Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, by Elizabeth Little

Things I love: words. Words and I are very good friends, if you know what I mean, which is that I really like learning about them. Where they came from, what they do, how funny they can be. See: my love of a children's book called Word Snoop. And this book is better, because it is for adults and therefore includes swear words. I am a big fan of a well-placed swear word, and Little clearly has practice in this.

I thought this book was going to be about something like the vagaries of translation, because of the title, which references a terrible transliteration of the words "Coca-Cola" into Mandarin. But actually, that's just a bit that's in the conclusion, and the rest of the book is EVEN BETTER, because it talks about verbs and modifiers and nouns and how nouns are pretty set in their ways in English, but how you have to go and decline them in other languages, and how some languages have a really fun time pluralizing nouns, and how the Bantu language family isn't content with just two or three noun classes (aka genders), no, no, how about 16? Or 22? I kind of want to die just thinking about it.

And Little feels that pain, and loves it! About noun class, she writes, "Grammatical gender often appears to be based on just the right combination of reason and utterly arbitrary dart-throwing monkey logic to ensure maximum confusion," which is SO TRUE, at least with what I remember of my French.

Little also throws in all these little sidebars of awesomeness, which highlight things that are really neat about various languages. So in a sidebar about noun tense, for instance, Little talks about how the Guaraní language adds endings to verbs to signify tense. There's a past-tense marker and a future-tense marker, which is cool, but EVEN COOLER is that you can combine them. Little's example uses presidents, so with this combination of endings you can get a word for Al Gore: mburuvicharangue, or "what we thought was going to be a future president but then turned out not to be." How cool is that?

I will grant that this might not be that cool to you — my husband certainly gave me funny looks about that last example and others that I shared with him. But if you've ever suffered through a conjugation in your life, you will probably find something to like in here.

Recommendation: An absolute must for lovers of words or languages or humorous anecdotes.

Rating: 10/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
books i done read

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

So... remember when I read Catching Fire and I thought it was pretty crappy but I was willing to let the third book decide my feelings and I said please for the love of goodness count me out of the love story?

Well. I have now read the third book. And I am just not pleased.

I will grant that it is, like the others, a quick, engaging read. I really wanted to know what was going to happen to these kids, even if I didn't care about the kids themselves so much. And there's definitely a lot more of the fun action-y goodness of the first novel than there was in the second. So these are good things.

But, I was amazed at how much I didn't care about the characters. I cared about the situations they were in, sure, but you could have swapped a character here and there and I would have cared about those situations the same amount. And even then, sometimes a situation would get me all interested and then it would be incredibly anticlimactic and I felt a little cheated. Specifically, there is a point when one character gives some very explicit instructions to another character, which would have been very interesting if said instructions had been followed, but they were not, and yet nothing comes of it. Nowhere do we find out why the instructions might have been given; nowhere do we find out even why they weren't followed. Nothing. I felt like I did with those darn spiders from The Name of the Wind, only repeated several times in a much shorter book.

Luckily, that love story business that I hated so darn much takes a bit of a vacation in this book — there's some appropriate worrying at the beginning, but then it tapers off — except that luckily turns into "annoyingly" because there is a really stupid reason that the love story falls apart. But then, definitely annoyingly, the love story comes back at the end, albeit in a much more depressing form.

And then there is an epilogue, and you know how I feel about epilogues (if you don't: I despise them). Though I will admit that this is one of the more unexpected epilogues of those that I have read, and therefore I have a little bit of respect for it. A little.

All in all, book and series? Meh.

Recommendation: Read this if you've read the other two. If you've only read the first, just live with that, you'll be happier. If you've not read any, well, you should of course start with the first one. If you want to. I am very ambivalent about this series.

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

See also:
Chrisbookarama
At Home With Books
Persnickety Snark
Jules' Book Reviews
books i done read
...and all of their respective brothers.

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Musing Mondays — Book Club Picks

Today's Musing Mondays question is... "If your book group asked you to bring two (2) suggestions for group reads to your next meeting, what two books would you suggest? Why?"

What an excellent question! There have been rather a few things that I have read lately where I've been like, "Darn it! I should have waited and suggested this for my book club!" so this gives me a chance to recommend them to my delightful book club friends anyway. But just two? Let me think...

Okay, well, first is definitely Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, not just because it's a fantabulous book. But mostly because of that. But also because I think there's a lot to discuss — there's the fact that it's Victorian-inspired, which invites comparisons galore, and there are the plot twists, which are well set up and well executed and can start a discussion or five on morals and ethics and getting what you've got coming and all sorts of other things.

The second... hmm. I'll go with The Black Minutes, by Martín Solares, because it's a book that really needs to be discussed. There's so much going on in that book that you can't possibly catch it all in one reading. It's also good for a book club because it's one of them foreign novels that people (including myself) don't tend to read, so you get to broaden the horizons of several readers all in one go!

But neither of these will be my next book club pick... unless I can't come up with something I haven't read by the time it's my turn to choose. :)

Read-a-thon!!

So I signed up for this 24-hour read-a-thon thing again, because it is AWESOME and I am probably INSANE. On October 9, I will be waking up early, grabbing a giant bowl of Cheerios, and settling into one of the many comfy chairs in my house for some super-awesome reading fun times to begin at 8am EDT (sidenote: Why on earth do we have Daylight Savings for nearly eight whole months? We are a strange nation) and end 24 hours later, though I died after just 20 hours last year and will probably do the same this year!

What I need from you lovelies is recommendations for books! The Read-a-thon is really not the time for 700-page novels or things that are difficult to read; it is for the reading of silly books and short books and books that I might not read if I had anything better to do.

Last year I ended up with a library-based mystery, three kids books, and a super-awesome end-of-the-world YA novel. Oh, and a second round of a delightful music-based audiobook.

Can I do better this year? I hope so! What have you got for me?

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

Another frame story! This is becoming a theme, it seems...

And darn this frame story all to heck. I picked up this book not knowing too much about it except that a) I keep seeing people mentioning it as a pretty awesome book and b) it was published in 2007 and therefore necessary for my Countdown Challenge. So when it started in all epic fantasy with its innkeeper with a shady past and creepy spider things that are not demons but are probably something more terrifying, I was like, "All right. This will be fun." AND THEN YOU NEVER FIND OUT ANYTHING MORE ABOUT THE SPIDERS.

Ahem.

One of my pet peeves in epic fantasy is this conceit of showing the reader a gun in Act I and then waiting until act, like, XVII to have it go off. This is only meant to be a three-book series, so I suppose there won't be that much waiting, but UGH.

Anyway, after the whole spiders thing happens, it turns out that one of the characters is some famous scribe who writes down the lives of other famous people, and also that the innkeeper with the shady past is a formerly Very Famous Person now languishing in Do You Remember That Guy land. After the scribe works some psychological magic on the innkeeper, the innkeeper is like, "Fine. I will tell you my story. It will take three days. Hope you don't have carpal tunnel."

This book is Day One of the story-telling, and here the story veers away from Epic Fantasy and settles into a more Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire land, with the long rambling stories that don't really have anything driving them (see: Quidditch World Cup). It is also similar in that most of Kvothe's story here takes place at an Academy, where Kvothe is like the smartest kid there, but waaay too cocky, and also very poor, and he's like Hermione and Harry and Ron all rolled into one, with even a vicious Draco to play against.

But... I liked the Harry Potter book. For all the long rambling quidditch and the ridiculous school antics, I at least knew that something was going to happen, and the things that happen generally lead toward that something. The Name of the Wind is just a set of stories about Kvothe's life, from being a gypsy kid to going to the Academy to trying to track down the thing what killed his parents. But there's never anything really driving the action, and for all I hoped that there would be spiders in the end, there were not. I'm sure that this is all building up toward something in the second and third books, but I'm the kind of reader who has to have at least some little morsel now, if you're going to keep me interested for another couple of 700-page books. And I don't feel like I got that.

Recommendation: Don't go into this expecting classic epic fantasy, but read this if you have the patience for that sort of story that's going to ramble on for a few books.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge, Chunkster Challenge)

See also:
books i done read
medieval bookworm
reading is my superpower

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Fine, fine.

Remember how I said that my new library was not spoiling me? It's getting serious, guys.

I had to run over to the library the other day to pay a 20-cent fine. Was it because I am afraid of fines or am used to not having any? Ha! I'm pretty sure I still have fines at two libraries in Ohio. (Shhh, don't tell!) But I had to pay this fine, because the library here blocks your card if you have any fines at all, which means no checking books out, no putting holds on anything, and no renewing books. Which of course means that there's no way to stop your fine from accruing until you go in and return the book, at which point you need to pay the fine anyway because you can't do anything else until you do!

When I talked to someone on the phone about this before dashing over to pay my 20 cents, he said that they're going to change this soon. THANK GOODNESS.

Interview with the Vampire

This movie had been in our Netflix instant queue for a while, so when Scott and I had our movie day with Halloween and The Core (which is only scary in how terrible it is), we threw in this vampire love-fest as well.

I haven't read Interview with the Vampire. I'm sure that someone has and will tell me that the book is way better than the movie, but I certainly enjoyed the movie itself. Though it could have used more Christian Slater. And less gross blood everywhere, but I'm sure that was half the point.

The story, as far as I can tell, is that this journalist, Slater, stumbles upon a vampire, Brad Pitt, who decides to tell the journalist his life story. The story is not very pretty — Pitt has a crappy life and for whatever reason is picked by the vampire Tom Cruise to become a vampire himself, which is even crappier than being a vampire usually is, because there just aren't that many around. Pitt realizes that he's made a pretty bad life decision, and tries to be as un-vampire-like as possible, but eventually he succumbs and does, like, the worst thing ever in nomming on the neck of a sweet little Kirsten Dunst, who Tom Cruise then turns into a vampire for shiggles. And then even more bad stuff happens.

I guess my one complaint about the movie is that I keep referring to the characters by the actors' names... I remember that Cruise was Lestat, and Pitt was Louie or Louis or something, but I can't for the life of me remember what Dunst's character's name was (a quick trip to Wikipedia tells me it was Claudia). I don't know if it's just the power of a famous name or a lack of caring about the characters. I think it's probably the latter. But the story is good, and interesting to someone whose experience with vampires is pretty much limited to loving Buffy and rolling her eyes through the first Twilight book. So I think it's an overall good time.

Recommendation: Watch this if you like any of the aforementioned actors, or Antonio Banderas, who is also in this movie. Or if you are interested in what the "real" life of a vampire might be like. Or if you really like the look of blood dripping down everyone's chin. Ew.

Rating: 7/10
(RIP Challenge)

Halloween

Scott and I were talking the other day about how neither of us has seen any of the classic scary films, though we both know the important parts from seeing zillions of references in other movies and on television. With RIP going and Hallowe'en coming up, I thought we should get a start on actually watching these films... and when we found Halloween classic on display at the library, it seemed like fate!

Only... I think maybe I didn't understand this movie. On the back, all the quotes were like, "Scary! Terrifying! Superb!" and when I was watching I was thinking, "Boring! Why do I care? More STABBY!"

I am clearly a jaded, cynical member of the Millenials. But this movie was absolutely not scary, and not even really that creepy. It did look good, though.

If you're like me and thought that this movie had maybe Freddy Krueger or Jason in it (I seriously have not seen ANY of these movies), let me tell you what this one's about. This is the Michael Myers movie, in which our antagonist starts off by stabbing his sister to death. When he's a six-year-old. Then, fifteen years later (when he's apparently magically twenty-three), he busts out of the clearly-not-very-secure mental place he's been hanging out in and goes back to his hometown for unclear reasons and decides to kill some babysitters, again for unclear reasons. I mean, I know he's a crazy person. But no reason other than that.

Most of the movie is not about the killing and the stabby, though... there's a lot of watching Jamie Lee Curtis look like she does today but act like a teenager, some pretty terrible acting, a girl getting stuck in a detached laundry room's window, and a weirdo psychologist who is looking for Myers anywhere but where he actually is.

Maybe I needed to be alive in '78 to get this movie. Or maybe I needed to watch it in '78. Is this like my beloved children's books that seem so amazing and novel at the time, but now I've read more and better? And those first books, while still holding a place in my heart, are not nearly as good as I remember them being? I would believe that.

Recommendation: Watch this at midnight. With the lights all off. Maybe with a cat that'll jump on you when you're least expecting it. Or watch it with an eye to the interesting cinematography. Or watch it just so you can realize that, ohhhhhhhh, that's where that music comes from!

Rating: 5/10
(RIP Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Musing Mondays — Characters

Today's Musing Mondays question is... "What makes you love / hate a character in a book?"

I imagine we're talking about characters we're supposed to like — what makes them good characters or awful characters we'd like to chuck out a window along with their books.

So in that case... my favorite characters are the ones that have a nice balance of wittiness, self-awareness, self-confidence, and knowledge. If they have a little more of one, or a little less of another, that's cool. But if they have too much or too little... that's when I dislike them. I am not a fan of the character that's always spouting off one-liners, unless they are self-aware enough to realize how silly they are. But once they get so self-aware that they are basically psychoanalyzing themselves on a regular basis? Count me out.

The Black Minutes, by Martín Solares

I saw this book hanging out in the "new mysteries" section of my library, and I was completely drawn in by the cover. And then I skimmed through the jacket flap and discovered that the author is from Mexico and said, "Hey! Orbis Terrarum book! Excellent!" So I grabbed it.

What a tough book. It starts off with a three-page cast of characters, many of whom have not just a given name but also a nickname (or two). I was glad for these pages later in the novel when I was like, "Who are these people? Is this guy that guy from before? No? Who the heck is he?"

It's also tough because the mystery at the beginning, which is all interesting and stuff, is actually a frame story for a mystery from twenty years earlier which takes up most of the book. So then when it's time to get back to the present, you get a bit of whiplash. The novel is broken up into three "books" to delineate these times, but it's still a little confusing.

And, for even more fun, the book switches from third person to first person (with different first people) on a regular basis, and there are a couple of weird dream-sequence-type things that I'm not sure about. I'm not up on the literature from Mexico, so maybe this is a thing? Or maybe it's just Solares' thing. I don't know.

But, regardless, the story — especially the 20-years-ago mystery — was incredibly interesting and engaging. It reminded me of Tana French's novels in that the mystery is good, but the novel is about so much more than that. In Solares' case, his novel is really about corruption in the Mexican government and police and everywhere, really, and how a man trying to stay uncorrupted can deal with all of that and even, later, how a corrupt man can deal with all of that. Solares does a great job of showing how rampant corruption is, and today, a few days after finishing the book, I'm still feeling a little paranoid. I think that's a sign of an excellent storyteller.

Recommendation: Check this out if you like your mysteries with a little more literary slant, like Tana French's, and have some time to spend reading this through slowly. This is not a novel you'll get through in a day.

Rating: 8/10
(RIP Challenge, Orbis Terrarum Challenge: Mexico, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

BBAW — Forgotten Treasure

Today's Book Blogger Appreciation Week topic is...

Thursday—Forgotten Treasure
Sure we’ve all read about Freedom and Mockingjay but we likely have a book we wish would get more attention by book bloggers, whether it’s a forgotten classic or under marketed contemporary fiction. This is your chance to tell the community why they should consider reading this book!

I don't know how many times I have answered questions like this with the exact same book, but I think it's a lot, and still I haven't heard much about it in the blogging world! I think it's because it's such an odd book — I have also answered many questions on what makes me love a novel with answers like plot and character, but this book isn't really about either. It's about the writing, which is brilliant and wonderful and immensely quotable.

The book is called The Manual of Detection, and it's a sort of homage to those gritty noir detective stories, one that doesn't take itself terribly seriously. The author throws in all of the classic noir tropes, but adds to them a bit of whimsical fantasy, in which the main villian once stole the entire day of November twelfth, with everyone waking up on Wednesday wondering where the heck Tuesday went. If you like the Thursday Next series, the attitude of this book is rather like that and I think you will find it amusing. But it's really the writing that I love — click that link above for one of my favorite passages from the whole thing, which is a small treatise on how "the world is unkind to the shoeless and frolicsome."

Oooh, and this book would be perfect for the RIP Challenge. Perhaps I will go read it again!

Murder on the Orient Express — The Movie

After reading Murder on the Orient Express, I decided that I needed to watch the movie again, mostly because I realized that I hadn't actually finished watching it the first time. I also decided to watch it to kick off the Peril on the Screen. Birds! Stones! Trains stuck in snowdrifts!

So, the movie... let me start by saying that I absolutely hated Poirot in the movie. I dislike his voice, his mannerisms, his moustache, and his intense shoutiness toward all of the suspects. I heard no shouting in the book.

And that brings me to my other dislike of the film — that the writers/directors/whoever changed facts and situations seemingly on a whim. There was a boat, for one, and an introduction of all the characters before they got on the train, and all of the compartment numbers were different, and different people discovered things, and some things weren't discovered at all, and even the first solution at the end is oddly different. Aaaand, my dearest Michael York's character went from being a fairly decent fellow to a kind of heartless fellow, when you look at it, and I don't like it when Michael York is abused like that. Ahem. I've berated the Harry Potter movies for being impossible to follow without having read the books; here I was not well able to follow the movie having finished the book less than twenty-four hours previous!

I'm trying to think of things I liked about the film, but the story is really it, and you read about that yesterday (at least, I hope you did!).

Recommendation: Just read the book! Or, watch just the parts with Michael York in them — you'll only watch like ten minutes of the film, but they will be a very nice ten minutes.

Rating: 5/10
(RIP Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

BBAW — Unexpected Treasure

Today's Book Blogger Appreciation Week Topic is...

Wednesday—Unexpected Treasure
We invite you to share with us a book or genre you tried due to the influence of another blogger. What made you cave in to try something new and what was the experience like?

A good question! I have been far more open to trying new things since joining the book blogging community, as I get a chance to a) hear about more books in general and b) hear people whose opinions I trust talk about books they love that I've never heard of.

Most recently, I read Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, without ever actually reading a review of the book. But I kept reading reviews of other books in which people would compare them to Fingersmith — always with Fingersmith coming out the winner, if only by a hair. So I was like, "Well. I had better go read Fingersmith." And I did and I absolutely loved it and I totally have Waters' The Little Stranger sitting on my shelf ready for the RIP Challenge.

And I just went to check out my ratings of other books to see if there was ever a blogger-recommended book that I just hated, and there is not! My Google Reader is filled with trusted reviewers, apparently... perhaps I should try a few more of those books that everyone's reading.

Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

Before we even get into the story here, let me tell you that I. Hate. Acid paper. My copy of this book is the 1974 movie tie-in edition, and although I thought they were done with this terrible paper by then, they were not. So now my copy of Murder on the Orient Express is technically two half-copies of Murder on the Orient Express. Sigh. I suppose that it could have been worse, that I could have lost a page without noticing and be missing 1 percent of the book — possibly an important 1 percent!

But there were no missing pages, and every page was delightfully intriguing. This book had been an option in a mystery novels class I took in undergrad, so though I read a different book from the list (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, another Christie novel with a crazy ending) I knew how this one ended. Even still, I was drawn in to the story and the odd detecting skills of M. Poirot.

The story starts off as a classic locked-room problem — a Mr. Ratchett is found dead in his compartment on the Orient Express train. The chain is in place on his side of the door, and the communicating door between his compartment and the woman's next door is also locked. His cause of death is twelve stab wounds to the chest, of varying levels of severity. The doctor on board the train immediately presumes a crime of passion perpetrated by a woman, but the pipe cleaner left behind at the scene says perhaps a man. But the handkerchief also left behind says a woman. And while most of the stab wounds say right-handed person, one definitely says left-handed person. And, everyone on the train has an alibi for the presumed time of death. Poirot gets dragged into solving this impossible problem, and of course he does, because that's sort of his job.

I greatly enjoyed finally reading this novel, which is similar to a Sherlock Holmes story but with better showing of clues to the reader. I felt like I could have solved this case myself even without knowing the final result, and I liked watching Poirot come to his realizations mostly along with me (he is a bit smarter than I, unfortunately). I also absolutely love the ending; not the solution bit, but the bit right after that.

Rating: 7/10
(RIP Challenge)

See also:
an adventure in reading

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

BBAW — New Treasure

This is my favorite part of Book Blogger Appreciation Week... the interview swap! Today I am introducing you to Robin, of My Two Blessings. She was kind enough to answer some questions for me about her hectic life, and I talked with her about library science and my undying love of Jasper Fforde, which you can read over at her site! Without further ado...

1) I note that your blog started off with much less talk about books... when and why did you decide to add more books to your posts and/or life?
I've always been a reader, but when I started my blog didn't know anything about book bloggers. It was home school bloggers that influenced me to start blogging. I have to give the credit to Katrina from Callapidder's Days for getting me started blogging about books. Up until that point I never even thought of blogging about what I was reading. I heard through some home school bloggers about the Fall Reading Challenge 2007 and decided to join in. Through the challenge, I discovered the beautiful world of book bloggers.

2. In your most recent posts, I see a couple of books I've read and enjoyed, but mostly books I have never even heard of. How do you hear about the books you read?
I've discovered quite a few books through the book and author blogs. Mental Multivitamin was a big influence and got me started thinking outside my book box and trying authors I normally wouldn't have read. And it just sort of snowballed from there. Then, I started following some of my favorite authors who post on group blogs such as Murderati and started checking out some of the other authors books. I have a lot of my favorites that I read such as J.D. Robb aka Nora Roberts, Stuart Woods, Ted Dekker, Charles De Lint, Patricia Briggs, no matter what they write.

3. What genres draw you in?
I'm a pretty eclectic reader but the main genres that pull me in are thrillers and suspense, paranormal, fantasy and science fiction and romance.

4. What components of a book (dialogue, writing style, font face, whatever) are important regardless of genre?
The writing style is important to me. I prefer 3rd person point of view but am branching out a bit and discovered there are a few writer who do 1st person point of view really well. The writing really has to pull me in from the very beginning. I'm a very visual person so if I can't visualize the story, I lose interest.

5. Are your son and husband readers, too? Do they share your tastes (or your tastes as a kid) in books?
My husband loves to read, except he only reads non fiction and loves war and spy stories. I usually pick him up a couple books whenever I'm at the bookstore. I'm working on my son. He has a room full of books but seems to gravitate to graphic novels and is into bionicles right now. He finally expressed an interest in Harry Potter, so we are reading the first novel together.

6. How easy is it for you to find time to read as a homeschooling parent and student yourself?
Schedules! We've got a good routine down for lessons and my studies. After all there are 16 hours in the day when I'm not sleeping. It's easy to find time to read when you love it. I read while eating breakfast, during lunch, and in the evening when James has gone to bed. I don't watch much tv so that isn't an issue.

7. In fact, how easy is it for you to find time to eat and sleep?
LOL! I need my sleep. If I don't get my 8 hours a night, I'm a very grumpy mom.

8. What is your favorite activity to do outside of reading?
Writing!

9. What is the one book you would least like to be stuck with on a desert island?
The least? Hmmm! Does Captain Underpants counts as a book?

10. What is your favorite post that you have written?
Yikes, that's a hard question, since I've written over 900 in the past 3 years. I think it would have to be a personal one - How our Life Together Began. Every time I read or think about it, it reminds me of how blessed our lives have been. Still gives me goose bumps to this day.

Musing Mondays — The Enablers

Today's Musing Mondays question is... "Where do you buy / get most of your books?"

I've mentioned probably a billion times that I don't buy many books, because I will only buy those that I've read and loved or that I've read and want to push to other people. But when I do buy books, I try to support the little guys. Sure, if I have a gift cert or something, I'll go to Borders or Barnes and Noble, because I like nothing better than free, but if I'm planning on spending my own money I definitely go indie.

I just recently moved 900 miles, so I'm still figuring out my way around the bookstores here in Jacksonville, but I have discovered two delightful shops already — Black Sheep Books, which is fairly close to my apartment, and Chamblin's Uptown, which is farther away downtown but comes with food! I've only made a book purchase at Black Sheep, but I can already tell it's going to be my new best friend for used book happiness, especially since the book I got there looked practically new for half the price. Love it.

BBAW — First Treasure

Hello, Book Blogger Appreciation Week! Today's topic is about spreading the love to other bloggers, or:

Monday—First Treasure
We invite you to share with us about a great new book blog you’ve discovered since BBAW last year! If you are new to BBAW or book blogging, share with us the very first book blog you discovered. Tell us why this blog rocks your socks off and why you keep going back for more.

Yes, that.

Today, I shall share with you a blog whose writer I met through the wonders of library school! I'm done, but she's still there, reading up a storm and preparing to become the coolest teen librarian this side of, um, really cool teen librarians. (I am not going to be a teen librarian, can you tell?) This awesome chick is Melissa, aka bibliochic, and she is a hoot and a half. She reads all the cool YA — dystopias, love stories, historical novels — but also books for very small people and full-sized people as well. She and I have fairly similar tastes outside of those icky love stories, so when she puts up a review I almost always add that book to my list. You should definitely go check her out, tell her I sent you, and ask her how the FRBR is going. She'll know what you mean. :)

Book Blogger Appreciation Week!

I think I forgot to mention before that I am participating in Book Blogger Appreciation Week again this year... oops! Consider it mentioned. I didn't put myself up for any awards or anything, but I will be participating in the daily blog topics, which are all about treasure! Yarr.

Tune in on Monday for the first topic, in which I will gush about a blog or two that I enjoy. It could be interesting!

The House of Tomorrow, by Peter Bognanni

"This is a point. It has no dimensions. It has no length, breadth, depth at all."
Jared listened without complaint.
"I don't know about you," I said, "But I feel very similar to a point lately."
"Fuckin' A," he said.

That's a quote from about three-quarters of the way through this book, and I'd say it's a pretty apt summary of the whole thing. The House of Tomorrow has a lot going on in it — you've got a kid living in a geodesic dome with a grandmother obsessed with R. Buckminster Fuller, a kid living with a secondhand heart trying to make a punk rock band as good as the Ramones or the Misfits while his mother hopes that giving her life to the church will help her deal with everything, and you've got what happens when these two kids meet, which is as odd and comical as you'd expect. But what the book is about, as far as I can tell, is how hard it is to define yourself when everyone around you is trying to make that definition for you. Which is what we humans deal with pretty much every second of every day, but Sebastian and Jared deal with it in a much more entertaining fashion.

An interesting thing about this book is that it reads like YA — teen protagonists, coming of age, overprotective parents, etc. etc. But I definitely got this book from the adult section, which I think is spectacular because there are so many books that get relegated to the YA section that need to be read by pretty much everyone, and this would be one of them. I would really like to know how Bognanni managed to get this marketed to adults.

I think what I really loved about this book was the writing of Sebastian, the kid from the geodesic dome. I have read so many books and seen so many movies where a similar character is presented as completely alien and mockable, but Sebastian was so real — sure, he has a weird way of talking, but the thoughts in his brain aren't any different from Jared's, and you can see that.

At times I felt that the plot was getting a little ridiculous — Jared decides that the band is going to play at the church youth group talent show, and somehow a full-scale viral marketing campaign gets hatched, including convincing a record store clerk that the band is the new cool indie thing that he should totally have heard of were he not living under a rock, which seemed a bit unrealistic to me. But then I remembered that I was totally okay with Sebastian living in a geodesic dome and I thought maybe I should cut the band a break. If you're prepared to suspend your disbelief just a little bit, I think you'll better appreciate the fun of the novel.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
The Book Lady's Blog
Devourer of Books

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters

Fingersmith is an odd sort of book. It is really spectacularly long (500-ish pages, which is a lot to me), and for long stretches there isn't much in the way of action, and there's not a ton of character development or anything, but I'm still kind of in love with it.

This is probably because it is Victorian-inspired and therefore a little ridiculous and also crazy. The book is split into three parts, and the first is fairly boring and took me a long time to get through. But basically there are some thief-types, and one of them convinces another, called Sue, to do a sweet little undercover gig that'll earn Sue a bazillionty twelve dollars (I think that's the exchange rate on 3000 pounds circa 1900, yes?), and she goes to do it. Yay. But all the while, Sue is like, "I did this and this and this other thing, and if only I had known then what I know now!" and I was like, tell me more, but she doesn't, and then at the end of the first part it's made relatively clear and I was like, "Damn."

Seriously. An excellent finish... and then there's more! Two whole more parts! And there are more crazy twists and turns and scandal and babies and knives (not together) and madhouses and escapes and if this run-on sentence isn't intriguing you in the least bit, you're probably not going to like the book.

But I did very much like it, and in fact while looking for the image for this post I found out that there is a BBC adaptation of this book and I immediately added it to my Netflix queue. I am very interested to see how some of the scenes in this book get adapted to the screen, and how much of the first part gets cut in favor of scandal and pretty dresses.

Rating: 9/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge, Chunkster Challenge)

See also:
The Written World
Trish's Reading Nook
things mean a lot

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Death Note Vol. 4, by Tsugumi Ohba

Not much to say here... this series is really addictive and also confusing beyond belief. In this book we have shenanigans with the second Kira, who has the ability to learn anyone's name just by looking at that person (thus being able to kill said person more easily than Light can), more "I have to say this or L will suspect that I'm Kira, but also saying it might make him think I'm Kira too so, um, crap," and then a ridiculous ending that I for one did not see coming and which can only make the books after this even more confusing. AND it was less boring and repetetive than the last one. Good work, everyone!

Rating: 7/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Rhinoa's Ramblings

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Foiled, by Jane Yolen

I've started to really like these graphic novels... they're often cute and quick and brimming with delightfulness and pretty pictures.

This book definitely had the pretty pictures, but I'm not really sure where Yolen was going with the story.

The plot, as far as I can tell: Aliera is a high-school outcast and a top-notch fencer. Her mother has bought her a new weapon from a tag sale, and it's pretty awesome except for the giant ruby-looking thing on its handle. Also, there's a new and also very hott kid in school, who is Aliera's new lab partner, and Aliera is all tongue-tied around him. He's weird, but cute, and the crushing is on. And then he asks Aliera on a date and some WEIRD stuff happens. Like, super-weird. Like, I would have read an entire book about the weird stuff and been delighted, but it doesn't fit with the beginning of the book at all.

Sigh. It's really pretty! And I can sort of draw some meaning from the story, like that people aren't always what they seem. But I'm still confused about this book. Maybe someone can explain it to me?

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Stuff As Dreams Are Made On...

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Booking Through Thursday — Movies to books?

Today's Booking Through Thursday asks, "Even though it’s usually a mistake (grin) … do movies made out of books make you want to read the original?"

They do! They really do. I commented on yesterday's RIP Challenge post that I've seen the movie version of two of the books on my list, which is part of why I want to read the books. I did the watching first, then reading thing also with Minority Report, Stardust, and The Princess Bride, in recent memory, and that all turned out well for me.

And sometimes I see a movie coming out that I am not that interested in seeing or am too poor to see, but am intrigued enough to read the book... I have the first Scott Pilgrim book on hold at the library for this reason, and I read Shutter Island for it, too. It's sort of nice to know that someone liked a book enough to make a movie of it, and you get to have a little preview of what the book is going to be about, too! Well, most of the time. :)

RIP Challenge V

Oooh, the RIP Challenge! This challenge holds a special place in my heart, as my first challenge ever, and is also super fun because I get to read scary things in time for Hallowe'en. Wonderful!

As Carl writes... "There are two simple goals for the R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril V Challenge:

1. Have fun reading.
2. Share that fun with others."

Cannot go wrong!

I will again be going with Peril the First, which involves reading four books of the mystery/suspense/thriller/dark fantasy/gothic/horror/supernatural variety... so limiting, right? I may also try the Peril on the Screen, which means watching creepy movies, but I'm way out of the loop on those so I'll need your advice!

For this year, I'll start with these books in my pool, unless you have others to tempt me with?

Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Shining, by Stephen King
Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

Books:

1. Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie (Review)
2. The Black Minutes, by Martín Solares (Review)
3. The Dead-Tossed Waves, by Carrie Ryan (Review)
4. The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain (Review)
5. Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain (Review)
6. The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (Review)

Movies:
1. Murder on the Orient Express (Review)
2. Halloween (Review)
3. Interview with the Vampire (Review)
4. Psycho