Books 15 & 16 - 2013
Book 15: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thomson Walker - 369 pages
Description from bookdepository.co.uk:
'It is never what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown...' What if our 24-hour day grew longer, first in minutes, then in hours, until day becomes night and night becomes day? What effect would this slowing have on the world? On the birds in the sky, the whales in the sea, the astronauts in space, and on an eleven-year-old girl, grappling with emotional changes in her own life? One morning, Julia and her parents wake up to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth is noticeably slowing
Thoughts:
This was not a good book to read during my audit busy season. That’s not to say it’s not a good book. Because it is. In a weird kind of way. But it’s depressing. It’s sad. It’s the kind of book that comes back to you when you feel a little down, or when you are lying in bed at two in the morning, unable to sleep. Or when something goes wrong in the world, and it takes a while for the powers to be to work out why. The premise of the story is that the Earth begins to slow on its axis, spinning slower and slower with the inevitable implication being that it will eventually stop. Gravity won’t work properly should the Earth stop. The beautifully precarious relationship we have with our planet comes into question in this debut novel. I’ve always felt that we - as in humanity - don’t truly appreciate the wonderful gift that is our planet. Not in a tree-hugging, do-gooder kind of way, because I truly believe that if we were to be ripped from this world tomorrow our world would be as if we’d never existed in a 100 years - a mere blink of the eye in planet life terms. But more in a ‘we are nothing in the scheme of things, and yet we have this amazing sphere flying through space to live on and its perfectly equipped to support us’. A too-near-flying asteroid could wipe us out tomorrow. And yet we all stress about our little problems in our little lives, and forget we are less than a drop in the ocean that is our universe. To my mind, this book looks at the idea behind ‘what if our planet decided our time was up?’. Over the course of the book, the Earth turns on humanity. Food becomes more and more difficult to grow, the days become hotter and the nights colder, the beautiful balance our bodies have with the rise and fall of the 24 hour day becomes increasingly irrelevant. And humanity struggles on, desperately trying to turn the Earth to facilitate our existence. Of course, some people try to adapt to this new world, in particular, the hours of day and night, trying to stay ‘off the clock’ and stay awake during days that stretch for days, sleep through nights of an equally long length. But the rest of the world very quickly moves to a 24 hour clock at complete odds with the rise and fall of the sun.
Don’t get me wrong. There are things about this book I didn’t like, despite my musings above. The story is told through the point of view of Julia, who is eleven. To be honest, I didn’t care all that much about Julia. I cared about the Earth, and Julie is a means through which to tell Earth’s story. But to me, the story is Earth’s and not Julia’s, even though I think the author did not intend it to be that way. I don’t care about an eleven year old, and I think the idea behind this story has so much potential and so many interesting questions that it would have been better served through a different protagonist. Or maybe not a protagonist at all. Then again, maybe it is Julia that gives this story its wistfulness.
I also had some problems with some of the effects of the slowing. To be honest, I’m not a hundred percent sure they are accurate or reasonable. But I can look past them. It’s not like there’s a lot of literature out there on the impact on the potential slowing of the Earth. I also felt the slowing happened too quickly; it seemed to jump from a few minutes of extra time to a whole day to several days quite quickly. But again, I can look past this. Overall, the idea fascinated me, and like the very best ideas (and I say ideas, not stories, because a great story can be a very simple, ordinary idea, and a great idea can be told in a story that is not at all interesting or enjoyable to read) it crawls under your skin and stays there, popping up to remind you of its existence whenever it feels it should. A fascinating debut with some flaws inevitable when trying to draw an Earth-changing idea into a mere 369 pages.
15 / 50 books. 30% done!
5727 / 15000 pages. 38% done!
Book 16: Alice in Zombieland by Gena Showalter - 394 pages
Description from bookdepository.co.uk:
"She won't rest until she's sent every walking corpse back to its grave. Forever." Had anyone told Alice Bell that her entire life would change course between one heartbeat and the next, she would have laughed. From blissful to tragic, innocent to ruined? Please. But that's all it took. One heartbeat. A blink, a breath, a second, and everything she knew and loved was gone. Her father was right. The monsters are real. To avenge her family, Ali must learn to fight the undead. To survive, she must learn to trust the baddest of the bad boys, Cole Holland. But Cole has secrets of his own, and if Ali isn't careful, those secrets might just prove to be more dangerous than the zombies.
Thoughts:
Alice Bell’s father is insane. Her mother won’t stand up to him, won’t leave him, just exists beside him. And her little sister Emma is Alice’s light, the one thing in her tormented life that she adores. But there’s a reason for Alice’s father’s insanity, and it’s not till the events of an evening that steal Alice’s family from her, that she understands what this reason is. There are zombies. And Alice’s father knew this, but not how to fight them entirely. It’s after her family are taken by the zombies that Alice is able to see them. At first she thinks she is going insane. But when she moves to a new school, she discovers that there are others like her. Including the very attractive Cole Holland, whom Alice seems to have some mystical connection with. The zombies are real, but can only be seen by some, and those some fight the zombies at night. So Alice is recruited into their little group, and oh yes, there might be something romantic going on with that Cole boy.
This is a pretty good book for a young adult novel set in the real world. I often find these kind of books make the teenage protagonists so annoying that they distract from the story (I much prefer young adult novels set in, essentially, another universe. The teenagers are, often, basically teenagers only in age.). The teenagers in this book manage to not be too annoying in this one (they get worse in the sequel) though Cole has a troubled past and Alice is still recovering from the death of her family. Setting off these two is Alice’s new friend Kat, who clearly has some health issues that she’d prefer to keep herself. Showalter doesn’t shy away from the inevitable practical problems that arise when one is fighting zombies at night - for example, missing schoolwork - and there is a nice sense of camaraderie among the zombie fighters even when half of them have dated the other half. The actual zombie fight that drives the plot is obviously setting up the overall trilogy, though even at the conclusion of the second book I still can’t work out what that conclusion might be. Overall, a clever play on some of the lore of the Wonderland stories coupled with the scary undeadness of zombies certainly had me looking at the dark in a different way afterwards.
16 / 50 books. 32% done!
6121 / 15000 pages. 41% done!
Currently reading:
- The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown - 509 pages
- Man Drought and Other Social Issues of the New Century by Bernard Salt - 276 pages
- Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge - 342 pages
And coming up:
- The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Volume 3: White Gold Wielder by Stephen Donaldson - 500 pages
- The Odyssey by Homer - 324 pages
- One for the Money by Janet Evanovich - 290 pages
Description from bookdepository.co.uk:
'It is never what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown...' What if our 24-hour day grew longer, first in minutes, then in hours, until day becomes night and night becomes day? What effect would this slowing have on the world? On the birds in the sky, the whales in the sea, the astronauts in space, and on an eleven-year-old girl, grappling with emotional changes in her own life? One morning, Julia and her parents wake up to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth is noticeably slowing
Thoughts:
This was not a good book to read during my audit busy season. That’s not to say it’s not a good book. Because it is. In a weird kind of way. But it’s depressing. It’s sad. It’s the kind of book that comes back to you when you feel a little down, or when you are lying in bed at two in the morning, unable to sleep. Or when something goes wrong in the world, and it takes a while for the powers to be to work out why. The premise of the story is that the Earth begins to slow on its axis, spinning slower and slower with the inevitable implication being that it will eventually stop. Gravity won’t work properly should the Earth stop. The beautifully precarious relationship we have with our planet comes into question in this debut novel. I’ve always felt that we - as in humanity - don’t truly appreciate the wonderful gift that is our planet. Not in a tree-hugging, do-gooder kind of way, because I truly believe that if we were to be ripped from this world tomorrow our world would be as if we’d never existed in a 100 years - a mere blink of the eye in planet life terms. But more in a ‘we are nothing in the scheme of things, and yet we have this amazing sphere flying through space to live on and its perfectly equipped to support us’. A too-near-flying asteroid could wipe us out tomorrow. And yet we all stress about our little problems in our little lives, and forget we are less than a drop in the ocean that is our universe. To my mind, this book looks at the idea behind ‘what if our planet decided our time was up?’. Over the course of the book, the Earth turns on humanity. Food becomes more and more difficult to grow, the days become hotter and the nights colder, the beautiful balance our bodies have with the rise and fall of the 24 hour day becomes increasingly irrelevant. And humanity struggles on, desperately trying to turn the Earth to facilitate our existence. Of course, some people try to adapt to this new world, in particular, the hours of day and night, trying to stay ‘off the clock’ and stay awake during days that stretch for days, sleep through nights of an equally long length. But the rest of the world very quickly moves to a 24 hour clock at complete odds with the rise and fall of the sun.
Don’t get me wrong. There are things about this book I didn’t like, despite my musings above. The story is told through the point of view of Julia, who is eleven. To be honest, I didn’t care all that much about Julia. I cared about the Earth, and Julie is a means through which to tell Earth’s story. But to me, the story is Earth’s and not Julia’s, even though I think the author did not intend it to be that way. I don’t care about an eleven year old, and I think the idea behind this story has so much potential and so many interesting questions that it would have been better served through a different protagonist. Or maybe not a protagonist at all. Then again, maybe it is Julia that gives this story its wistfulness.
I also had some problems with some of the effects of the slowing. To be honest, I’m not a hundred percent sure they are accurate or reasonable. But I can look past them. It’s not like there’s a lot of literature out there on the impact on the potential slowing of the Earth. I also felt the slowing happened too quickly; it seemed to jump from a few minutes of extra time to a whole day to several days quite quickly. But again, I can look past this. Overall, the idea fascinated me, and like the very best ideas (and I say ideas, not stories, because a great story can be a very simple, ordinary idea, and a great idea can be told in a story that is not at all interesting or enjoyable to read) it crawls under your skin and stays there, popping up to remind you of its existence whenever it feels it should. A fascinating debut with some flaws inevitable when trying to draw an Earth-changing idea into a mere 369 pages.
15 / 50 books. 30% done!
5727 / 15000 pages. 38% done!
Book 16: Alice in Zombieland by Gena Showalter - 394 pages
Description from bookdepository.co.uk:
"She won't rest until she's sent every walking corpse back to its grave. Forever." Had anyone told Alice Bell that her entire life would change course between one heartbeat and the next, she would have laughed. From blissful to tragic, innocent to ruined? Please. But that's all it took. One heartbeat. A blink, a breath, a second, and everything she knew and loved was gone. Her father was right. The monsters are real. To avenge her family, Ali must learn to fight the undead. To survive, she must learn to trust the baddest of the bad boys, Cole Holland. But Cole has secrets of his own, and if Ali isn't careful, those secrets might just prove to be more dangerous than the zombies.
Thoughts:
Alice Bell’s father is insane. Her mother won’t stand up to him, won’t leave him, just exists beside him. And her little sister Emma is Alice’s light, the one thing in her tormented life that she adores. But there’s a reason for Alice’s father’s insanity, and it’s not till the events of an evening that steal Alice’s family from her, that she understands what this reason is. There are zombies. And Alice’s father knew this, but not how to fight them entirely. It’s after her family are taken by the zombies that Alice is able to see them. At first she thinks she is going insane. But when she moves to a new school, she discovers that there are others like her. Including the very attractive Cole Holland, whom Alice seems to have some mystical connection with. The zombies are real, but can only be seen by some, and those some fight the zombies at night. So Alice is recruited into their little group, and oh yes, there might be something romantic going on with that Cole boy.
This is a pretty good book for a young adult novel set in the real world. I often find these kind of books make the teenage protagonists so annoying that they distract from the story (I much prefer young adult novels set in, essentially, another universe. The teenagers are, often, basically teenagers only in age.). The teenagers in this book manage to not be too annoying in this one (they get worse in the sequel) though Cole has a troubled past and Alice is still recovering from the death of her family. Setting off these two is Alice’s new friend Kat, who clearly has some health issues that she’d prefer to keep herself. Showalter doesn’t shy away from the inevitable practical problems that arise when one is fighting zombies at night - for example, missing schoolwork - and there is a nice sense of camaraderie among the zombie fighters even when half of them have dated the other half. The actual zombie fight that drives the plot is obviously setting up the overall trilogy, though even at the conclusion of the second book I still can’t work out what that conclusion might be. Overall, a clever play on some of the lore of the Wonderland stories coupled with the scary undeadness of zombies certainly had me looking at the dark in a different way afterwards.
16 / 50 books. 32% done!
6121 / 15000 pages. 41% done!
Currently reading:
- The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown - 509 pages
- Man Drought and Other Social Issues of the New Century by Bernard Salt - 276 pages
- Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge - 342 pages
And coming up:
- The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Volume 3: White Gold Wielder by Stephen Donaldson - 500 pages
- The Odyssey by Homer - 324 pages
- One for the Money by Janet Evanovich - 290 pages