January 2008 Booklist
First list of the new year! The explanation for all the Animorphs is that I keep telling myself I don't have time to read, but when I can't stand to look at my research projects anymore I take a few hours and read an Animorph or two all the way though.
1. Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card
I read this right after reading Ender's Game which made for a pretty cool contrast. I love how it's all about the same place and many of the same events, but everything comes out so different from Bean's point of view. Plus I really like the beginning in Rotterdam, when all the kids have created their own society on the streets. It was an interesting insight into poverty.
2. Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card
This is about the new world order after the end of the Bugger Wars. I love how it's all about real countries, but in a future imagined by Card where the U.S. is no longer at the top and all these little countries have a real chance of becoming something important. The ending made me really sad because I forgot about a character's death. :~(
3. Animorphs #28: The Experiment by K. A. Applegate
I read this to cheer myself up, but then I saw the cow on the cover and knew it was going to make me more miserable, because it's about slaughterhouses. That's why I had to read The Sickness afterwards.
4. Animorphs #29: The Sickness by K. A. Applegate
Ax gets sick and Cassie needs to perform brain surgery to save him. She also morphs a Yeerk. I like this one.
5. Is it a Choice?: Answers to 300 of the Most Frequently Asked Questions about Gays and Lesbians by Eric Marcus
I'm doing a huge project on gay rights, and this is one of my resources. I finished it because it was fairly short and informative all the way through. It was written in the 90s, so a lot of progress has been made since then (sodomy laws were repealed, a few states made gay marriage or civil unions legal...), but a lot hasn't. The concept was interesting: the author, who has written other books about sexuality, went on a radio show to promote a book. Instead of talking about the book, he got a lot of calls with "silly" questions like "Is it a choice?" or "Who plays the man and who plays the women?" He complained to some straight friends about these questions and they replied by agreeing with the callers or asking him for the answers. He realized that what was common sense to him was not common sense to much of the straight population and ended up publishing this book. I found the story amusing because, especially in doing this research, I had the same reaction as him. Doesn't everyone know these things? I'm really opening up now to the necessity of education, because of lot of the resistance to gay rights comes from ignorance on how sexuality really works.
6. Myst: The Book of Ti’ana by Rand Miller with David Wingrove
I reread this because I'm doing book reviews on game-book crossovers for ONU's online journal. This was actually the very first non-YA chapter book I ever read, and a the time I thought it was very excellent. It was kind of disappointing to reread it and find out that it's actually pretty average. I love the detail of the D'Ni civilization and the creation of their culture, but a lot of the characters were kind of flat, the technology was glossed over, and I don't have the slightest clue why the bad guy went to the lengths he did to get revenge (or, for that matter, how he did it. It was like *Poof! Instant destruction!*). It was still good enough that I wanted to stop a couple chapters away from the end, because everyone was happy and I didn't want to see everything go up in smoke.
7. As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto
This was a book I kind of stumbled over in my gay rights research and it sounded interesting enough that I read it for fun (well, not fun, but out of interest). It's a true story about a guy who lost his penis in an accident when he was a baby, and instead of, you know, raising him as a boy without a penis, his family and doctors chose to raise him as a girl. As I'm sure is obvious, this was a bad decision and he had an absolutely horrendous childhood until he found out the truth and made the decision to become a male again. I've always been strongly against irreversibly assigning intersexed babies a gender, and as such I found it difficult to believe people would do that to a baby who was without doubt genetically and physically a male. It's kind of an important case for both types of children, though, because the complete failure that resulted helped teach people how sex works, and how it doesn't work. The book ended on a somewhat happy note where everyone was finally patching up their lives and making things right, but I read yesterday that the man and his twin brother both committed suicide in 2004, after the book was published. :~(
8. Megamorphs #3: Elfangor’s Secret by K. A. Applegate
I think I've read this one too many times, because it's not as exciting as it used to be. Basically, the Animorphs travel through time trying to keep Visser Four from messing up the past and thus the present. It's pretty cool because they visit a lot of famous battles and things, but as they do keep messing up the past, the places they visit later aren't quite right, which is fun.
9. Animorphs #30: The Reunion by K. A. Applegate
This one is pretty cool too. The Animorphs are working closely with Visser One (by the way, I'm pretty sure that both Visser Four and Visser One had been demoted before these last two books but since Yeerks, like, never use their real names and the Animorphs don't know their new titles, they keep calling them by their old ones, even in the narration. I don't know why, but this kind of annoys me, even though I'd be more annoyed by their names changing) and pretending to be Andalites, which is hilarious. In the end, Visser One figures out who Marco is (oops) but then dies, except, much like the book with the Leerans, no body is ever found and so you know that she must not be dead.
1. Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card
I read this right after reading Ender's Game which made for a pretty cool contrast. I love how it's all about the same place and many of the same events, but everything comes out so different from Bean's point of view. Plus I really like the beginning in Rotterdam, when all the kids have created their own society on the streets. It was an interesting insight into poverty.
2. Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card
This is about the new world order after the end of the Bugger Wars. I love how it's all about real countries, but in a future imagined by Card where the U.S. is no longer at the top and all these little countries have a real chance of becoming something important. The ending made me really sad because I forgot about a character's death. :~(
3. Animorphs #28: The Experiment by K. A. Applegate
I read this to cheer myself up, but then I saw the cow on the cover and knew it was going to make me more miserable, because it's about slaughterhouses. That's why I had to read The Sickness afterwards.
4. Animorphs #29: The Sickness by K. A. Applegate
Ax gets sick and Cassie needs to perform brain surgery to save him. She also morphs a Yeerk. I like this one.
5. Is it a Choice?: Answers to 300 of the Most Frequently Asked Questions about Gays and Lesbians by Eric Marcus
I'm doing a huge project on gay rights, and this is one of my resources. I finished it because it was fairly short and informative all the way through. It was written in the 90s, so a lot of progress has been made since then (sodomy laws were repealed, a few states made gay marriage or civil unions legal...), but a lot hasn't. The concept was interesting: the author, who has written other books about sexuality, went on a radio show to promote a book. Instead of talking about the book, he got a lot of calls with "silly" questions like "Is it a choice?" or "Who plays the man and who plays the women?" He complained to some straight friends about these questions and they replied by agreeing with the callers or asking him for the answers. He realized that what was common sense to him was not common sense to much of the straight population and ended up publishing this book. I found the story amusing because, especially in doing this research, I had the same reaction as him. Doesn't everyone know these things? I'm really opening up now to the necessity of education, because of lot of the resistance to gay rights comes from ignorance on how sexuality really works.
6. Myst: The Book of Ti’ana by Rand Miller with David Wingrove
I reread this because I'm doing book reviews on game-book crossovers for ONU's online journal. This was actually the very first non-YA chapter book I ever read, and a the time I thought it was very excellent. It was kind of disappointing to reread it and find out that it's actually pretty average. I love the detail of the D'Ni civilization and the creation of their culture, but a lot of the characters were kind of flat, the technology was glossed over, and I don't have the slightest clue why the bad guy went to the lengths he did to get revenge (or, for that matter, how he did it. It was like *Poof! Instant destruction!*). It was still good enough that I wanted to stop a couple chapters away from the end, because everyone was happy and I didn't want to see everything go up in smoke.
7. As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto
This was a book I kind of stumbled over in my gay rights research and it sounded interesting enough that I read it for fun (well, not fun, but out of interest). It's a true story about a guy who lost his penis in an accident when he was a baby, and instead of, you know, raising him as a boy without a penis, his family and doctors chose to raise him as a girl. As I'm sure is obvious, this was a bad decision and he had an absolutely horrendous childhood until he found out the truth and made the decision to become a male again. I've always been strongly against irreversibly assigning intersexed babies a gender, and as such I found it difficult to believe people would do that to a baby who was without doubt genetically and physically a male. It's kind of an important case for both types of children, though, because the complete failure that resulted helped teach people how sex works, and how it doesn't work. The book ended on a somewhat happy note where everyone was finally patching up their lives and making things right, but I read yesterday that the man and his twin brother both committed suicide in 2004, after the book was published. :~(
8. Megamorphs #3: Elfangor’s Secret by K. A. Applegate
I think I've read this one too many times, because it's not as exciting as it used to be. Basically, the Animorphs travel through time trying to keep Visser Four from messing up the past and thus the present. It's pretty cool because they visit a lot of famous battles and things, but as they do keep messing up the past, the places they visit later aren't quite right, which is fun.
9. Animorphs #30: The Reunion by K. A. Applegate
This one is pretty cool too. The Animorphs are working closely with Visser One (by the way, I'm pretty sure that both Visser Four and Visser One had been demoted before these last two books but since Yeerks, like, never use their real names and the Animorphs don't know their new titles, they keep calling them by their old ones, even in the narration. I don't know why, but this kind of annoys me, even though I'd be more annoyed by their names changing) and pretending to be Andalites, which is hilarious. In the end, Visser One figures out who Marco is (oops) but then dies, except, much like the book with the Leerans, no body is ever found and so you know that she must not be dead.