then, however, I should have another normal post sometime in the next week, and there's another blog hop type of thing that I'm hoping to participate in, too. I'm hoping that these things end up going well.
Monday, March 4, 2013
3/4/2013- Game Over by Joseph Locke
I mentioned in my last post that I planned to read a bad and outdated novel about video games that I found as I was subbing in a high school library, so, over my lunch break, I did just that. However, Game Over by Joseph Locke is not just an outdated book about video games. It is also, without any warning whatsoever from the outside of the novel, an outdated book about Satan opening an arcade where angry teenagers pretend to kill each other so often that they actually start doing it. It was every bit as bad as I expected, and I don't really see how, with so much focus being on either the promise of God's salvation (or the power of a possibly magical local youth pastor), the author could have justified the fact that this book contains some of the most bizarre and horrific murders that I've recently seen in print. True, the fact that it was as subtle about its Christian leanings as a cereal commercial is about the benefits of getting up and eating a pound of solid sugar is makes it so there was no mistake about what side the author fell on in the God vs. Satan debate, but the uses of household tools (and the axes that all of the parents in this town seemed to decorate with) hardly made me think of spending a morning in church. I was also, admittedly, disappointed in the fact that, since the games were powered by Hell itself, there were no details about the technology used to run the devil's own arcade.
I cannot say much in defense of Game Over, since it was an oddly written and bizarre plea for specifically Christian salvation that ended more quickly than any of the free eBooks I've read that seem to exist solely for the purpose of getting you to buy the rest of the series ever have. If you feel the need to read a book about the devil ripping a small town to shreds with an early-90s video arcade, however, I have no way of preventing you from finding Game Over for yourself. At the very least, it's short enough that sitting down to read it won't take up too much of your time.
I cannot say much in defense of Game Over, since it was an oddly written and bizarre plea for specifically Christian salvation that ended more quickly than any of the free eBooks I've read that seem to exist solely for the purpose of getting you to buy the rest of the series ever have. If you feel the need to read a book about the devil ripping a small town to shreds with an early-90s video arcade, however, I have no way of preventing you from finding Game Over for yourself. At the very least, it's short enough that sitting down to read it won't take up too much of your time.
3/4/2013- The Flash Gold Chronicles #2: Hunted by Lindsay Buroker
A few months ago, when I was sitting in the teacher's lounge and waiting for my next assignment on a very odd day of substitute teaching, I read Flash Gold by Lindsay Buroker, a steampunk novella that I'd found for free while browsing Amazon.com's bestseller lists. I'd just finished another free novella I'd found that was so bad it was a bit puzzling, so my expectations for Flash Gold were not remarkably high, but I was pleased to find that it was very enjoyable. It took me a while to get to it, but after that, I actually bothered to buy the second and third books in the series for my Kindle (which wasn't very expensive at all), leading me to believe that the author's making the first book available for free was an effective tactic.
Today, I finished reading The Flash Gold Chronicles #2: Hunted, which was, like the first book in the series, very entertaining. It wasn't hard to tell that this was the middle of a trilogy, since the plot with Kali, the main character, and her ex-boyfriend seems to wrap up conflicts introduced in the first book, and, as someone who has read books before, it seems obvious that the mysterious woman pursuing Kali is the set-up for the series' grand finale. It was still fun to read, though, with interesting dialogue, a lot of cool steampunk nonsense, and, though this is a slight spoiler, two likable main characters who don't waste too much time in actually admitting that they like each other. It reminds me a lot of the Spice and Wolf series in that it's about nice people traveling around and having adventures in a fantasy setting, not taking itself too seriously as it goes. So far, though, the Flash Gold books have been moving a lot faster, and where Spice and Wolf deals with politics and economics, the characters in Flash Gold deal with the much more immediate issues of bounty hunters and explosions.
Though I'm tempted to read the third Flash Gold book right now and finish off the whole series, I saw a really outdated YA novel about the perils of video gaming in the back of the library that I think I'm going to read instead. Despite my distraction, though, I am genuinely interested in seeing how the series ends and coming back here to type my opinions on it into the void.
Today, I finished reading The Flash Gold Chronicles #2: Hunted, which was, like the first book in the series, very entertaining. It wasn't hard to tell that this was the middle of a trilogy, since the plot with Kali, the main character, and her ex-boyfriend seems to wrap up conflicts introduced in the first book, and, as someone who has read books before, it seems obvious that the mysterious woman pursuing Kali is the set-up for the series' grand finale. It was still fun to read, though, with interesting dialogue, a lot of cool steampunk nonsense, and, though this is a slight spoiler, two likable main characters who don't waste too much time in actually admitting that they like each other. It reminds me a lot of the Spice and Wolf series in that it's about nice people traveling around and having adventures in a fantasy setting, not taking itself too seriously as it goes. So far, though, the Flash Gold books have been moving a lot faster, and where Spice and Wolf deals with politics and economics, the characters in Flash Gold deal with the much more immediate issues of bounty hunters and explosions.
Though I'm tempted to read the third Flash Gold book right now and finish off the whole series, I saw a really outdated YA novel about the perils of video gaming in the back of the library that I think I'm going to read instead. Despite my distraction, though, I am genuinely interested in seeing how the series ends and coming back here to type my opinions on it into the void.
3/1/2013- Robotech #11: Metamorphosis by Jack McKinney
I am not sure that reading novels based on weird dubs of 80s sci-fi
anime is the best use of my time, but I do it anyway. I've been reading
the Robotech novels like crazy lately, though I've been doing it wildly
out of order, and on Friday, I finished Metamorphosis, the 11th of them.
(The last one that I read was the 7th, so that should tell you my high
regard for logic in this case.) It was something that I found at a used
book store, so after I started reading it, I realized that it was the
second book in the New Generation story arc. The story still made as
much sense as it would have anyway, though, so it didn't bother me.
Like the other based-directly-on-episodes-of-the-cartoon Robotech books that I've read, Metamorphosis is decently written, if not occasionally a little dry, but full of parts where it seems like the author, constrained by the source material, is ready to pound his face into his writing desk. There's one part of this book in particular, where the book tries to explain why, if all of the Macross stuff took place in the same area just a few decades before, the characters come across a primitive society that prays to a dam that's almost worth every page of the novel. It's all sort of ridiculous, and this one, more than the other books in the series, is incredibly episodic. Seeing as I'm irrationally fascinated with Robotech, though, I really enjoyed it. It had enough sci-fi nonsense to last me through breaks on two less than thrilling days of subbing, and the characters in this story arc were really likable, too. Given the extremely specific target audience of this novel, I'm not sure if it would be proper for me to recommend it to anyone else. Still, for my own purposes, I'm way too excited that I've still got a stack of Robotech books to get through.
Like the other based-directly-on-episodes-of-the-cartoon Robotech books that I've read, Metamorphosis is decently written, if not occasionally a little dry, but full of parts where it seems like the author, constrained by the source material, is ready to pound his face into his writing desk. There's one part of this book in particular, where the book tries to explain why, if all of the Macross stuff took place in the same area just a few decades before, the characters come across a primitive society that prays to a dam that's almost worth every page of the novel. It's all sort of ridiculous, and this one, more than the other books in the series, is incredibly episodic. Seeing as I'm irrationally fascinated with Robotech, though, I really enjoyed it. It had enough sci-fi nonsense to last me through breaks on two less than thrilling days of subbing, and the characters in this story arc were really likable, too. Given the extremely specific target audience of this novel, I'm not sure if it would be proper for me to recommend it to anyone else. Still, for my own purposes, I'm way too excited that I've still got a stack of Robotech books to get through.
Monday, February 25, 2013
2/25/2013- The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster
Hello! Today, I finished reading The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster, which I'd excitedly downloaded upon noticing that it was a sci-fi pulp novel available for free from Project Gutenberg, an online provider of out of copyright eBooks. (As I type this, it is still available.) It was the story of a caveman-esque tribal man named Burl (because that's what everyone in outer space is named) who figures out that he can do something other than flee in terror from a variety of horrifying giant bugs, leading him to accidentally create the beginnings of civilization. Even though there was nothing wrong with it, as it seemed to be well written and well though out, I didn't really like it. The characters were simplistic, which makes sense, since they were all members of an extremely primitive tribe and not conditioned to do much other than try to survive. That made it seem dry and boring, though, with a minimum of dialogue and almost no interpersonal interactions that extended beyond, "Hey, look! I think we can eat this dead monster bug's leg!" If you're a reader that really finds insects and detailed, scientific descriptions of horrifying insect monsters fascinating, though, I can see where you might really enjoy this book. It could also really satisfy readers that are into adventure stories where one man cuts nature to shreds until he unquestionably has dominion over an entire planet. I don't think that The Forgotten Planet is a bad book, but it isn't at all my cup of tea.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
2/22/2013- Maid for Me by Kat Lieu
Hello! I have some stuff to do over at my cross stitch blog, so I'm not going to write too much here today, but on Friday, I finished reading Maid for Me by Kat Lieu, which was a book too bizarre to just be ignored. Usually, I say that I don't know what to expect when I download a free Kindle book, but in the case of Maid for Me, that was only partially true. Both the cover and the description made it seem very anime-influenced, though the description made it sound like a cute and fluffy romantic comedy, and the cover, which showed an anime girl in her relatively conservative underwear standing next to a maid's uniform, made it seem a little like the kind of anime where a girl spends 26 episodes dropping things and bends over to pick them up a dozen times an episode. The book was free, so I figured that if it ended up being the latter, I'd figure it out within 10 pages and delete it with no risks taken.
Luckily, Maid for Me ended up being more of a romantic comedy type of story, though, in terms of anime, it was more like one of the weird OAVs that used to cost 3 dollars from the Right Stuf Bargain Bin than it was like the sort of series where people can stand around for 50 episodes and still not know who they want to go out with. It has a resilient leading lady with an improbable, but appropriately tragic back story, a pile of boys who think she's really fabulous despite her beaten-into-your-head lack of self-confidence, gambling, threats of bizarre ritualistic violence, and local politicians. It wasn't my favorite thing that I've read this year by a long shot, and I was irrationally bothered by a couple of comma errors that I found, but it was enthusiastically executed, self-referential, and, while it lasted, entertaining, if nothing else. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to someone that didn't like anime, but, as a person who finished it and then though about how long it had been since I'd watched my VHS of Assemble Insert, it didn't seem like a wasted hour. If you'd also like to read Maid for Me, it's currently available on Amazon.com as both an eBook and a paperback, though currently, the eBook is 99 cents rather than free. It's really short and incredibly strange, and as someone who didn't despise the book or have a violently positive reaction to it, I think I'm in the minority, but if you think it sounds interesting, you may end up liking it.
Luckily, Maid for Me ended up being more of a romantic comedy type of story, though, in terms of anime, it was more like one of the weird OAVs that used to cost 3 dollars from the Right Stuf Bargain Bin than it was like the sort of series where people can stand around for 50 episodes and still not know who they want to go out with. It has a resilient leading lady with an improbable, but appropriately tragic back story, a pile of boys who think she's really fabulous despite her beaten-into-your-head lack of self-confidence, gambling, threats of bizarre ritualistic violence, and local politicians. It wasn't my favorite thing that I've read this year by a long shot, and I was irrationally bothered by a couple of comma errors that I found, but it was enthusiastically executed, self-referential, and, while it lasted, entertaining, if nothing else. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to someone that didn't like anime, but, as a person who finished it and then though about how long it had been since I'd watched my VHS of Assemble Insert, it didn't seem like a wasted hour. If you'd also like to read Maid for Me, it's currently available on Amazon.com as both an eBook and a paperback, though currently, the eBook is 99 cents rather than free. It's really short and incredibly strange, and as someone who didn't despise the book or have a violently positive reaction to it, I think I'm in the minority, but if you think it sounds interesting, you may end up liking it.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
2/21/2013- Bianca in Black by Elizabeth Sax Rohmer
Hello! I'm in the high school library again today, which, as always, gives me a lot of time to read. This morning, my book of choice was a 1958 mystery by Elizabeth Sax Rohmer titled Bianca in Black, which I'd gotten for 50 cents from a used books for charity bin at Wal-Mart. It wasn't really a bad book, but compared to a lot of the books I'd read recently, it seemed very simple. In it, a beautiful fashion model named Bianca, who refuses to wear any colors other than black, keeps marrying men that she doesn't love, and all of them promptly drop dead. Of course, she didn't do it, since she's a lovely damsel in distress, and of course, Bruce Willoughby, the detective who stumbles upon her falls madly in love with her, meaning that he feels responsible for solving the murders and clearing his darling love's good name. It wasn't an awful book, and, as I read it, it was interesting, but the plot moved in an incredibly straight line, with no room for subplots or even red herrings that were addressed for more than a few sentences at a time. It drove me crazy that through the whole book, Bianca did nothing but ask for help and beg that Bruce stay away from her, as she was ever so dangerous and didn't want to hurt him, and it was also a little strange that the entire mystery wrapped itself up in the last four pages, with nothing from the characters but an, "Oh, it's really too bad that happened, isn't it?" in response to the whole thing.
I realize that I am probably being unfair to Bianca in Black, but at about the same time, I'd bought another used book from the same line (both were labelled as Airmont Mysteries) called Crime and Judy, in which a lady detective coming up against institutionalized sexism and her wheelchair bound brother fight a swamp full of Communists, so my expectations for this were very high. What is interesting about directly comparing the two books, however, is that they were both obviously formatted to fit in a 124 page book, which means that while Crime and Judy has a pretty reasonable text size, the print in Bianca in Black is so small that it makes old Bibles look like the large-print editions of magazines.
Bianca in Black probably wasn't worth the eye strain that I got from reading it, but since I got it for 50 cents, it's hard to be upset about that. Reading it was an okay way to spend the morning, and it's not like I have to sit and read through it again and again. If it sounds like the kind of book you'd be interested in reading, it is long out of print, but it looks like, at least online, used copies can be found easily and cheaply.
I realize that I am probably being unfair to Bianca in Black, but at about the same time, I'd bought another used book from the same line (both were labelled as Airmont Mysteries) called Crime and Judy, in which a lady detective coming up against institutionalized sexism and her wheelchair bound brother fight a swamp full of Communists, so my expectations for this were very high. What is interesting about directly comparing the two books, however, is that they were both obviously formatted to fit in a 124 page book, which means that while Crime and Judy has a pretty reasonable text size, the print in Bianca in Black is so small that it makes old Bibles look like the large-print editions of magazines.
Bianca in Black probably wasn't worth the eye strain that I got from reading it, but since I got it for 50 cents, it's hard to be upset about that. Reading it was an okay way to spend the morning, and it's not like I have to sit and read through it again and again. If it sounds like the kind of book you'd be interested in reading, it is long out of print, but it looks like, at least online, used copies can be found easily and cheaply.
2/20/2013- Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge by Maurice Leblanc
(For some reason, this did not post when I wrote it last night, so a lot of my statements about having posted already today are no longer relevant. It sounds weird, but as far as concerns about my blog go, I feel that it may be the least of my problems.)
Hello! I know that I already posted here today, but I just finished reading Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge, by Maurice Leblanc, which I bought from the Kindle store (found, as always, at Amazon.com) about a week ago. I started reading it while I was still subbing in the library this afternoon, but it was really entertaining, so I decided to finish it before eating dinner. It was a bit different from some of the other Lupin novels I've read in that Lupin spends it acting more as a detective than an active part of the plot. The first half seemed to me like a pretty normal mystery, but I actually preferred the second half, which is both a mystery and a somewhat sick soap opera at the same time.
In writing about Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge, I think that it's also worth noting that in the middle of the book, there's a supposed drowning that's almost directly lifted from the last Fantomas book that I read (Messengers of Evil- Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas, which isn't at all a wordy title), which was very jarring. The aftermath of the event in question isn't all that similar, since Juve, the super-detective from Fantomas, is a bit more efficient than Lupin is in terms of getting things done, but it still seems strange. Despite this, though, this was a genuinely difficult to unravel mystery, and not just because it was bizarre or convoluted, like the goings-on in Lady Audley's Secret earlier today, and it was fun to read, too.
Though I've already said plenty about the book in question, I want to say that the coolest thing about my having read Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge is that it's a new translation of the novel by Josephine Gill, making it readily available to English language readers. Before finding this last week, I'd downloaded all of the Lupin novels that I could find from Amazon and Project Gutenberg, feeling sort of disappointed that once I'd read them all, the series would be done for me, unless I got much better at reading in French. When I did see all of the new translations, though, I got really excited and downloaded one of them immediately. As far as the quality of the writing in it goes, it seemed to me to be on par with most of the other Lupin books that I'd read, with some parts of it, particularly the conversations between the Gentleman and Thomas le Bouc, seeming more contemporary than what I'd read in the others. I can't imagine people going "that guy" in 813, which I thought was the draggiest of all the Lupin books I've read, but here, it didn't at all seem out of place. There were a couple of missing periods, and, at least on my old-fashioned buttons on the side Kindle, the formatting had some weird giant spaces between the words, but that didn't bother me much. I still plan to read more of Josephine Gill's new translations, though in the future, I'm hoping to skip the part where I get so excited that they exist that I read the novels completely out of order with the rest of the series.
Hello! I know that I already posted here today, but I just finished reading Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge, by Maurice Leblanc, which I bought from the Kindle store (found, as always, at Amazon.com) about a week ago. I started reading it while I was still subbing in the library this afternoon, but it was really entertaining, so I decided to finish it before eating dinner. It was a bit different from some of the other Lupin novels I've read in that Lupin spends it acting more as a detective than an active part of the plot. The first half seemed to me like a pretty normal mystery, but I actually preferred the second half, which is both a mystery and a somewhat sick soap opera at the same time.
In writing about Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge, I think that it's also worth noting that in the middle of the book, there's a supposed drowning that's almost directly lifted from the last Fantomas book that I read (Messengers of Evil- Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas, which isn't at all a wordy title), which was very jarring. The aftermath of the event in question isn't all that similar, since Juve, the super-detective from Fantomas, is a bit more efficient than Lupin is in terms of getting things done, but it still seems strange. Despite this, though, this was a genuinely difficult to unravel mystery, and not just because it was bizarre or convoluted, like the goings-on in Lady Audley's Secret earlier today, and it was fun to read, too.
Though I've already said plenty about the book in question, I want to say that the coolest thing about my having read Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge is that it's a new translation of the novel by Josephine Gill, making it readily available to English language readers. Before finding this last week, I'd downloaded all of the Lupin novels that I could find from Amazon and Project Gutenberg, feeling sort of disappointed that once I'd read them all, the series would be done for me, unless I got much better at reading in French. When I did see all of the new translations, though, I got really excited and downloaded one of them immediately. As far as the quality of the writing in it goes, it seemed to me to be on par with most of the other Lupin books that I'd read, with some parts of it, particularly the conversations between the Gentleman and Thomas le Bouc, seeming more contemporary than what I'd read in the others. I can't imagine people going "that guy" in 813, which I thought was the draggiest of all the Lupin books I've read, but here, it didn't at all seem out of place. There were a couple of missing periods, and, at least on my old-fashioned buttons on the side Kindle, the formatting had some weird giant spaces between the words, but that didn't bother me much. I still plan to read more of Josephine Gill's new translations, though in the future, I'm hoping to skip the part where I get so excited that they exist that I read the novels completely out of order with the rest of the series.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
2/20/2013- Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. Braddon
Hello! Today, I hit the mark of having read eight books out of my seventy-five book goal for the year, which doesn't sound all that impressive, but, since it put me over being ten percent towards my goal, I was fairly excited. For the time being, though, that information isn't very relevant.
A few minutes ago, I finished reading Lady Audley's Secret, an 1862 novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Like most of what I read is, it was an impulse download for my Kindle from which I had very little idea of what to expect. In this case, however, I was not disappointed at all. Despite the fact that Lady Audley's Secret seems at times to be way too long, with passages of household descriptions that seem to drag on for pages and pages and enough unnecessary plot twists to fuel a daytime soap opera for months, it's one of the most entertaining books I've read for ages. I'm not sure that anyone would have put it quite this way in the 1860s, but basically, the novel is about a rich slacker who becomes obsessed with his best friend's disappearance and tries to prove that his uncle's spoiled and much younger new wife, the titular Lady Audley, had something to do with it. This very well could have made for a boring book, but I think that what makes Lady Audley's Secret so fun is that it seems to be insane trash. It's full of blackmail, murder, bizarre lies that take hundreds of pages to unravel, secret keeping maids and their drunk husband-cousins (which I realize was acceptable at the time, no matter how weird it seems now), and a lot of snobbery about French novels. It does take a while to get through, but it almost never gets boring. When it does start to drag, however, it's never long before some strange and nearly inexplicable plot twist comes along to break up the monotony.
Because Lady Audley's Secret is from 1862, it is in the public domain and can be easily found as a free ebook. I read the edition available from Amazon.com, since it was convenient to download, but it is also available at Project Gutenberg, where it can be found alongside piles of other novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
A few minutes ago, I finished reading Lady Audley's Secret, an 1862 novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Like most of what I read is, it was an impulse download for my Kindle from which I had very little idea of what to expect. In this case, however, I was not disappointed at all. Despite the fact that Lady Audley's Secret seems at times to be way too long, with passages of household descriptions that seem to drag on for pages and pages and enough unnecessary plot twists to fuel a daytime soap opera for months, it's one of the most entertaining books I've read for ages. I'm not sure that anyone would have put it quite this way in the 1860s, but basically, the novel is about a rich slacker who becomes obsessed with his best friend's disappearance and tries to prove that his uncle's spoiled and much younger new wife, the titular Lady Audley, had something to do with it. This very well could have made for a boring book, but I think that what makes Lady Audley's Secret so fun is that it seems to be insane trash. It's full of blackmail, murder, bizarre lies that take hundreds of pages to unravel, secret keeping maids and their drunk husband-cousins (which I realize was acceptable at the time, no matter how weird it seems now), and a lot of snobbery about French novels. It does take a while to get through, but it almost never gets boring. When it does start to drag, however, it's never long before some strange and nearly inexplicable plot twist comes along to break up the monotony.
Because Lady Audley's Secret is from 1862, it is in the public domain and can be easily found as a free ebook. I read the edition available from Amazon.com, since it was convenient to download, but it is also available at Project Gutenberg, where it can be found alongside piles of other novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
2/6/2013- The Lady Astronomer by Katy O'Dowd
Hello! It's been a while since I've posted here- exactly three finished books- so I feel like I need to do at least one catch up post! Two of the three books I read were Spice and Wolf volumes 5 and 6, a pair of Japanese novels translated into English and set right in the middle of a series, so, for fear of slipping and typing up paragraphs and paragraphs of spoilers, those, for now, are not getting their own posts. They were both very entertaining, though, and I can't wait to read the seventh volume!
For today, my post is about The Lady Astronomer by Katy O'Dowd, which is another book I downloaded on a whim when it was free on Amazon.com. (Currently, it costs $2.99, which also isn't too steep.) It had pretty good reader reviews on the site, but, as it is with most of the books I download when they're free, I really didn't know what to expect from it. I did know it was a steampunk novel, since that was written all over the reviews, and no one was complaining about the spelling or grammar, so that was enough for me.
What I got from The Lady Astronomer was a book that I'd have no problems recommending to a junior high girl that wasn't put off by magic or robots in her reading. It's cute and cheerful, with really cool mechanical stuff littering every chapter and characters that are quite likable. I did think that, at the start, things seemed a little disjointed, with chapters leaving off and picking up at places that seemed slightly random, and the romantic elements that kick in about halfway through seemed forced, like more of an unnecessary subplot than anything else. Once Lucretia, the leading lady, has to go on a trip on her own, I felt like her leaving the supporting cast behind really got the story to pick up, giving it more focus and suspense than the first half of the book had. Still, as a whole, I thought that reading The Lady Astronomer was enjoyable, even if I wasn't exactly the target audience. It reminded me of something that I would have gotten as a surprise from a book order flier when I was in school, and I can easily imagine it being in one of those now.
For today, my post is about The Lady Astronomer by Katy O'Dowd, which is another book I downloaded on a whim when it was free on Amazon.com. (Currently, it costs $2.99, which also isn't too steep.) It had pretty good reader reviews on the site, but, as it is with most of the books I download when they're free, I really didn't know what to expect from it. I did know it was a steampunk novel, since that was written all over the reviews, and no one was complaining about the spelling or grammar, so that was enough for me.
What I got from The Lady Astronomer was a book that I'd have no problems recommending to a junior high girl that wasn't put off by magic or robots in her reading. It's cute and cheerful, with really cool mechanical stuff littering every chapter and characters that are quite likable. I did think that, at the start, things seemed a little disjointed, with chapters leaving off and picking up at places that seemed slightly random, and the romantic elements that kick in about halfway through seemed forced, like more of an unnecessary subplot than anything else. Once Lucretia, the leading lady, has to go on a trip on her own, I felt like her leaving the supporting cast behind really got the story to pick up, giving it more focus and suspense than the first half of the book had. Still, as a whole, I thought that reading The Lady Astronomer was enjoyable, even if I wasn't exactly the target audience. It reminded me of something that I would have gotten as a surprise from a book order flier when I was in school, and I can easily imagine it being in one of those now.
Friday, January 25, 2013
1/25/2013- The Missing Link by Bryan Pedas and Brandon Meyers
Hello! I'm on my second of two days of subbing for high school and junior high band, which has been a lot less traumatic than I initially expected. That really has nothing to do with my post for today, though, as I just finished reading another book, called The Missing Link, by Bryan Pedas and Brandon Meyers. I have a habit of downloading free eBooks from Amazon.com and loading my Kindle with them before I forgot what it is that I downloaded and when I did it. Because of that, I cannot say with any certainty when it was that this book was free. Currently, though, it's $2.99, which also isn't a bad price.
It would take me ages to explain what goes on in The Missing Link, but to be overly simplistic about the whole thing, it's a novel split three ways between a bizarre takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, a pair of misfits road story, and a bunch of homeless people doing some post-apocalyptic demon fighting, all in the face of a worldwide Internet outage. I thought that it went on for way too long, with the chapters set in downtown Chicago occasionally feeling out of place, and at times, I suspect that four-letter words and bizarre comparative language that couldn't be comfortably quoted in polite company were being thrown around just for the sake of their presence. What The Missing Link did have going for it, however, is that it wasn't at all boring and constantly seemed creative. I can't say that I'd recommend it to everyone, and it won't end up on my all-time favorite books list, but it was interesting and, for quite a bit of it, entertaining. It also had several parts that I get the feeling will be very memorable, particularly the next time that my PC's virus protection decides that a game I've been playing for years has suddenly decided to launch the world's most ineffective attack on my computer.
If you have a solid attention span, spend a lot of time online, and aren't easily offended, The Missing Link might be worth checking out. Otherwise, you may want to find a book that's not tailored to such a wildly specific audience.
It would take me ages to explain what goes on in The Missing Link, but to be overly simplistic about the whole thing, it's a novel split three ways between a bizarre takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, a pair of misfits road story, and a bunch of homeless people doing some post-apocalyptic demon fighting, all in the face of a worldwide Internet outage. I thought that it went on for way too long, with the chapters set in downtown Chicago occasionally feeling out of place, and at times, I suspect that four-letter words and bizarre comparative language that couldn't be comfortably quoted in polite company were being thrown around just for the sake of their presence. What The Missing Link did have going for it, however, is that it wasn't at all boring and constantly seemed creative. I can't say that I'd recommend it to everyone, and it won't end up on my all-time favorite books list, but it was interesting and, for quite a bit of it, entertaining. It also had several parts that I get the feeling will be very memorable, particularly the next time that my PC's virus protection decides that a game I've been playing for years has suddenly decided to launch the world's most ineffective attack on my computer.
If you have a solid attention span, spend a lot of time online, and aren't easily offended, The Missing Link might be worth checking out. Otherwise, you may want to find a book that's not tailored to such a wildly specific audience.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
1/23/2013- The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
Hello, again! I realize that I just posted here earlier today, but, after a few more hours of uneventful library work, I finished reading The Castle of Otranto, which was written by Horace Walpole. Though I had a better idea what to expect from this novel than I had from Revenge!, thanks to a recommendation from the author of decay-proof record scroll, (who I've known by so many user names that I'm not sure which to use here) after I'd been talking about The Mysteries of Udolpho on Twitter, I really didn't think that it would be as entertaining or quick to read as it was. Though, as late 18th century Gothic novels, they're usually mentioned in conjunction with each other, The Mysteries of Udolpho is an incredibly long and plodding novel about a bunch of people who make bad decisions for hundreds of pages on end, while The Castle of Otranto is the sort of book that begins with someone being crushed to death by a giant helmet and is finished two and a half hours later. It was written over 200 years ago, so the language in The Castle of Otranto may seem dated to some, but in actuality, the plot moves so quickly, and with such bizarre supernatural soap opera plot points, that the dated language isn't noticeable at all.
The Castle of Otranto is the sort of book that, if you're in the mood for something ridiculous and aren't put off by older books, is very easy to recommend. The last time that I checked, it was not available as an eBook from Amazon, which seemed sort of weird to me, but a very nicely formatted and typo-free one is available from Project Gutenberg.
The Castle of Otranto is the sort of book that, if you're in the mood for something ridiculous and aren't put off by older books, is very easy to recommend. The last time that I checked, it was not available as an eBook from Amazon, which seemed sort of weird to me, but a very nicely formatted and typo-free one is available from Project Gutenberg.
1/23/2013- Revenge! by Robert Barr
Hello! It's been a while since I posted here, since I haven't read as much as I should have lately, but, as I'm a substitute teacher in a high school library today, I just finished reading a book! Today's book was Revenge! by Robert Barr, which I knew absolutely nothing about before I began reading it. A few months ago, though, I was impressed by the general loopiness of one of his other books, Jennie Baxter: Journalist, so I didn't see why this wouldn't be worth trying to get through.
Rather than being a more traditional novel, Revenge! is a collection of twenty short stories, which makes it really convenient for placement on an e-reader. None of the stories are terribly long, and since, as you may have guessed from the title, most of them focus on the subject of revenge, there's plenty that happens in each of them. I have to admit that I wasn't very impressed by the two Westerns in the middle of the book, but that's more because I don't like Westerns very well than it is because they were poorly written. If someone is really into cowboys shooting at each other, I'd imagine that they'd be just as bored by the cheerful and cute romantic comedies that are also included in the book, with which I was happier.
Revenge! isn't a perfect book, especially if you, like I did, plan to sit and read all twenty of the stories right in a row. By the last few stories, the stacks of bodies and ruined careers, along with the carefully crafted plans that lead to them, start to get a little boring, but there's just enough humor and stories that stray from the darker parts of the theme to keep it from getting unreadable. Not all of the stories are that memorable, either, but they are good enough to hold your attention as you're reading them.
If you'd like to read Revenge!, it is downloadable as a free eBook both from Amazon.com and the more charitable Project Gutenberg, as are several of Robert Barr's other books.
With this post almost finished, I think that I'm going to try to post here more often, with a post for every book I read rather than one for every four or five of them. Because of that, the posts will be shorter, but hopefully, they'll be a little less irritating to read and to write, too.
Rather than being a more traditional novel, Revenge! is a collection of twenty short stories, which makes it really convenient for placement on an e-reader. None of the stories are terribly long, and since, as you may have guessed from the title, most of them focus on the subject of revenge, there's plenty that happens in each of them. I have to admit that I wasn't very impressed by the two Westerns in the middle of the book, but that's more because I don't like Westerns very well than it is because they were poorly written. If someone is really into cowboys shooting at each other, I'd imagine that they'd be just as bored by the cheerful and cute romantic comedies that are also included in the book, with which I was happier.
Revenge! isn't a perfect book, especially if you, like I did, plan to sit and read all twenty of the stories right in a row. By the last few stories, the stacks of bodies and ruined careers, along with the carefully crafted plans that lead to them, start to get a little boring, but there's just enough humor and stories that stray from the darker parts of the theme to keep it from getting unreadable. Not all of the stories are that memorable, either, but they are good enough to hold your attention as you're reading them.
If you'd like to read Revenge!, it is downloadable as a free eBook both from Amazon.com and the more charitable Project Gutenberg, as are several of Robert Barr's other books.
With this post almost finished, I think that I'm going to try to post here more often, with a post for every book I read rather than one for every four or five of them. Because of that, the posts will be shorter, but hopefully, they'll be a little less irritating to read and to write, too.
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