The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells

Things I knew about this book going in:
1) I should have read it a long time ago.
2) Time travel.
3) Something about a morlock.

Strangely, there's not actually much more to the story than that! There is, obviously, a time machine, and a Time Traveller, as he is called. And it's a frame story, so there's a narrator who has dinner with the Time Traveller and hears his stories and then recounts them to us, which is always a good time. And so through our narrator we learn about how time travel theoretically works (just moving really really fast through time, basically) and then later how the Time Traveller is now called Late for Dinner and also managed to travel to the year 802701. That is a big number, dudes.

In the future there are some perfect-ish people who are also totes lazy and boring, and also some terrifying people-ish creatures, the aforementioned Morlocks, who are industrious enough to steal Mr. for Dinner's time machine. Social commentary ensues, Mr. for Dinner gets his time machine back, he goes home, no one believes him, and then he and his machine disappear. The end!

I'm sure that when this book came out in 1895, people were like, holy moly this Herbert fellow is a genius and also possibly insane! But unfortunately here in 2011, I've read one or two books that involve time travel and so I already had that part down and the rest of the book had to carry itself, which it didn't do terribly well. So, as a novella experience, not so great.

But I totally enjoyed the book on its historical merits of introducing time travel (I mean, travelling really fast through time is a genius idea) and the intriguing future that Wells devises. It's not exactly a dystopian future, since there's no real sense of utopia, but it's obviously not the future to which Victorian gentlemen aspired and those Morlocks are pretty creepy. I also like the Time Traveller's nods toward literary convention — he mentions once that in a novel the author could tell you all the intricacies of society, but he was a little too busy experiencing the world, thanks, and while sometimes that can be really annoying, Wells does it just fine.

My only problem with the story is that I'm pretty sure that the Time Traveller should have gotten his time machine stuck somewhere along his travels, considering his explanation of how it works, but I suppose I can forgive Mr. Wells, just this once.

Recommendation: For people who like to know where their contemporary literature came from, also future time travellers (or past time travellers?).

Rating: 7/10

The Postmortal, by Drew Magary

Dudes. Dudes. How did you let me not read this for so long? I picked it up because a) it has to go back to its library home soon and b) I hadn't read anything in a week and it looked like it would go quickly. You should pick this book up because it turns out to be pretty fantastic!

I guess there are some caveats to the fantastic, as you kind of have to like a few different kind of things to get into this story. For one, it's a semi-dystopia — "semi-" because the world isn't ever really advertised as utopia, but it's definitely got that dystopian/apocalyptic air to it. Two, it's written as a series of blog posts, which I of course think is delightful but maybe you read enough blogs already? Three, for a book about quasi-immortality, a lot of people die in it, and not very nicely at that.

So. Yes. The background to the story is that some ginger guy invented the cure for aging instead of the cure for gingerness (sorry, Mary!) and everyone is like, "I gotta get me some of that." And that's kind of the story itself, too. We follow this guy John's blog posts as he guides us through 60 years of almost no aging, from right before The Cure is legalized to everyone getting them some of that to those who aren't everyone beating up/throwing lye in the eyes of everyone to some people deciding that cure, whatever, it's time to die if that's cool to government-sponsored bounty hunting to government-sponsored murder. It's pretty intense. And of course the whole time the population is increasing like crazy and all the countries are freaking out at each other and a plane ticket costs $12K because there is no oil left and the lines just to get on the highway (in your plug-in, of course) are hours long because America still won't get behind useful public transportation.

That last is probably (and sadly) the little detail that makes this story ring most true to me, but there are plenty of those little details in Magary's story. This whole book, although it's told as John's story and follows his generally poor handling of all the crazy going on in the world, is really about those details and how on earth the Earth is going to handle a population that suddenly can't get old. And Magary does a great job of showing every facet and really making you think about how this universe is going to play out.

And I really like the blog conceit, which exemplifies the intense nose-to-smartphone social media obsessiveness that Magary predicts will only increase in the next seventy years (right, the book starts in 2019, which is not that far away oh no!). There's a brief intro at the beginning that sets up the story as coming from a hard drive on a discarded old smartphone, with the entries in this book selected to construct a narrative, so right away a couple levels of unreliable narrator, which is excellent. But also I like the blog posts because they convey the right tone for the story, which is this sort of personal-but-one-level-removed, kind of journalistic, kind of diary-ish tone that, and this is key, doesn't really allow John to go exposition crazy because he's nominally writing for people who know what the hell is going on. It would be so easy to go exposition crazy in this kind of story (see Torchwood: Miracle Day, which I would compare and contrast to this except it would end in me yelling), but for the most part Magary avoids it (except for a stray "as you know," which, yelling).

It's not a perfect book, and I found myself super-annoyed with John at many points in the story, some of which were probably not supposed to make me annoyed, but on the whole I found it quite intriguing and thought-provoking. In fact, I had to stop more than once along the way to play "what-if" with my husband, who was trying to play a video game and is probably now trying to figure out how to get one of those cycle marriages all the fictional people are talking about, only maybe five years instead of forty because he's not going to live forever.

Recommendation: For enjoyers of dystopia, sad truths, and a little gratuitous violence (not too much).

Rating: 9/10

Sun of Suns, by Karl Schroeder

I got this audiobook as a free download more than a year ago and tried to read it then, but I quickly got bored of it and moved on to more exciting things. But for some reason I kept it on my iPod, and so when I ran out of things to listen to at work the other day I decided to give this another shot.

The story is something like this: There's a dude called Hayden who lives in a strange world where nations float through space and create artificial suns to light themselves and their allies. When he's a kid, his nation tries to build its own sun, but the big nation that already provided their sun was like "I don't think so" and came and destroyed the sun and also Hayden's mum, who was hanging out at the sun at the time. Okay? So then years later we meet Hayden again, and he's sort of infiltrated the government what killed his mum with the intent to kill the guy that led the raid that killed Hayden's mum (he's kind of obsessive about this). But then some stuff happens and Hayden ends up going with Killer Guy (who may not actually have done any killing) and a bunch of other people on some weird treasure hunting mission, and Hayden is torn between hating and liking these people.

And there's action and explosions and double-crosses and love stories and it's all pretty standard science fictiony fare. I had quite a few problems with the plot and lack thereof, and with some questionable choices by the characters, but it turned out a lot better than I thought it was the first time I listened. What I really enjoyed was how the universe was structured with the floating nations and all; Schroeder did a nice job with the world-building.

I won't be continuing with the series, but I will be giving this to my husband to listen to because it's totally up his alley.

Recommendation: For the action-adventure-sci-fi lover, and those who like interesting worlds.

Rating: 6/10

Regarding Ducks and Universes, by Neve Maslakovic

How could I not read this book, with a title and cover like that? Impossible.

It also helps that the book is a bit of a sci-fi romp, a biiiiit like Shades of Grey or The Android's Dream with the science and the touch of satire and the all-around amusement the author obviously has with his/her own book. I'm a fan.

The fun science here is a bit baffling, but once your head gets around it it's pretty cool. Basically, in the late-ish 1980s of an alternate history (I mean, already alternate before this crazy thing happened), there was a Mad Scientist type who managed to split off the universe into a Universe A and a Universe B that share a timeline and population up to said split, but then anything that happens after the split is one-universe-only. So if this split happened tomorrow, there would be a You A and a You B who are exactly alike tomorrow, but in thirty years maybe one of you is a movie star and the other is not, or one of you lives in Iceland and the other in California, whatever. Awesomely, the Mad Scientist (I think, it could have been someone else) also invented a transporter thing that allows for people from the two universes to travel between them, provided they don't go seeking out their alters (i.e. You A seeking out You B) without permission from said alters.

Are you confused now? Good!

Because of this crazy science, the book is pretty exposition-heavy at the beginning, which is slightly annoying. But then you start getting into the plot part, and that's pretty darn interesting too. Here we have a Felix Sayers (who totally wishes he were related to Dorothy) off to visit Universe B ostensibly for funsies, but actually because he's just found out that he's really Felix A and that his parents lied about his birthdate for some unknown reason. He'd like to figure out why the lying, of course, but he'd also like to make sure that Felix B hasn't gone and written the mystery novel that Felix A has been meaning to get around to, someday, you know, maybe. Things only get stranger when two competing research teams start following Felix A around and he finds out that he might already be a bit more important to history than he ever hoped to be.

I had a lot of fun with this book. There's confusing science, of course, but there's also a healthy dose of vintage mysteries with Sayers and Christie, and some social commentary on environmentalism and social media and e-books that is amusing in small doses, though Maslakovic goes a little too far every once in a while. But! Anyway! Otherwise delightful. Also, there are fun side stories including some corporate espionage, violations of the Lunch-Place Rule, and illness by almost-dog. You know, normal stuff.

"There is something to be said about being unreachable, especially when you are trying to avoid being prodded by your boss to engage in regulation-breaking activities of the sourdough kind."

Recommendation: For fans of the sci-fi romp, Agatha Christie, and sourdough bread.

Rating: 9/10
A to Z Challenge

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Soooooo remember when I read The Hunger Games and I liked it and then I read the sequels and I did not like them? If you did, you're better than me, because I totally forgot the first part of that. And so when my book group decided to read The Hunger Games I was like, uggggggggggggggggggggh I don't wanna.

And so I sat down and I started reading it, and then I got distracted by other books, and then I decided to just power through it and oh, right, I forgot that this one is actually pretty darn good and so I stayed up until midnight (horrors!) reading it.

In case you also have forgotten this book in the wake of its sequels, the premise is awesome: dystopian future, The Man (well, The Capitol) keeping his subjects down, said subjects unable to rally against The Capitol because they are instead pitted against each other in a yearly deathmatch using children and sadly not claymation. Oh, devious, Capitol. Delightfully evil. Well done.

My favorite parts of this book take place in the arena. Kids killing kids, kids allying with kids who are going to kill them later, kids making up temporary ethics in order to have some semblance of humanity in the midst of all the killing. Watching Katniss devise plans is awesome; watching her carry them out is even more awesome.

The rest? Eh. I had a lot of problems with this book last time I read it because of the love story, which still stinks, and the handful of things that seem super important at the beginning but seem to be forgotten by the end, which still exist and still irk but after reading the whole series I know which ones to just flat-out ignore. I actually got through a lot of the crappier parts of the book that way this time, just remembering that they weren't really important and thus not worrying about them. I highly recommend this course of action.

Another plus side to the re-read is that I could stop being frustrated that Collins chose to create a love story that I find both implausible and annoying and instead just read her story as written. I still found myself rolling my eyes at many turns, but I could appreciate better the interactions and emotions that Collins created. I'm going to maintain my allegiance to Team Katniss Should Grow A Pair, but I guess I can hang out with the other teams if they're having a party or something.

Recommendation: If you like a good (bad?) dystopian future and some excellent fighting and logic-using, you should read this book. Just this one.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

To say nothing of the dog! This book kind of broke my brain, on account of it's about time travel and there is nothing simple about time travel and to make it worse Connie Willis invents a time travel science and when you actually try to explain time travel you are going to make brains explode.

But what I love about this book, and part of why I'm going to go find some more Connie Willis books and read them ASAP, is that the time travel totally breaks the brains of the people doing the time travelling. In multiple ways! First, they don't really understand it any better than I do, and second... oh, second.

"It's no wonder they call you man's best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by—"

And then the protagonist gets time travelled, but the point of it is that this whole soliloquy is part of the "maudlin sentimentality" that comes with time-lag, which encompasses many amusing (to the reader) symptoms and is a result of too much time travel. Willis writes these passages with obvious delight, and I can't help but love them.

The plot of the book is... simple... Ned Henry, our protagonist, is charged with finding this weird statue thing called the bishop's bird stump, which is apparently very ugly but which is required by a beast of a woman, Lady Schrapnell, to complete the rebuilding in 20... something... sometime in the mid-21st century... of a cathedral that burned down in 1940. Anyway, the vagaries of time travel mean that Henry and others can't get anywhere near the cathedral at the right time, and so they can't find this thing, but Lady Schrapnell is very persuasive and keeps sending Henry back in time until he gets totally time-lagged. The only cure is rest, which he can't get in the present time with Lady Schrapnell all a-crazy, and so he gets sent to the late 1800s instead to help return a cat that got mistakenly time-travelled when it should perhaps have been drowned. Then things start to get crazy.

I enjoyed the heck out of this book, which also features 1930s mystery novels, jumble sales, séances, crazy university professors, and many allusions to the book Three Men in a Boat which I must go read immediately, because it's got to be pretty awesome if it inspired this.

Recommendation: For those who enjoy being totally confused and bewildered.

Rating: 9/10
(TBR Challenge)

Zombie, Ohio, by Scott Kenemore

I'm not gonna lie — if this book had been Zombie, Iowa or Zombie, Florida, or Zombie, Texas or whatever, I would have been about 1 percent as likely to pick it up. I mean, I like zombies and all, but they're getting a little overdone these days. But combine them with Ohio, my home state for almost 25 years? And make the story told from the point of view of a zombie? I am so in.

So, yes. This book opens with a guy wandering around amnesia-full after a car accident. He finds his wallet and driver's license, finds his way home, and discovers that there are zombies — I'm sorry, "moving cadavers" in government-speak — wandering around. He is understandably confused and worried, and gets a friend to drive him over to his girlfriend's house to hole up and wait out the storm or whatever, but during all this excitement he takes a bathroom break only to find that the back of his head is kind of missing. Better keep that hat on!

At first, the dude, Peter, is like, "Well, I'd better hide this zombie thing," but then he realizes he totally can't and so runs off to be a zombie in the woods of Ohio. He has "fun" zombie adventures — eats some brains, kills some people, kills some zombies, becomes a legendary zombie by shooting at military helicopters and flipping soldiers the bird... you know. Normal stuff.

It's actually a lot more intriguing than I was anticipating it to be. Peter is pretty self-aware, and being an amnesiac gets a lot of digs in at general human behavior. And also he's pretty much the smartest zombie around, with the others being more like "regular" zombies, so there's a lot of protecting of the zombie herd going on that is kind of sweet. On the downside, there's a bit of a plot line revolving around the fact that Peter's car accident was not so accidental, and although the resolution is interesting, the whole thing could have been edited out and I wouldn't notice a lack in the rest of the story.

On the whole, then, I'd say this book does what it says it's gonna do, and does it pretty okay.

Recommendation: For those who want a different perspective on the zombie novel craze, and people who have always wondered what Knox County, Ohio would look like zombified.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Search for WondLa, by Tony DiTerlizzi

My main reaction to this book is this: WHAT.

I picked it up knowing absolutely nothing about it except that it had a neat cover and a strange title. The "jacket" copy (I grabbed the audio version) was interesting enough, with its promises of a kid living underground and busting out and discovering new and interesting things, that I figured I could give it a listen at work. So onto my iPod it went.

Listening to it, though... eh. I missed the part on the box where it said that Teri Hatcher was narrating, and that was a pleasant surprise at first, since I do love Hatcher's voice. But I quickly discovered that I do not like Teri Hatcher's robot voice, or her "Dory speaking whale" voice (from Finding Nemo, of course, and which Hatcher uses for a different, alien large animal) or, in fact, her teenage girl voice, which is possibly more that I hate teenage voices and inflections in general, see that link above. Uggggggggh.

So the story, then. There is a teenage girl — well, a twelve-year-old, so almost teenage — called Eva Nine (another narrating beef: Hatcher can't decide if it's pronounced eh-va, ee-va, or ay-va), who lives underground with her robot MUTHR, who is, obviously, her robot mother. It's just the two of them, and they're training Eva to go wander around Earth, or something, I'm not quite clear on this, but the training gets interrupted when a Bad Guy comes and burns up their hidey-hole. Eva runs off, then gets captured by the Bad Guy, then escapes with a couple of friend-types who are decidedly not human, then goes back to rescue MUTHR, then decides to figure out why she is not on Earth with the humans, and then there is more travelling and adventuring and oh, the title comes from some picture that Eva finds that has just the letters WondLa visible around the picture. Uh. Huh.

I guess this is a children's book, though I found it in the YA section (I imagine it's for older kids, younger teens), and so I guess I can forgive a lot of the telegraphed information and things that seem obvious to me but come as a "surprise" at the end. And one of the things that I absolutely did not see coming actually makes the book make a whole lot more sense, and makes it possibly better, and I wish I had figured it out sooner so I could have appreciated it while it was happening. But I had a lot of nitpicky problems with the story; I wondered how DiTerlizzi's version of a Babel Fish actually works or why the Bad Guy shows up in the first place or why certain things that seemed incredibly important got completely ignored for the rest of the book.

Oh, and then at the end something completely out of left field happens so that I will read the sequel. Not gonna happen.

I don't think I would read this book again, but if I were going to go back in time and pick this book up for the first time again, I would make sure it was in book form, as apparently there are neat illustrations and, of course, I wouldn't have to listen to the voices I disliked. And there's an interesting thing that I didn't check out because I didn't want to download something, but if you are reading this with kids they'll probably download it before you even realize — on the CDs and, I imagine, in the book are some illustrations that you can hold up to a webcam and that the aforementioned downloadable program will apparently decode and turn into some sort of interactive image or video or something? If you end up doing this, let me know what it is!

Recommendation: I think kids will like this; I think I would have liked it better as a kid, at least. I imagine that if you like DiTerlizzi's other stuff, this is probably right up that alley.

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

This book. Hmm. I just finished it a few days ago, after about three weeks of reading it... or avoiding it, as the case may be. Perhaps I just read this at the wrong time, but although I was interested in where the story might go, I was dreading having to read the story to find out. Does that make sense? Probably not.

I guess the first problem I had with this book is that I expected it to be a different kind of odd than it was. The story is about a time-machine repairman, whose life is like this, according to the jacket flap: "When he's not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished." I also knew that Yu eventually finds a book called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, written by himself (yes, this is also the book that I read), and that the book was a sort of meta treatment of science fiction in the way that the Thursday Next series is a meta treatment of books in general.

And... well. In the book, character Yu does visit a couple of clients, console his boss, visit his mother, and search for his father. He does find that book. The author Yu takes on science fiction. But Thursday Next, character Yu is not. It starts off strong, with a client visit to Linus Skywalker, who isn't thrilled about his famous dad. And the introduction of TAMMY, who is a familiarly down-on-herself operating system. But my overall impression is that this is not a funny book. This is not even a generally amusing book. This book depressed the crap out of me.

And, okay, I can deal with depressing every once in a while, so I kept reading, waiting for the "ridiculously funny" also promised to me by the jacket flap. But it's not even just regular depressing, with character Yu having a disappointing childhood and an aimless adulthood, which he does. It is beat-you-over-the-head depressing, with author Yu taking run-on sentences to a Henry James level and using them to repeat the same depressing concepts over and over until you think that you're the one with a crappy and aimless adulthood. Goodness.

It is possible that this book isn't actually that depressing. It is possible that it is actually highly entertaining. But I spent the majority of that three weeks stuck in an interminable depressing interlude, and that is what I remember best.

Maybe I need to come back to this one another time, without the shadow of Jasper Fforde hanging over this book. And without any expectations of humor whatsoever. Or maybe I could listen to it, so that someone else can point to the "ridiculously funny" parts for me? Someday, maybe.

Recommendation: For, I suppose, those who have read a lot of science fiction and have the strength to break through the depressing parts more quickly than I did.

Rating: 5/10
(A to Z Challenge)

V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore

...Interesting. That's how I would describe this book. I love the movie version, which I've watched at least once a year (on Guy Fawkes Night, natch) for the past several years, and this year someone reminded me that it was, you know, a graphic novel first, and maybe I should read it? Yes, maybe I should. So I requested it from the library, and it took forever to arrive, and then I renewed it a couple of times, and then finally I says to myself, "Self, you've gotta just read this thing. Go." So I did. It took a while, largely because I started a job in the middle of it and I'm still working out how to read print books (I listen to audiobooks at work) on my new schedule. But I read it and it was interesting.

The story is this: There's a dude, and he's called V, and he dresses like Guy Fawkes, and he blows some stuff up, and you're like, cool. He is blowing stuff up because he lives in a fascist state run by basically Big Brother, with help from a computer, so we've got some good dystopian tropes in there. At some point, he saves a girl called Evey from some police-type people who are going to do terrible things to her, and she sort of becomes his apprentice. Also, the fascist state does not like V and is hunting him down, and slowly learning his backstory (which is kind of nuts) in the process.

The book is actually quite different from the movie — and this necessarily is how I have to approach this review — with more creepiness in V's backstory and seedier government officials, and actually much less blowing stuff up, which is disappointing but understandable for the medium. I quite liked all of the extra things I learned about Larkhill, where V was imprisoned, because it made V make more sense, but much of the stuff I learned about the government officials (they're corrupt! promiscuous! ne'er-do-wells!) was rather tedious. More creepy smiling masked people, please!

All in all, I did like the novel, but it won't top my yearly dose of explodey things any time soon.

Recommendation: Definitely read it if you've seen the movie, or if you generally like dystopia and intrigue in pictorial form.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Y: The Last Man Book 4, by Brian K. Vaughan

I ended up reading this one pretty quickly after the last because I seem to have gotten Scott interested in the series and thus I didn't want him stealing this before I got a chance at it. Because I'm territorial like that. But now I think Scott's going to end up reading them first...

Okay, so, book the first was all exposition-heavy and kind of annoying, but then book the second was a lot better with the action and the plot moving forward, and then book the third was pretty equally okay. But then I got completely squicked out and a little derailed by this book, and I can only hope the squicky stuff NEVER COMES BACK AGAIN.

I'm sure it was at least a little on purpose, but these weird scenes in which repressed sexuality is made unrepressed and some odd form of torture happens really made me cringe. It was just so... weird and awkward and so seemingly completely irrelevant to the story (which is actually how I feel about the Israelis in this series, too, now that I think about it) that I just wanted that half of the book (yes, half) to be over now!

Luckily, once it's done you can see that there was, in fact, a point to all the awkward and it actually makes me feel a little less annoyed with Yorick because he becomes a slightly less annoying person. So that's a plus. And the second half of the book is fairly interesting, with yet another set of crazy people and an equally crazy throwdown between them and our heroes (who are still Yorick, Mann, and 355).

So... I think I'm going to put this series away for a little bit and come back to it once I can repress those unrepressing scenes. Makes perfect sense, yes?

Recommendation: Ehhhhhh... let me get back to you on this. If it makes sense in the overall story, I'll give it a thumbs up.

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

See also:
[your link here]

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

Y: The Last Man Book 3, by Brian K. Vaughan

More Yorick! Good times! Well, good for me. Not Yorick. Or anyone else, for that matter.

Let's see, who's a player in this book? We're still following Yorick, his monkey Ampersand, 355, and Dr. Mann on their journey to California. But there's a quick detour in Kansas when a terribly accented Russian shows up ready to rescue some male astronauts (well, one is obviously a cosmonaut) on their Houston-unsupported return to Earth. Which would be going fine, except...

The strange Israeli army people are back, apparently following the orders of Yorick's mother who thinks that 355 is going to do something terrible to Yorick... or something. It's not terribly clear. What is clear is that the Israelis' leader is bent on kidnapping Yorick for herself... not like that. Maybe like that? Okay, not as clear as I thought.

Who else, who else... there are some geneticists, which is cool. Oh! Right! And a troupe of actors who stage a play about the last man on Earth, make meta-commentary on this series ("If there's one thing I hate, it's crappy works of fiction that try to sound important by stealing names from the Bard"), introduce me to a work by Mary Shelley called The Last Man (which is on my TBR pile effective immediately), and piss off a bunch of Kansas ladies who really just wanted someone to continue their stories (you know, soap operas) for them.

OH. And then there is someone called Toyota who for some reason wants Ampersand. I imagine that will come back again quickly.

So all in all the series remains on a high level of ridiculousness tempered by an intriguing question and some fine illustration.

Recommendation: Yeah, you should probably pick up this series. It's pretty cool.

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

See also:
Rhinoa's Ramblings

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

Y: The Last Man Book 2, by Brian K. Vaughan

This is definitely better than the first collection of the series, mostly because there is nearly 100 percent less exposition. So relaxing to just read a story!

The plot is still generally the same, of course — Yorick is probably the last man on Earth, making him a very hot commodity for many groups who want him in varying levels of alive. A government operative called 355 and a Dr. Mann would like to figure out why he's still alive and possibly clone him, because that would be useful, but the group farthest to the "dead" end of the aforementioned spectrum is hunting this little group down as they travel from Boston to California. They make it as far as Ohio in this book and stir up quite a bit of trouble in the process.

This series continues to provide an interesting answer to the "what if we got rid of all those pesky men" question, though the focus on the Daughters of the Amazon in this set got pretty tedious pretty fast — I get it, they're a cult, they're quite crazy, can we move on now? But of course we can't, because Yorick's sister has gotten herself caught up in the crazy.

With any luck, things will get crazy in a different direction in the next book.

Recommendation: Read the first set; if you like it, read this!

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

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist

Dudes. This was a really good book. I love me a dystopian novel, and I thought this one was especially effective because I could really, definitely see it happening. The Hunger Games? Eh, maybe. Shades of Grey? Definitely not. The Handmaid's Tale, which this reminded me strongly of? Not really. This? Oh, I could totally see this.

The "this" I'm talking about is a world where the people we love are no longer dying for stupid reasons like decades-long organ transplant waiting lists... because the older, procreatively-challenged members of society are ready and mostly willing to fork over a kidney, or a cornea, or an auditory bone, or a liver, or a heart whenever there isn't anyone else around to do it.

See, over in that Scandinavia area (if not everywhere), the population is divided into "needed" people — parents, schoolteachers, nurses — and "dispensable" people, with no one to take care of. These dispensable people are taken away at a ripe old age (50 for ladies; 60 for gents, who can sow their seeds a bit longer) to live in one of the titular Units, where they live wonderful lives of comfort and ease, with no need to earn money or cook for themselves or do anything at all that they don't want to, except, you know, participate in medical and psychological experiments and donate an organ here or there until it's time to donate a major organ.

Our dispensable friend is Dorrit, who didn't try terribly hard to become needed and is rather enjoying her time in the Unit. We follow along as she has a relatively easy time of things, makes friends, makes a "friend," and then makes a baby, which sort of throws everything out of whack both in the Unit and in Dorrit's life. And boy, do things get interesting from there.

It's not ever terribly exciting... the story is fairly slow-paced and the focus is really on the emotions of the people within the Unit, which are quite up and down, as one might imagine. And Holmqvist does a great job of this. She also does an excellent job portraying the whole Unit system as a pretty good idea, really, if not a very easily sustainable one.

There is a whole boatload of intriguing in this novel, and I may have to read it again at some point to really appreciate what Holmqvist has done and to look again at the interactions between the characters in a new light.

Recommendation: Grab it if you like a good dystopian novel or a good psychology-driven narrative.

Rating: 9/10
(Orbis Terrarum: Sweden, A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Reading matters
Jules' Book Reviews
At Home With Books

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

Y: The Last Man Book 1, by Brian K. Vaughan

I'm getting smart on this A to Z Challenge thing and picking books to read from my long TBR list on GoodReads. Birds! Stones!

This book is the first volume of the collection of Y: The Last Man comic books. In this set we learn that some mysterious and possibly ooky thing has eliminated all of chromosomally male creatures on earth (humans, monkeys, chinchillas, whatever), except for one human, Yorick, and his monkey, Ampersand. Yorick has no idea why he's still alive, but he's more worried about finding his girlfriend slash possible fiancée than pretty much anything else.

Of course, there are other players in this new world — at the beginning of the comic we are introduced to a woman with an amulet that too many people want to get their hands on, an Israeli army officer who gets a quick promotion after all the dying, a scientist with a cloned fetus that dies during birth (the fetus, not the scientist), a secret agent known only as 355, a group of "Amazons" who cut off their breasts and fight with bows and arrows and generally want to kill men and also women who don't follow their path, and a majority Democratic government under siege by the wives of the Republican congressmen who died.

There is a lot of stuff going on here, and I am intrigued to see how it plays out in the future, but I'm not terribly thrilled with the characters or the storyline thus far, probably because everything is in big-time Exposition Mode. I think I'll give the next volume a chance and see what happens.

Recommendation: Good for fans of apocalyptic and other generally problem-ridden universes, and those with an eye for pop-culture references.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Rhinoa's Ramblings

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.

The Giver, by Lois Lowry

I first read this book in eighth grade, and I recall absolutely adoring it. My favorite part was when we discussed it in class, and there were three different interpretations of the ending! I'm pretty sure this was the first book I'd ever read, or at least the first one I had discussed, where there were so many ways to think about it.

The weird thing about this book, which I have read many times since that first, is that every time I re-read it I like it less as a story, but I love it more as a book and as a commentary on society. I attended a library book club meeting about this book, and for all of those adults that seemed to be the consensus: a very interesting book, but not really well-liked. I think it helps to be 13 when you read it first, because all of the plot devices that become overplayed in another ten years of reading are brand new.

If you haven't read it (if, say, you were in eighth grade before the mid-90s!), this is a pretty simplistic book about a dystopian future world. In this world, the focus is sameness: all babies born in the same year are considered exactly the same age and each age level wears the same clothing and hair styles and follows the same rules. The exceptions to sameness are in the form of aptitudes and interests, with children performing volunteer work at different jobs and eventually being assigned to a job that seems to fit them, whether that's Nurturer (taking care of babies), Recreation Director, Laborer, or Birthmother (making babies, but probably not the fun way). However, at this year's job-assigning ceremony, Jonas gets picked for a job that is very different from those: Receiver of Memories. As we read about Jonas's job, the delightful, organized world he lives in starts to fall apart, as dystopias are wont to do.

I really like that this story is low-key — there's a brief period of hurriedness, but the plot generally moves along slowly. It's much more like The Long Tomorrow than, say, The Hunger Games. Good times.

Rating: 8/10 (inflated for sentimental value, probably)
(Flashback Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Maze Runner, by James Dashner

Okay, so here's my thing about series books. I like them, in general, and I appreciate story arcs that cross over several books before being resolved. But. I intensely dislike it when, in the first book, the only real mystery is not solved. Give me something to feel good about, you know?

Unfortunately, that's what this book does. And I'm just not invested enough in the story to go read another book to find out what's happening. I might Wikipedia it instead.

The premise of the story is good — it's the whole reason I wanted to read the book! There are all these boys trapped in a maze, and we follow along with the new kid, Thomas, who has just come in, memory mostly wiped like everyone else's (he can remember his name, and he can remember general details about life but not specifics like if he has a family or where he lived), who nonetheless feels like everything around him looks a little familiar. And some of the other kids sort of recognize him, too, the ones who have had bad things happen to them. And this maze they're in, it moves around every day and the boys have designated Runners who go out and try to map it, even though there doesn't seem to be an exit.

Doesn't that sound kind of cool? I was intrigued, anyway. But the book... it's an action book kind of like The Knife of Never Letting Go, where there is no character development to speak of, but lots of running and jumping and climbing trees and whatnot. And it does that part pretty well, I'll grant, but it's not enough to get me to read more of the same.

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

See also:
Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'?
My Friend Amy
Devourer of Books
Thoughts of Joy...
Library Queue

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

This World We Live In, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Oh, I wanted to love this book so much. I absolutely adored the other two books in this series, which were full of suspense and emotion and just win in general, and I was intrigued by the prospect of the two protagonists meeting each other. But.

Well, let's just start with the obvious — this book is completely different from the other two. It takes place after the events of both, and the world is starting to look up. So right away the suspense of "what's going to happen next oh no terrible things are going to happen I can't look let me peek through my fingers" is dialed way down to something more like "what's going to happen next it's probably going to be okay there aren't as many terrible things that could happen but I'll keep reading in case one does." Which, okay. It's a different book. If I wanted more of the same I should just go re-read the others.

But I was hoping the book would at least speak to me in the same way. New book, new situations, but still a poignant outlook on a bleak life? Not really. The characters pretty much refuse to be developed, so even when terrible things did happen I was just like, "Oh, that happened," unlike my barely-stifled sobs in reading the other books.

I will give Pfeffer credit for not just making the world all bright and shiny again, and for giving us a sense of what else is happening in the world outside of Miranda's house. But now I'm going to pretend this never happened and go back to the ambiguous endings I liked so much from the previous books. And then I'll see what other stories Pfeffer has to offer, because they're probably pretty darn good.

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

See also:
My Friend Amy
biblio+chic

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

Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

So, remember when I read The Hunger Games and I thought it was an okay read but I wasn't thrilled and I said count me out of the love story? Well, certain people convinced me that the sequel wasn't really a love story, regardless of Teams Peeta and Gale, and so I read the sequel. In an evening. Collins can really write an engaging plot line.

But maybe not a good one, as I got to the end and was like, "Um, what? What? What??? No freaking way!" with a grumpy look on my face.

I told my Amy earlier that this book suffers from serious Book Two of a Trilogy Syndrome, in which the author has come up with a good beginning, and also a good (one hopes) end, but can't really figure out how to connect the two and thus crams too many things into the middle book. In this case, the middle book covers the span of an entire year, from shortly after the end of Katniss's Hunger Games and straight through the next year's Games. Because of this, there's necessarily a lot of jumping around — Katniss and Peeta prepare for the Victory Tour, Katniss gets the lives of her family and friends threatened, they start the tour in District 11, some stuff of importance happens in a couple other districts, the Victory Tour is over, more threats, vague notions of rebellion/escape... you get the idea. It's not very well connected and I personally felt almost more interested in what was happening in the parts that got glossed over than the parts that were written in detail, which is not good.

And the next Hunger Games... there seemed to be way too much time spent on it for how important it really is to the story, especially after finding out what happens in the end. I think that Collins could have left out some of that boring action and thrown in some more of the rebellion and intrigue that she ignored in the beginning, and I would have been much happier.

Since I've now read the first two books, I'll probably read the third just for the closure, but I wouldn't really recommend reading the second one right now. If the third one is awesome, I'll let you know it's safe to read this one. :)

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

See also:
Jules' Book Reviews
book-a-rama
The Bluestocking Society
dreadlock girl
Midnight Book Girl
books i done read

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