Book Round Up
Just now this minute (or maybe last minute, it's hard to tell with minutes) I finished reading Struts & Frets by Jon Skovron. It's a teen book about a musician and his artist girlfriend and it's set in Columbus, OH, which is mainly why I picked it up. It was...meh. I've read better wanna-be musician books. It wasn't terrible, I finished it, but the protag wasn't too engaging and I feel like other books, like Guitar Girl or Audrey, Wait! deal with the music scene in a more interesting way. And even though it was set in C-bus (and in fact the protag lives in German Village, which is right smack dab up against my library) it didn't feature the city as a big thing, which made me sad. Columbus has a character to it that I think would be nice to see brought out in a book. This book just didn't do that.
I also recently finished Better Days, a graphic novel by Joss Whedon set in the Firefly-verse. It was also just meh, although there was this great page with Book and some call girls and a gun that made me laugh.
A Hat Full of Sky is technically the next in Pratchett's Discworld series. It's a j-fic instead of an adult novel, and is the second in the Tiffany Aching sub-series. Lots of fun. I like Tiffany, and I like the Nac Mac Feegle and I *adore* Rob Anybody and when they talk about "ship" - that go baaaa - so this was a good read. They're fast and a good kid's introduction to the Discworld setting.
Read Invisible by Pete Hautman, too, because he's the author who is coming to the library for visits during next year's Teen Read Week. I don't do real-life teen books very often, but this was pretty good. Very suspenseful, left you wondering what happened for a good deal of the story. I figured out the big twist fairly early but the writing and characterization was still good enough that I kept it up to the end. Also it's a very short book, so it's a super fast read. I think this might be a good reluctant reader pick, or a good boy book.
And I finally - FINALLY - finished Chosen by Ted Dekker. It seems like I have been working on this book for years. It's actually only been maybe four or five months, but man. It draaaagged. It's your standard Christian fantasy novel, first in a series of a million (or maybe just five, I don't know) and I'm not sure I can pick up the sequel. I'll admit that about two thirds of the way through the book the plot was actually somewhat interesting. The rest was...standard. Normal. Nothing big. And sometimes irritating. Like, for example, Dekker named one of the bad guys "Alucard." Yep. This Alucard is actually a bat, too, and I don't know if that makes it better or worse. But I was absolutely not impressed at all.
I also recently finished Better Days, a graphic novel by Joss Whedon set in the Firefly-verse. It was also just meh, although there was this great page with Book and some call girls and a gun that made me laugh.
A Hat Full of Sky is technically the next in Pratchett's Discworld series. It's a j-fic instead of an adult novel, and is the second in the Tiffany Aching sub-series. Lots of fun. I like Tiffany, and I like the Nac Mac Feegle and I *adore* Rob Anybody and when they talk about "ship" - that go baaaa - so this was a good read. They're fast and a good kid's introduction to the Discworld setting.
Read Invisible by Pete Hautman, too, because he's the author who is coming to the library for visits during next year's Teen Read Week. I don't do real-life teen books very often, but this was pretty good. Very suspenseful, left you wondering what happened for a good deal of the story. I figured out the big twist fairly early but the writing and characterization was still good enough that I kept it up to the end. Also it's a very short book, so it's a super fast read. I think this might be a good reluctant reader pick, or a good boy book.
And I finally - FINALLY - finished Chosen by Ted Dekker. It seems like I have been working on this book for years. It's actually only been maybe four or five months, but man. It draaaagged. It's your standard Christian fantasy novel, first in a series of a million (or maybe just five, I don't know) and I'm not sure I can pick up the sequel. I'll admit that about two thirds of the way through the book the plot was actually somewhat interesting. The rest was...standard. Normal. Nothing big. And sometimes irritating. Like, for example, Dekker named one of the bad guys "Alucard." Yep. This Alucard is actually a bat, too, and I don't know if that makes it better or worse. But I was absolutely not impressed at all.