February Wrap-Up

Still unemployed, so still going strong on reading... well, except for the last week of course. Darn you, Scott! Here's what we've got:

Days spent reading: 20
Books read: 9
...in fiction: 7
...in non-fiction: 2
...in science fiction: 2
...in popular science: 2
...in fantasy: 3
...in young adult: 1

Series reads: Codex Alera

Favorite book: Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson (Review) 9.5/10

Challenges
Countdown Challenge: +4 books for 32/45
Chunkster Challenge: +2 books for 3/6
The Baker Street Challenge: +0 books for 0/3
My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge: +0 for 0/12
Support Your Local Library Challenge: +8 for 18/50

Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson (21 February — 28 February)

Hmm. I read this book because Scott read it last summer on his trip to China and he said it was pretty good. But. I started reading it and it was not. He claimed that it got better (insert Monty Python joke here), so I buckled down and kept going. It certainly did get better... after the first 300 pages. Of 571. And then some of those remaining pages were also bad. But not all of them.

The story itself is a long-winded affair about the colonization of Mars, at first by a small group of Russians, Americans, and various other nationalities, and then by the rest of Earth. At the very beginning you read about one of the first hundred killing another, and you're like, "Whoa! Crazy! Why did that happen?" and Robinson tells you IN EXCRUCIATING DETAIL, starting with the selection of the colonists several years earlier. There are also a lot of weird tangents about areology (the study of Mars) and psychology that are interesting to a point, but a) have nothing to do with the plot and b) read more like a journal article than a novel.

When the action picks up and the story goes back to the whole someone-getting-killed thing it's fairly well done, but other than that it's a snooze.

Rating: 4/10
(Chunkster Challenge)

Booking Through Thursday (26 February)

Still working on Red Mars... slowly.... If it doesn't get better soon, Scott is going to have a lot to answer for!

But! For your reading pleasure: Booking Through Thursday this week asks about what kind of books you collect.

• Hardcover? Or paperback?
• Illustrations? Or just text?
• First editions? Or you don’t care?
• Signed by the author? Or not?

I'm not much of a book collector, myself. I used to buy books all the time, as my recent discovery proves, but poor college-me was much more a fan of the library and that's stuck pretty hard. These days I only want to own books that I've already read and loved, but I still don't really want to pay for them, so it's mostly paperbacks that I get. I also like the fact that paperbacks are less bulky. However, I certainly appreciate the hardcovers that I receive, since they'll likely last longer and do look more imposing on my shelf. :)

Orbis Terrarum Challenge

I'm adding on another challenge for the year because it has an awesome name: Orbis Terrarum. The idea behind this one is to read ten books by ten authors from ten different countries. I have a few of these foreign books on my reading list already, so why not use this as an excuse to read them, right? :)

Ideas:
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak (Australia)
Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones (New Zealand)
The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Spain)
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia)
The Story of the Cannibal Woman, by Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe)
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco (Italy)
One More Year, by Sana Krasikov (Ukraine)
Let Me In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Sweden)
The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde (Wales)

If you have suggestions, send them my way! I'm trying to stay away from American authors because I certainly read enough of those, but other than that I'm pretty much open to anything.

Books read:
1. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak (Australia). (Review)
2. Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black (Ireland). (Review)
3. The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde (Wales). (Review)
4. La Bête Humaine, by Émile Zola (France). (Review)
5. The Book of Murder, by Guillermo Martínez (Argentina). (Review)
6. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?, by Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe). (Review)
7. Woman With Birthmark, by Håkan Nesser (Sweden). (Review)
8. The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Spain). (Review)
9. The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa (Japan). (Review)
10. The Case of the Missing Books, by Ian Sansom (Northern Ireland). (Review)

Musing Mondays (23 February)

I'm currently reading a chunkster of a book that is taking a long time to get going... Scott promises me that the ending is well worth it, but I keep getting distracted away from it by movies and the mindlessness of watching him play Fable II. Since I foresee a post on that book taking a while, I will entertain you in the meantime with this meme.

The Musing Mondays question this week is:

"How often do you visit the library? Do you have a scheduled library day/time, or do you go whenever? Do you go alone, or take people with you?"

I have been pretty constantly at the library since becoming unemployed (and, with luck, will find employment at a library in the near future!), checking out piles of books and DVDs. I'm lucky because my library system is ginormous, so I can get pretty much any book or movie or TV show I can think of as long as I'm willing to wait for it to arrive from the far reaches. The branch library I usually go to also has three-week checkout periods with four online renewals allowed, so I don't feel bad about stocking up on books!

Most things end up coming from holds I've placed (the library is like free Netflix!), so I end up going to the library at least once a week, usually twice, to pick them up and return everything I'm done with. I also usually browse the new releases and mystery sections before I get out of the library. If I bring Scott with me, we also end up looking through the movies, though the library's own selection is pretty limited.

Books galore!

Last night, I ended up at my parents' house to wait out a storm that kept me from going to band practice (snow + nearly bald tires = screw driving!). When I realized that the roads weren't going to be clear before this morning, I decided to venture into the attic and rescue the books that I had left behind when I went to college. My brother had boxed them up sometime during my first semester and I hadn't seen them since!

So I smushed myself into the crawlspace (I can just sit up in there without getting a nail in the head) and dug through the piles of boxes until I came to one labelled BOOKS. Also, another one labelled BOOKS. Oh my. I haven't counted them, but I'd estimate that I increased my book collection by about 50 books overnight!

Of course, there are quite a few that I find myself embarrassed to own (Sweep series, I'm looking at you!), so I'll be able to drop those at the library, perhaps. But I'd say that most of them are in the keep pile, and as I mentioned yesterday, my haphazardly organized shelves are pretty much full. This could get interesting.

Relatedly, the one book that I'd been looking for was the one I did not find. Did I perhaps lend you Life of Pi sometime in the last six years? If so, could you give it back? Thanks!

The Pluto Files, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson (18 February)

Yes, yes, I saw this guy on the Daily Show and wanted to read his book. Depressing, but true. Good work, Stewart!

The book is subtitled "The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet," which is pretty apt. I mean, I am in a Facebook group called "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet."

And it's interesting... I didn't know much about how Pluto obtained planet-hood, and I wasn't sure what caused the recent demotion, so it was nice to learn about that. And I mostly liked the fact that Tyson wrote about his personal fight against the Pluto proponents who felt he was slighting that poor ice ball. He includes e-mails from scientists and letters from children telling him how mean he's being to Pluto and why he should bring it back. It's a good time.

But I almost didn't finish it because of the first few chapters, where Tyson attempts to make a case that people like Pluto because it shares its name with Mickey Mouse's dog. Maybe, but he doesn't back up that opinion with very much fact at all, and it comes off sounding kind of childish. So does the fact that he takes credit for the mnemonic "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas." And the fact that he name-drops hanging out with Bill Nye the Science Guy (R) at a New Horizons launch party. Totally unnecessary.

Luckily, the rest of the book is well-reasoned and full of citations. It also includes a kid's drawing of Pluto, and that's just cute. :)

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2009, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Booking Through Thursday (19 February)

This week’s Booking Through Thursday question:

“How do you arrange your books on your shelves? Is it by author, by genre, or you just put it where it falls on?"

My shelves are quasi-sorted... when I moved in with Scott we consolidated our books onto my large bookshelf, so basically what happened was he got the top shelf, I the middle, and all of our large books take up the bottom. On my shelf, the books are mostly arranged by height, because I don't like bumpy lines, but also by author if there's a need. But then I started bringing books home from my parents' house (a project still not done!) and all of those ended up on shelves in our spare room. Those are pretty much sorted by books I've read and books that I haven't managed to crack open in the five years I've owned them. Maybe someday I'll actually organize those shelves.

There are also "to be sold on Amazon.com" books in the closet (Scott's) and cookbooks in the kitchen (mine). And library books in a canvas library bag next to the bed. And probably books hiding elsewhere that just haven't been unpacked yet!

Cursor's Fury, by Jim Butcher (17 February)

The third in the Codex Alera series.

Tavi gets into yet another scrape in this book! Surprised? With the First Lord still thinking about kicking the bucket maybe someday in the future, the high lords of Alera have been bickering about who will succeed his heirless-ness. The First Lord wants to just get the whole uprising thing out of the way, so he chooses one of the two front-runners to become his legal heir in an attempt to draw out the other, Kalare, and force him to fight early. It works far better than the First Lord intended, and soon there are a lot of dead people lying about.

Tavi is away from the fighting this time, serving as the First Lord's spy in the military even though there's no way Tavi can fight (no furies, remember!). Luckily, he's assigned to a prototype Legion made up of soldiers from all parts of Alera, a Legion that is not meant to see battle. Except... Kalare is not just fighting on his own. He's brought in a race called the Canim (dog-like creatures, naturally) to do some of the dirty work for him and it falls on the First Aleran to fight them, mostly under the unexpected command of Tavi.

Other stuff happens, too, of course, but I think the Canim battle is the most interesting part, especially with Tavi leading the way. The book also finally settles Tavi's lineage (which made me go, "Duh! Should have seen that one!") and shows you much of the First Lord's cunning, something that the characters are always just arguing about. Well done, all in all, except for this little tiny major thing that happens at the very end and makes me want to scream in frustration. Bah. We'll see where Butcher goes with that in the next book...

Rating: 7.5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow (14 February — 15 February)

A non-fiction book? What?? It's so true.

This one is a book about probability and how it affects our everyday lives and not just the lives of imaginary textbook people. It does a pretty good job, too. The Monty Hall problem shows up, as does a question about offspring: If you know a woman has two children and one of them is a girl, what is the likelihood that both of her children are girls? The answer is not intuitive but it is understandable. However, when the question changes to say that you know that one of the woman's children is a girl named Florida, suddenly the probability of a two-girl family changes. Buh? It's explained, but I still don't get it. At all. My brain hurts even thinking about it.

There's also some historical info about how the field of statistics came about and real-life applications of probability (including the O.J. Simpson trial and a crazy DNA-sample-approved mistaken imprisonment).

Mlodinow has a good writing style (which earned a 93 percent in his son's English class, hmmm) and the topic was interesting to me, but if you don't want to think too hard about math, I'd steer clear.

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn (13 February)

This is a "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary novel," or, in other words, a book written in letters (that you'd send in the mail) that has to be careful of its words as certain letters (of the alphabet) are removed from the book one by one.

The premise is that there is an island called Nollop that is beholden to words and tradition: its citizens send letters and read newspapers without help of the internet. It is named after Nevin Nollop, the alleged inventor of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." This sentence is placed prominently on a cenotaph (yeah, there's some vocabulary in this novel!) in town, which becomes a problem when the letter "z" falls off. Ella Minnow Pea, her cousin Tassie, their families, and the rest of Nollop are at first amused when the island council decrees that the letter thus shall no longer be used (or allowed to be used, or read, or spoken of), but grow increasingly apprehensive when "q" falls off, then "j," et cetera.

We find all of this out through letters between Ella, Tassie, et al, which become more limited as the letters fall. Scott's favorite line near the end reads something like, "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO."

Ella Minnow Pea is a book for word nerds but also a commentary on totalitarian societies. Excellent combination!

Rating: 8.5/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Coraline, by Neil Gaiman (12 February)

Like you haven't heard about this book already, what with the movie being out and all. The movie is actually the reason I picked up the book, much like Stardust before it, but this time I'd definitely say I prefer the book to the movie. And I rather liked the movie.

Coraline Jones is your average kid: curious, adventurous, and mostly ignored by her parents. On a rainy day when she'd like to be outside but is told to stay inside, her father suggests she get out of his hair and explore their new house. One of the things she finds is a bricked-off door separating her flat from another in the same house. A couple days later, bored and curious, Coraline unlocks the door to find not a wall of bricks, but a hallway that leads right back to her flat. Well, her other flat. In this flat she finds her other mother, who'd really like to be her only mother and also sew buttons into Coraline's eyes.

Et cetera. It's a short book, just go read it already!

Why I like the book better: It's a short book. The movie, at 100 minutes or so, was much longer than it needed to be, and filled that space with extra characters (what useful purpose did Wybie serve?) and and way too much build-up to the button problem, at the expense of its solution. The movie is still cute, though I wish I had seen it in 3-D!

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2002, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson (9 February — 11 February)

This book was awesome. The end.

Okay, okay. But really! Awesome! I was drawn in from the first line of the first chapter (not counting the prologue, because that was whatever): "Prince Raoden of Arelon awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he had been damned for all eternity."

Indeed. Raoden has been taken by the Shaod, which used to turn random people of Arelon into the supposed gods of Elantris, but which stopped doing that ten years previous and now turns its victims into perpetually decaying (but never dying) hulks of flesh. Raoden finds himself thrown into Elantris, now little more than a prison where gangs fight over the ritual food newcomers bring (everyone is very hungry, though they don't technically have to eat) and every injury, no matter how slight, lasts forever. Instead of becoming crazy like many Elantrians, however, Raoden chooses to make a better life for those inside ans see if he can't find out what caused the death of Elantris in the first place.

Meanwhile, Raoden's betrothed, Sarene, arrives in Arelon a week before her wedding, but only just in time for the prince's funeral. Oops. Sarene, whose political marriage is still valid due to a fancy clause in the contract, decides she's still going to do what she set out to do, which is keep Arelon and her home of Teod protected from those who would destroy them.

Also meanwhile, those who would destroy Arelon and Teod send out a priest called Hrathen to pave the way for the conquerors — those of the religion of Shu-Dereth. Hrathen is to convert the Arelenes within three months or the people will face death. His carefully laid plans start to unravel, though, with the influence of Sarene, Raoden, and a religious zealot called Dilaf who is out to destroy Elantris.

So there's a lot of story here. But it's all really well told and all of the pieces Sanderson gets you curious about tie together at the end quite spectacularly. There were a few things I found extraneous and rather deus ex, but I will forgive those because everything else was so, well, awesome.

Rating: 9.5/10
(Chunkster Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Pandemonium, by Daryl Gregory (8 February)

This morning it felt like forever since I picked up a book, even though I finished Children of God, you know, three days ago. I'd meant to start this book right away, but instead I went to the movies twice (Underworld was okay for not having seen the others; Coraline was awesome and I can't wait to pick up my hold copy from the library) and was otherwise generally lazy. As happens.

Anyway, this book was definitely exciting to me. I picked it up off the new releases shelf at the library because the title had the word "demon" highlighted within "pandemonium" and because the back promised me demonic possession and an appearance by a possessed Philip K. Dick. How do you go wrong with that?

Basically the book tackles the question, what if demons calling themselves The Truth and The Painter and The Captain and several other great stock-character names decided to inhabit people's bodies at random for kicks and giggles? And, also, what if one of those possessed people realized he never got un-possessed and tried to figure out how to get rid of The Hellion inside him?

I liked it. Pandemonium certainly isn't literary, but it's excellent book candy and a quick read. The plot and style remind me of Christopher Moore (whose books I should really get back to reading, now that I think about it), and that's a compliment.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell (2 February — 5 February)

Children of God is the follow-up to Russell's The Sparrow, one of my favorite books of last year and all time. It picks up shortly after the last book left off, with Emilio Sandoz still recovering from what he believes God did to him and trying to reconcile that with his life on Earth, where forty years passed by while he was gone.

The Society of Jesuits is set on sending a second mission to Rakhat to try again, as it were, and attempt to open up trade agreements with the Jana'ata that will be mutually beneficial. The Father General wants Emilio to return to the planet, but Emilio, understandably, is only willing to train people to go in his stead. The Father General, ever wily, figures out some way to get Emilio on that ship.

Meanwhile, back on Rakhat, we find out that Emilio wasn't the last human left on the planet after all, and also that that human seems to have helped engineer a Runa revolution, changing Runa and Juna'ata society for the better, but also for the worse.

The book is told in the back-and-forth style of The Sparrow, but I don't think it worked as well as in the first novel. It felt a little too jarring to keep zooming between the planets and their timeframes that didn't line up, and then also to go back and forth between the on-planet present and the on-planet future looking back. But it was still a good book, probably more so if you've read the first one.

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)