More reading log
As I said: I don't stop reading just because LJ goes down. ;-) And I read fast. (Can you imagine if I put fanfics in here as well? I'd never catch up! *g* Actually, that might be fun. Votes?)
Han Solo's Revenge by Brian Daley (re-read)
Summary: In which Han Solo helps break up a slave-trading ring because they hired him to carry slaves (which is highly illegal and besides he Does Not Do That, so he killed the slave-wranglers and freed the slaves instead) and then wouldn't pay him for his non-services. Also has several well and thoroughly convoluted subplots.
Reaction: I already mentioned that I love these books. They are basically "Han and Chewie have adventures pre-Luke-trilogy", with two adorkable droids and some really fantastic guest stars. This one also has some quite fun thinky-thoughts about trying to change a bad system from the outside vs from the inside, argued out mostly between Han and the kickass-gorgeous-lady character, Fiolla of Lorrd (Lorrd being a planet where an enslaved race of humanoids evolved the ability to mimic, lip-read, and otherwise communicate via body language really, really well. This is a plot point and also fricken fun.)
Plus, there is a gawky little otter-type guy trying to repossess the Millennium Falcon on behalf of some collections agency or other. He is AWESOME AND WIN in his fussy little way, also he saves Chewie's life at one point. Then there is the gunman Gallandro who is not exactly a good guy but is classy as heck, and the amazing one-eyed plesiosaurus ferryboat dude whose name I cannot remember (I love him, he's fantastic), and the two droids being teamworky and saving Han and Chewie's lives (Bollux and Blue Max are so utterly made of awesome, and they have such an epic friendship; this is really a Trilogy of Epic Friendships and Awesome Guest Characters, yes)...
And I could just go on and on. There's the incident where Chewie macgyvers a hang-glider out of a surveying tripod and a dead pterodactyl, for Pete's sake! :D These are some of my very favorite tie-in novels ever, yes.
Han Solo and the Lost Legacy by Brian Daley (re-read)
Summary: In which Han Solo et al get caught up in a hunt for the lost treasure of Xim the Despot.
Reaction: I find this one a little less interesting than the other two, because it's kind of predictable - they're searching for Endless Wealth, and you know they're not going to get to keep it, because this is pre-series and Team Han/Chewie/Falcon have to wind up getting hired by Obi-Wan and Luke in order to pay back Jabba the Hutt, at some point. Also the gorgeous girl isn't quite as kickass. OTOH, there is a sort of meter-long caterpillar guy who plays half a dozen musical instruments at once (and also gets drunk. He's terribly cute when he's drunk.) And a fantastic bit of alien-civilization worldbuilding which I will not spoil, and some rather fascinating ethical-dilemma work with Bollux and Blue Max and some killer robots. I love the thinky-thoughts stuff in these books almost as much as the guest characters (although the first one was less thinky-thoughts and more straight-up Kill The Establishment...)
Complete Poems by Rudyard Kipling
Summary: Or words to that effect. Yeah, I read books of poetry straight through. What? ;D
Reaction: *sticky flags everywhere* I put in sticky-notes at all the poems that I wanted to memorize, or type out on my computer so I could find them later, or whatever, and I think I used... a great many dozen.:D Also I actually learned a poem (Road Through the Woods, which I've been trying to learn since I was five - I finally had to parse out the rhyme scheme, ABCB and so forth, because it's a bit odd and it switchfoots), which is something I had not done enough of lately because my brain was busy getting un-fried. I shall learn more poems later on. :D
I shall put a poem here, because I feel like it:
O hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us
And black are the waters that sparkled so green;
The moon o'er the combers looks downward to find us
Asleep in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow;
Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thine ease!
The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,
Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas.
Kipliiiiiiiiiiing. ♥
How to Write Research Papers by Sharon Sorenson
Summary: What it says on the tin. It's nonfiction. (I randomly picked it up at the library while looking for some Terry Pratchett, honestly... IDEK.)
Reaction: I know, it sounds a bit boring - but hey. This is Quite A Good Book. I didn't learn anything about writing research papers in my last (and only) college writing class, nor in earlier levels of school; what I know all came from a lovely English prof I know IRL who took pity on me when my geology lab teacher required me to write a midterm paper, and walked me through the steps of finding things to cite and citing them.
So, for me, this is a very good basic book. It starts at the beginning with "what is a research paper? There are two types of research paper: one where you compile research on a topic and spit it out, and one where you research two things and write a compare/contrast/such". (I paraphrase.) Which nobody had ever told me before, and I had therefore been much confuseled, since my homeschool training assumes you are going to be saying original stuff (i.e. the second sort of paper) and my college profs had assumed you were going to be compiling and regurgitating (i.e. the first sort).
Then it walks you through Picking A Topic and Narrowing A Topic and "we are giving you these steps in an order, but be warned, you will have to keep going back and doing more research and narrowing and such!", and... basically all the stuff that everyone assumes I knew already because I can punctuate a compound-complex-Chestertonian sentence without squinting. o_O
So. Awesome starter book for writing research papers. I am mainly putting it in here because I know I'll never be able to find it again if I don't write down the author's name somewhere online. XD
Complete Poems by G.K. Chesterton (re-read)
Summary: What it says on the tin. Again. (...I actually checked out a whole pile of poetry books after I stumbled across the English Poets shelf at the library, but these are the only two I finished. Well, I nearly finished Robert W. Service, and I got about halfway through an antique edition of Burns with improbable commentary... and I sort of finished the Masefield, but it wasn't complete.)
Reaction: I have to be careful about reading too much of GKC's poetry at a time. It's... surprisingly dark and cynical, in places; there's a bitter tone to the snark that sits oddly to his prose work. (And he has a few poems with an anti-Semitic flavor that I literally can't read, from a post-WWII perspective - they're that squicky to me.)
But, on the whole, I do love his poetry. Even if I find "Lepanto" completely impossible to learn or recite because of the abrupt rhythmic changes and because I'm just not that good a voice-actor, and even if the "Ballad of the White Horse" does have continuity errors that throw me completely out of the poem... Chesterton, Kipling, Tolkien, and Masefield, I think, are the greatest poets of the last couple hundred years. They do very different things with their verse, and use different methods to achieve their effects (I've been having a lot of fun comparing Kipling's and Masefield's use of rhythm, for example; Kipling often switches from a two-foot to a three-foot and back in the same line to mimic the rhythm of his characters' speech, while Masefield sticks much closer to a settled iambic or trochaic meter that somehow encompasses lines like "upper m'nt'ga'nts'l sheet"), but they're all fantastic at making their poems do what they are intended to do. Which is all you can ask of a great poet, really. :-)
The World's Greatest Super Heroes by Paul Dini (writer) and Alex Ross (artist) (re-read)
Summary: A collection of half a dozen oversized graphic novels about DC Comics' front-line stars: "Peace on Earth" (Superman), "War on Crime" (Batman), "Spirit of Truth" (Wonder Woman), "Power of Hope" (Captain Marvel / Shazam), "JLA: Secret Origins", and "JLA: Liberty and Justice".
Reaction: Frankly, I checked this out because I wanted to re-read "Liberty and Justice". Because I love it. It's narrated by J'onn J'onzz, for one thing (I am such a fan of his - yeah, me and my shapeshifty justice guys, lol), but essentially... it's fantastic. Paul Dini is my favorite superhero writer on the DC side, I think, because he does what I love best: he writes small-scale, slice-of-life stories about good people with superpowers, and about the struggles they face in trying to be heroes. And he does it with happy endings.
(Also, his characters. His characterization. That's what I mean: he writes primarily about interesting people, with individual personalities, which is quite rare in superhero comics altogether. Stan Lee did it somewhat, and changed the world; Chris Claremont did it, and turned a second-time-dying comic book into a thirty-five-year phenomenon. But it's harder than you'd think to do it consistently, and Paul Dini does. His Captain Marvel... I don't even know the character, apart from the story in this volume, but he's adorable and brilliant and awesome here.)
But anyway. Fantastic set of stories. "Peace on Earth" is about what happens when Superman decides to take on world hunger; "War on Crime" is a Batman story that actually gets Bruce Wayne involved in fighting inner-city blight (all four of these individual stories share a theme of getting the heroes' alter egos working for change on a personal level); "Spirit of Truth" sends Wonder Woman to the Middle East; "Power of Hope" has Captain Marvel visiting a children's hospital and Billy Batson making friends with an abused boy.
"Secret Origins" is a set of two-page spreads giving the backstories for the JLA heroes who appear in "Liberty and Justice" - I'm not always too fond of Alex Ross's style, but there's some lovely artwork in here. And Plastic Man's origin as recounted here always makes me laugh. (Plus, I love the whole concept of Plastic Man: a thug who gets superpowers and decides to become a hero. And the writers actually let him, instead of pounding on him till he turns into a villain and tries to take over the world. :D)
And "Liberty and Justice". Which deals with the question of the Justice League's public image: they're de facto the strongest people on earth - no checks and balances on their power - so what happens when they don't look like the good guys in a given instance? I LOVE THIS BOOK OKAY. Also J'onn and Hal and Barry. And Ray Palmer! And Aquaman (I love how Paul Dini writes him as so matter-of-factly Atlantean; at one point he's got a line about "the Hostile Surface-Dweller stereotype", LOL)! And everybody! Also J'onn's speech at the end - I love it when J'onn gets to make speeches. He's so very good at it; he's got a unique speech-making style that's a lot more personal than Superman's press releases.
(I just love J'onn, okay? XD)
Han Solo's Revenge by Brian Daley (re-read)
Summary: In which Han Solo helps break up a slave-trading ring because they hired him to carry slaves (which is highly illegal and besides he Does Not Do That, so he killed the slave-wranglers and freed the slaves instead) and then wouldn't pay him for his non-services. Also has several well and thoroughly convoluted subplots.
Reaction: I already mentioned that I love these books. They are basically "Han and Chewie have adventures pre-Luke-trilogy", with two adorkable droids and some really fantastic guest stars. This one also has some quite fun thinky-thoughts about trying to change a bad system from the outside vs from the inside, argued out mostly between Han and the kickass-gorgeous-lady character, Fiolla of Lorrd (Lorrd being a planet where an enslaved race of humanoids evolved the ability to mimic, lip-read, and otherwise communicate via body language really, really well. This is a plot point and also fricken fun.)
Plus, there is a gawky little otter-type guy trying to repossess the Millennium Falcon on behalf of some collections agency or other. He is AWESOME AND WIN in his fussy little way, also he saves Chewie's life at one point. Then there is the gunman Gallandro who is not exactly a good guy but is classy as heck, and the amazing one-eyed plesiosaurus ferryboat dude whose name I cannot remember (I love him, he's fantastic), and the two droids being teamworky and saving Han and Chewie's lives (Bollux and Blue Max are so utterly made of awesome, and they have such an epic friendship; this is really a Trilogy of Epic Friendships and Awesome Guest Characters, yes)...
And I could just go on and on. There's the incident where Chewie macgyvers a hang-glider out of a surveying tripod and a dead pterodactyl, for Pete's sake! :D These are some of my very favorite tie-in novels ever, yes.
Han Solo and the Lost Legacy by Brian Daley (re-read)
Summary: In which Han Solo et al get caught up in a hunt for the lost treasure of Xim the Despot.
Reaction: I find this one a little less interesting than the other two, because it's kind of predictable - they're searching for Endless Wealth, and you know they're not going to get to keep it, because this is pre-series and Team Han/Chewie/Falcon have to wind up getting hired by Obi-Wan and Luke in order to pay back Jabba the Hutt, at some point. Also the gorgeous girl isn't quite as kickass. OTOH, there is a sort of meter-long caterpillar guy who plays half a dozen musical instruments at once (and also gets drunk. He's terribly cute when he's drunk.) And a fantastic bit of alien-civilization worldbuilding which I will not spoil, and some rather fascinating ethical-dilemma work with Bollux and Blue Max and some killer robots. I love the thinky-thoughts stuff in these books almost as much as the guest characters (although the first one was less thinky-thoughts and more straight-up Kill The Establishment...)
Complete Poems by Rudyard Kipling
Summary: Or words to that effect. Yeah, I read books of poetry straight through. What? ;D
Reaction: *sticky flags everywhere* I put in sticky-notes at all the poems that I wanted to memorize, or type out on my computer so I could find them later, or whatever, and I think I used... a great many dozen.:D Also I actually learned a poem (Road Through the Woods, which I've been trying to learn since I was five - I finally had to parse out the rhyme scheme, ABCB and so forth, because it's a bit odd and it switchfoots), which is something I had not done enough of lately because my brain was busy getting un-fried. I shall learn more poems later on. :D
I shall put a poem here, because I feel like it:
O hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us
And black are the waters that sparkled so green;
The moon o'er the combers looks downward to find us
Asleep in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow;
Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thine ease!
The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,
Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas.
Kipliiiiiiiiiiing. ♥
How to Write Research Papers by Sharon Sorenson
Summary: What it says on the tin. It's nonfiction. (I randomly picked it up at the library while looking for some Terry Pratchett, honestly... IDEK.)
Reaction: I know, it sounds a bit boring - but hey. This is Quite A Good Book. I didn't learn anything about writing research papers in my last (and only) college writing class, nor in earlier levels of school; what I know all came from a lovely English prof I know IRL who took pity on me when my geology lab teacher required me to write a midterm paper, and walked me through the steps of finding things to cite and citing them.
So, for me, this is a very good basic book. It starts at the beginning with "what is a research paper? There are two types of research paper: one where you compile research on a topic and spit it out, and one where you research two things and write a compare/contrast/such". (I paraphrase.) Which nobody had ever told me before, and I had therefore been much confuseled, since my homeschool training assumes you are going to be saying original stuff (i.e. the second sort of paper) and my college profs had assumed you were going to be compiling and regurgitating (i.e. the first sort).
Then it walks you through Picking A Topic and Narrowing A Topic and "we are giving you these steps in an order, but be warned, you will have to keep going back and doing more research and narrowing and such!", and... basically all the stuff that everyone assumes I knew already because I can punctuate a compound-complex-Chestertonian sentence without squinting. o_O
So. Awesome starter book for writing research papers. I am mainly putting it in here because I know I'll never be able to find it again if I don't write down the author's name somewhere online. XD
Complete Poems by G.K. Chesterton (re-read)
Summary: What it says on the tin. Again. (...I actually checked out a whole pile of poetry books after I stumbled across the English Poets shelf at the library, but these are the only two I finished. Well, I nearly finished Robert W. Service, and I got about halfway through an antique edition of Burns with improbable commentary... and I sort of finished the Masefield, but it wasn't complete.)
Reaction: I have to be careful about reading too much of GKC's poetry at a time. It's... surprisingly dark and cynical, in places; there's a bitter tone to the snark that sits oddly to his prose work. (And he has a few poems with an anti-Semitic flavor that I literally can't read, from a post-WWII perspective - they're that squicky to me.)
But, on the whole, I do love his poetry. Even if I find "Lepanto" completely impossible to learn or recite because of the abrupt rhythmic changes and because I'm just not that good a voice-actor, and even if the "Ballad of the White Horse" does have continuity errors that throw me completely out of the poem... Chesterton, Kipling, Tolkien, and Masefield, I think, are the greatest poets of the last couple hundred years. They do very different things with their verse, and use different methods to achieve their effects (I've been having a lot of fun comparing Kipling's and Masefield's use of rhythm, for example; Kipling often switches from a two-foot to a three-foot and back in the same line to mimic the rhythm of his characters' speech, while Masefield sticks much closer to a settled iambic or trochaic meter that somehow encompasses lines like "upper m'nt'ga'nts'l sheet"), but they're all fantastic at making their poems do what they are intended to do. Which is all you can ask of a great poet, really. :-)
The World's Greatest Super Heroes by Paul Dini (writer) and Alex Ross (artist) (re-read)
Summary: A collection of half a dozen oversized graphic novels about DC Comics' front-line stars: "Peace on Earth" (Superman), "War on Crime" (Batman), "Spirit of Truth" (Wonder Woman), "Power of Hope" (Captain Marvel / Shazam), "JLA: Secret Origins", and "JLA: Liberty and Justice".
Reaction: Frankly, I checked this out because I wanted to re-read "Liberty and Justice". Because I love it. It's narrated by J'onn J'onzz, for one thing (I am such a fan of his - yeah, me and my shapeshifty justice guys, lol), but essentially... it's fantastic. Paul Dini is my favorite superhero writer on the DC side, I think, because he does what I love best: he writes small-scale, slice-of-life stories about good people with superpowers, and about the struggles they face in trying to be heroes. And he does it with happy endings.
(Also, his characters. His characterization. That's what I mean: he writes primarily about interesting people, with individual personalities, which is quite rare in superhero comics altogether. Stan Lee did it somewhat, and changed the world; Chris Claremont did it, and turned a second-time-dying comic book into a thirty-five-year phenomenon. But it's harder than you'd think to do it consistently, and Paul Dini does. His Captain Marvel... I don't even know the character, apart from the story in this volume, but he's adorable and brilliant and awesome here.)
But anyway. Fantastic set of stories. "Peace on Earth" is about what happens when Superman decides to take on world hunger; "War on Crime" is a Batman story that actually gets Bruce Wayne involved in fighting inner-city blight (all four of these individual stories share a theme of getting the heroes' alter egos working for change on a personal level); "Spirit of Truth" sends Wonder Woman to the Middle East; "Power of Hope" has Captain Marvel visiting a children's hospital and Billy Batson making friends with an abused boy.
"Secret Origins" is a set of two-page spreads giving the backstories for the JLA heroes who appear in "Liberty and Justice" - I'm not always too fond of Alex Ross's style, but there's some lovely artwork in here. And Plastic Man's origin as recounted here always makes me laugh. (Plus, I love the whole concept of Plastic Man: a thug who gets superpowers and decides to become a hero. And the writers actually let him, instead of pounding on him till he turns into a villain and tries to take over the world. :D)
And "Liberty and Justice". Which deals with the question of the Justice League's public image: they're de facto the strongest people on earth - no checks and balances on their power - so what happens when they don't look like the good guys in a given instance? I LOVE THIS BOOK OKAY. Also J'onn and Hal and Barry. And Ray Palmer! And Aquaman (I love how Paul Dini writes him as so matter-of-factly Atlantean; at one point he's got a line about "the Hostile Surface-Dweller stereotype", LOL)! And everybody! Also J'onn's speech at the end - I love it when J'onn gets to make speeches. He's so very good at it; he's got a unique speech-making style that's a lot more personal than Superman's press releases.
(I just love J'onn, okay? XD)