December Book Reviews
I was crabby in my last entry. I haven't had the best week; I'm concerned about money and trying to catch up on sleep and life etc. after the holidays. I hate feeling like I can't catch up on life.
This is my first completely obligation-free weekend in I don't even know how long, and I spent today being bored and lazy and also spending too much money. (The oxford heels I've been lusting after at Target were on sale. So were some other things.) I finished my book and started two more, and tonight, frustrated by my overall writing progress, I worked on AEFB and did double my quota (to make up for yesterday), and finished two chapters. And I wrote a little in something else too. So I feel pretty satisfied about that, despite the uselessness of the rest of the day.
Writing some book reviews:
(this first one is from more than a month ago but I forgot to post it)
Yesterday I finished listening to Bartimaeus: Ring of Solomon and it's got me in a crazy kind of mood. Crazy like at 11:00 PM when I should have already been asleep, I instead drew some Bartimaeus "storyboards" for half an hour and then said to myself, "What about all those old Bartimaeus drawings I did?" so then got out my old sketchbooks and flipped through them until I found all the old Bartimaeus drawings.
Not so much that Ring of Solomon was spectacular--it was pretty good; I love Bartimaeus the character and that shadow-marid was kind of cool, but I didn't feel any great connection with Asmira, the shared protagonist--but rather that it reminds me of one of my favorites, Ptolemy's Gate, which was spectacular. I keep drawing it. I keep pulling it off the shelf, reading the last two pages, flipping through the rest of the book wondering where all the good parts are, then putting it back on the shelf and wandering away.
Bartimaeus and Nathaniel make for good shared protagonists because Bartimaeus is supposed to be the "evil" of the two (in Solomon he kills and devours people and other spirits without pause) and he's completely and unhappily enslaved to Nathaniel, who is (from our point of view) supposed to be the "good" of the two, yet he's doing the enslaving. And just that all Nathaniel wants is power, his whole life, and when he finally gets it, he just falls apart and misses who he used to be, and he goes back, he tries to fix things, and then there's completely badass teamwork like unto no other badass teamwork. It was SO, SO GOOD. When I first read it, I just kept weeping uncontrollably and clutching it to my chest, wondering why Deathly Hallows hadn't been this wonderful.
Slightly more current ones:
Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels: I like to fold over pages in books when I read something good. For the first fifty pages or so, I was folding over nearly every page. It was really interesting, and actually made me think a lot about my own writing.
The Demon's Surrender: Excellent! Surprising and gripping, not as great as the first book (Lexicon) but better than the second (Covenant). From all the hype, I was afraid a character I rather liked would die and they did not, so that was good.
Entwined: It's a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, and I found the audiobook! Also, it ended up being tentative high fantasy (takes place in some other kingdom but could basically be England), which to me is a plus. The story was okay, fairly well told but a little too silly in some places. It also fell into the Twelve Dancing Princesses trap--there are twelve girls who, as an entity, are considered a main character in this story. They are represented by twelve girls but they are really one character. In retelling the story, you either get to lose their personalities because you show them as a single entity, or do a half-assed job of characterizing them because you can't have twelve main characters. Entwined was the latter. There was also a kind of Footloose theme going (and I really hoped that the dead queen/mother would end up being the witch/vampire/something). (Also, why do TDP stories always have vampire types?) Overall, the book was interesting but not great.
Chime: I was really looking forward to this book! I read so many great things about it! So many things that when I actually read it, I was moderately disappointed. Not as great as I'd hoped. (I was also led to believe that it was high fantasy. It's not.)
Remalna's Children: I read this collection of two short stories on my iPod earlier this week. (More about reading on the iPod later.) The first, "Beauty," is the sequel-story to one of my favorite books ever, Crown Duel, and I love it. A long time ago, it inspired me for the title An Eye for Beauty, which is the book I'm writing now. I found the second story difficult to follow and disappointing.
Across the Great Barrier: Patricia C. Wrede is so wonderful. Everything she writes is different from everything else. She wrote some good high fantasy and some great alternate-history fantasy, and some of those alternate histories were EXCELLENT epistolary novels. It's been several years since I read the first book in this particular alternate-history series (trilogy?), but I liked this book. Interesting, not too complicated. My favorite alternate-histories are the ones with America; people do London a lot but not America, and it's so huge and wild that you would think people would write alternate Americas more often.
Then this morning after I finished Barrier I started The Return of the King (more than ten years since I started LOTR, and I never got around to finishing...I remember once upon a time I said I'd read LOTR before the movies came out...oh, how I laugh at that memory!) and also The Annotated Peter Pan, which is a beautiful book that must be savored. And also A Christmas Carol on the iPod, which I am really enjoying.
I'm attempting to read three audiobooks right now, all of them high fantasy, and almost all of them irritating or disappointing by various levels.
The first is Eon. The premise sounded good, but it didn't grab me. Also, the discs were sticky, and I have to clean them--always a pain. I haven't decided yet if the story is important enough to me to go ahead and clean the discs.
The second is Kristin Cashore's Fire. I read Graceling and found it irritating for several reasons. The biggest reason I remember is that she basically just rolled into bed with this guy she liked without considering repercussions or whether he might not be worthy of having sex with her. (I don’t care so much if characters--even teenagers--have sex in books. I just want them to think about it.) I think I felt she was Mary Sueish? I don't know. It felt contrived or something to me. And everyone LOVES this book, so I was like, "...well, what's wrong with me?" But I'm listening to Fire, and aside from the beginning (which was fairly engaging, and which I believe was about the king in Graceling as a little boy), I have literally not been following this book AT ALL. I can't even remember the main character's name. (Lol OH WAIT IT'S THE TITLE OF THE BOOK.) There's a lot of mystery but I don't know why. I don't like this book, basically, but I keep wondering if I'm missing something here. My desk at work is in a really central location and near the vice president's office; the noise often distracts me from my audio books.
The third is Tamora Pierce's Mastiff, which irritated me for most of it and as I have three discs to go, it's now completely grabbed me. Planning a long and bitchy post, but after I finish it.
Tomorrow: Findley (I have become a grocery store snob and store-bought turkey tastes like sadness now), hooking up my new DVD player, attempting to hook up the new-old flatbed scanner my brother let me have, putting up my new-old blackout curtains, dishes, cleaning, writing, library, research, and probably some baking.
Posts to come (reminders to myself; if I write them in Word-doc-posts, I will almost definitely forget): food, e-readers (eReaders? ereaders?). Possibly something else that I already have forgotten.
This is my first completely obligation-free weekend in I don't even know how long, and I spent today being bored and lazy and also spending too much money. (The oxford heels I've been lusting after at Target were on sale. So were some other things.) I finished my book and started two more, and tonight, frustrated by my overall writing progress, I worked on AEFB and did double my quota (to make up for yesterday), and finished two chapters. And I wrote a little in something else too. So I feel pretty satisfied about that, despite the uselessness of the rest of the day.
Writing some book reviews:
(this first one is from more than a month ago but I forgot to post it)
Yesterday I finished listening to Bartimaeus: Ring of Solomon and it's got me in a crazy kind of mood. Crazy like at 11:00 PM when I should have already been asleep, I instead drew some Bartimaeus "storyboards" for half an hour and then said to myself, "What about all those old Bartimaeus drawings I did?" so then got out my old sketchbooks and flipped through them until I found all the old Bartimaeus drawings.
Not so much that Ring of Solomon was spectacular--it was pretty good; I love Bartimaeus the character and that shadow-marid was kind of cool, but I didn't feel any great connection with Asmira, the shared protagonist--but rather that it reminds me of one of my favorites, Ptolemy's Gate, which was spectacular. I keep drawing it. I keep pulling it off the shelf, reading the last two pages, flipping through the rest of the book wondering where all the good parts are, then putting it back on the shelf and wandering away.
Bartimaeus and Nathaniel make for good shared protagonists because Bartimaeus is supposed to be the "evil" of the two (in Solomon he kills and devours people and other spirits without pause) and he's completely and unhappily enslaved to Nathaniel, who is (from our point of view) supposed to be the "good" of the two, yet he's doing the enslaving. And just that all Nathaniel wants is power, his whole life, and when he finally gets it, he just falls apart and misses who he used to be, and he goes back, he tries to fix things, and then there's completely badass teamwork like unto no other badass teamwork. It was SO, SO GOOD. When I first read it, I just kept weeping uncontrollably and clutching it to my chest, wondering why Deathly Hallows hadn't been this wonderful.
Slightly more current ones:
Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels: I like to fold over pages in books when I read something good. For the first fifty pages or so, I was folding over nearly every page. It was really interesting, and actually made me think a lot about my own writing.
The Demon's Surrender: Excellent! Surprising and gripping, not as great as the first book (Lexicon) but better than the second (Covenant). From all the hype, I was afraid a character I rather liked would die and they did not, so that was good.
Entwined: It's a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, and I found the audiobook! Also, it ended up being tentative high fantasy (takes place in some other kingdom but could basically be England), which to me is a plus. The story was okay, fairly well told but a little too silly in some places. It also fell into the Twelve Dancing Princesses trap--there are twelve girls who, as an entity, are considered a main character in this story. They are represented by twelve girls but they are really one character. In retelling the story, you either get to lose their personalities because you show them as a single entity, or do a half-assed job of characterizing them because you can't have twelve main characters. Entwined was the latter. There was also a kind of Footloose theme going (and I really hoped that the dead queen/mother would end up being the witch/vampire/something). (Also, why do TDP stories always have vampire types?) Overall, the book was interesting but not great.
Chime: I was really looking forward to this book! I read so many great things about it! So many things that when I actually read it, I was moderately disappointed. Not as great as I'd hoped. (I was also led to believe that it was high fantasy. It's not.)
Remalna's Children: I read this collection of two short stories on my iPod earlier this week. (More about reading on the iPod later.) The first, "Beauty," is the sequel-story to one of my favorite books ever, Crown Duel, and I love it. A long time ago, it inspired me for the title An Eye for Beauty, which is the book I'm writing now. I found the second story difficult to follow and disappointing.
Across the Great Barrier: Patricia C. Wrede is so wonderful. Everything she writes is different from everything else. She wrote some good high fantasy and some great alternate-history fantasy, and some of those alternate histories were EXCELLENT epistolary novels. It's been several years since I read the first book in this particular alternate-history series (trilogy?), but I liked this book. Interesting, not too complicated. My favorite alternate-histories are the ones with America; people do London a lot but not America, and it's so huge and wild that you would think people would write alternate Americas more often.
Then this morning after I finished Barrier I started The Return of the King (more than ten years since I started LOTR, and I never got around to finishing...I remember once upon a time I said I'd read LOTR before the movies came out...oh, how I laugh at that memory!) and also The Annotated Peter Pan, which is a beautiful book that must be savored. And also A Christmas Carol on the iPod, which I am really enjoying.
I'm attempting to read three audiobooks right now, all of them high fantasy, and almost all of them irritating or disappointing by various levels.
The first is Eon. The premise sounded good, but it didn't grab me. Also, the discs were sticky, and I have to clean them--always a pain. I haven't decided yet if the story is important enough to me to go ahead and clean the discs.
The second is Kristin Cashore's Fire. I read Graceling and found it irritating for several reasons. The biggest reason I remember is that she basically just rolled into bed with this guy she liked without considering repercussions or whether he might not be worthy of having sex with her. (I don’t care so much if characters--even teenagers--have sex in books. I just want them to think about it.) I think I felt she was Mary Sueish? I don't know. It felt contrived or something to me. And everyone LOVES this book, so I was like, "...well, what's wrong with me?" But I'm listening to Fire, and aside from the beginning (which was fairly engaging, and which I believe was about the king in Graceling as a little boy), I have literally not been following this book AT ALL. I can't even remember the main character's name. (Lol OH WAIT IT'S THE TITLE OF THE BOOK.) There's a lot of mystery but I don't know why. I don't like this book, basically, but I keep wondering if I'm missing something here. My desk at work is in a really central location and near the vice president's office; the noise often distracts me from my audio books.
The third is Tamora Pierce's Mastiff, which irritated me for most of it and as I have three discs to go, it's now completely grabbed me. Planning a long and bitchy post, but after I finish it.
Tomorrow: Findley (I have become a grocery store snob and store-bought turkey tastes like sadness now), hooking up my new DVD player, attempting to hook up the new-old flatbed scanner my brother let me have, putting up my new-old blackout curtains, dishes, cleaning, writing, library, research, and probably some baking.
Posts to come (reminders to myself; if I write them in Word-doc-posts, I will almost definitely forget): food, e-readers (eReaders? ereaders?). Possibly something else that I already have forgotten.