3-/5. If grad school did nothing else for me, it showed me that just because someone shows a lot of evidence for his side doesn't actually mean that he's right. Even within my fairly small field of the hardest of hard sciences, there were controversies between different professors that it was impossible to know how to resolve unless you had ( Read more... )

2/5. So the terrible thing is, I actually liked this book. Rozzlynn has the bones of a good, if shallow, story in here, the outline of a YA-dystopian Revenge-type deliciously catty backstabbing sort of story that I quite enjoyed from time to time. (And teen angst OH WOE IS ME! which I didn't enjoy, but whatever.) Unfortunately, it differs from ( Read more... )

3+/5. I liked it! I was expecting not to (I suppose mostly because of having read so much praise for it -- I am a contrary beast), but I got drawn in. It's pretty clearly a first book. The opening scene is full of action, but following it is a lot of somewhat-boring exposition where we are told a lot of things about How and Why the Characters Are ( Read more... )

3-/5. This is the second book in a Hunger Games Lite series. Teen romantic angst like whoa, eeeeevil dystopia, love triangle, but without the trenchant reality-show commentary that made Hunger Games worth reading. Whee. It was better than the first book in the series, Matched, in that we didn't get any horrible villain speeches that made no sense, ( Read more... )

3+/5. I was pleased by this book: a historical YA-ish (I don't think it's marketed as YA, but it can be thought of that way) alternate-history-time-travel-steampunk-SFF that actually seems to take some pains to get the history right. YAY. (Full disclosure: I know very little about the 1800's except through reading Austen and Dickens, so my ( Read more... )

4/5. Mystery. (Male) cop and (female) priest, and together, they fight crime! Okay, that's a very simplified summary, but this is what D got out of my slightly hysterical summary of it late at night after finishing it ( Read more... )

(3+/5) Um. So. I thought I was done with epic fantasy. But, you know, there's the Wheel of Time, which I am physically incapable of reading more than a quarter of a book of without dropping it in sheer and utter boredom, but which I have vaguely fond memories of, in that sort of "oh, yeah, I used to read that" sort of way. So I've been keeping up ( Read more... )

I think after this I'll be caught up on my reading. For now.

Before I Fall (Oliver) 3/5. YA mainstreamish. I almost typed "dystopia," I'm getting so used to using that word. Anyway. Car accidents and death and life and stuff like that. A bit on the problematic side (in my opinion Izzy Willy-Nilly did a similar kind of theme in a much less mawkish ( Read more... )

3+/5 - So a couple of years ago I attempted to read Eat, Pray, Love, and got through maybe a chapter, or less, of whining by some entitled privileged shallow brat who thought it would be a great idea to run away from all her responsibilities and seek happiness by sexing up random guys. Um, no ( Read more... )

3/5. This was a fast dystopian-spunky-female-lead YA read (of course from my sister) -- that is to say, don't expect lyrical prose or deep philosophical discussions, but it was a page-turner and I enjoyed it. The basic plot is that the 16-year-olds get sorted tested into Houses factions that embody traits like courage and friendship, at which point ( Read more... )