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.
Showing posts with label french novels with lead characters of ambiguous morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label french novels with lead characters of ambiguous morality. Show all posts
Friday, June 14, 2013
Thursday, February 21, 2013
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.
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