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.
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