Fables Vol. 1, by Bill Willingham

Man, I really wanted to like this book. I tried to like it, all the way through, but save for a few moments of amusement I was largely unimpressed. This is not The Unwritten, sadly, and maybe my love for that comic colored my view of this one? I'll need to do some SCIENCE to find out.

In the meantime, let me tell you why this book should have been awesome:

First, I mean, fables. I have really grown to enjoy satires/homages of fairy tales and the like, and that's exactly what this is. In this comic series, the inhabitants of, like, any imaginary story have been exiled from their respective homelands by some mighty Adversary and now live mostly in NYC, except for the non-human ones (or non-able-to-pretend-to-be-human ones) who live on a farm upstate. Which sounds kind of ominous, actually, I hope they're okay. In this particular volume we have Old King Cole as the mayor of Fabletown, Snow White as his deputy, the Big Bad Wolf (aka Bigby) in pretend-human form as a cop/detective-type, and lots and lots of other favorite characters doing many and varied things. Oh, and Bluebeard shows up and I totally know who he is this time! Thanks, Neil Gaiman!

Second, it's a murder mystery. Bigby's case here is the mysterious disappearance slash probable murder of Rose Red, whose apartment is covered in blood almost like that one episode of Dexter and whose man-friend Jack (of Beanstalk fame) is eager to find out whodunnit. I love murder mysteries, and in this case I get to actually see the crime scene for a change! Graphic novels are cool like that.

So, fables and murder. Fantastic. But, here's why it failed for me: the writing. It was very comic-book-y with the emphasis on all the important words but also sometimes on words that seemed to be fine on their own and I was like, wait, what? He said that sentence how? Does he speak English? (Does he speak English? Does he speak English? I could do this all day...)

Ahem. And then also Willingham tried to be all cutesy and self-aware with the dialogue and it comes out instead all verbose and clunky and awful and like absolutely no one anywhere would actually talk, and I am like, omg chill out, which is easy for me to say from this end of an extremely run-on sentence but WHATEVER. It's a comic book! I want to look at the pictures!

Example: Bigby says to Snow White, "This isn't about Prince Charming. It's about your sister, Rose Red." And of course no one talks like that unless they're Expositing, and so Snow White calls him on his BS and says, "This may surprise you, Mister Wolf, but I'm not entirely an idiot. I actually know my sister's name." Unfortunately, this is ALSO not how anyone talks unless they're putting on a show for a listener, of which there are none that are not the reader. A simple "Yeah, that's her name, what about her?" or "Do I have another?" would easily have sufficed, but no-oooo, and that's how the whole rest of the book goes and it is tiresome.

The concept and the general execution are so good, guys, and if you are more forgiving of terrible dialogue than I am you will probably really like this series, which I imagine goes on in the same vein. But I can't do it. Let me know how it goes?

Recommendation: Fables, MURDER, pretty pictures. Is this your bag?

Rating: 5/10

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

I'm just going to start with this — I don't think I understood this book. I don't think anyone in my book club (for which I read this book) understood this book. I made this discovery at the book club meeting, during which we found some discussion questions including (to paraphrase) "How did Didion use humor in this book?" and "What parts of this book were exhilarating?"

We couldn't come up with humor. We couldn't come up with exhilaration. We came up with introspection, detachment, plodding...

Which is not to say that I disliked this book. I didn't like it, perhaps, but I found it very intriguing, which is more than I can say for some of my fellow readers!

The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's memoir about the death of her husband, which happens suddenly if not unexpectedly at the dinner table, and how she makes it through the first year after his death. This is not easy after forty years of marriage and the rocky previous year in their relationship, and it is especially difficult because Didion's daughter is, from five days before the death to the end of Didion's narration, in and out of the hospital herself with mystery ailments that don't bode well for her.

I did not find it an exhilarating book; in fact, Didion seems to go out of her way to make everything very rational and straightforward, even the things that aren't naturally so, and provide a sort of road map to life as a widow. She speaks of being called a "cool customer" by her social worker, of saving her husband's shoes just in case he comes back, of dealing with the panic that is set off by the most innocuous of memories. I haven't lost a spouse of forty years, but I have lost some loved ones in my time, and I can see a lot of Didion's reactions in my own, if scaled down.

I can only think that I would have understood and appreciated it better if I actually knew who Didion was outside of the scope of this book, and knew the context of her life in which to place all of these events. I felt absolutely lost when Didion would mention friends or locations that meant nothing to me, or when she referenced previous novels by her or her husband. I knew there must be a connection to be made, but I had no idea what it was or how to make it.

So on the whole, I found this book fairly depressing and a bit under-explained in places (and over-explained in others), but I did find it an interesting read for the simple honesty of it all.

Recommendation: I really don't know who this was written for. I'm going to say that if you know Didion or have gone through similar troubles, you might be interested. But I'm not sure.

Rating: 5/10
(A to Z Challenge)

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

Go the Fuck to Sleep, by Adam Mansbach

Sorry for the swearing, up there, but what can you do? Actually, since I read this book while I was, um, cataloging it, I know exactly what you can do — the catalog record offers up a second title of Go the Fok to Sleep because the cover has a convenient moon in the middle. And maybe people don't know what it really says?

But I do! Oh, I do, because after all the internets hullabaloo about this book I couldn't help spending a couple minutes paging through this before sending it out to be processed. That's right, a couple minutes. I was thinking about not even writing up for the blog, but I realized that I could maybe save a few of you those couple minutes that you could use to, like, sleep in a bit one morning, or something.

Yes, indeed, this book is not nearly as exciting as the internet made it out to be. I can hear your shock from all the way over here!

You've probably heard the premise of the book, but if not — it's in the style of a kids' rhyming book, and ostensibly of the go-to-sleep genre of such. I've seen it compared to Goodnight Moon, but it's not quite the same tone. I would say it's trying very hard to be more Dr. Seuss-y or somesuch, but Seuss is a way better poet.

And maybe that's a weird thing to be picky about, but, I mean, the book is like ten pages long and it's entirely made up of these little poems, and the poems are not very good! Mansbach forces words into patterns where they do not fit, and I found myself having to really think about how to make a line go "ta dum dum ta dum dum" more often than I'd like.

Unrelatedly, I just tried to Google some of the lines to show you what I mean, and I discovered that Google won't let me see the results for "go the fuck to sleep," though it will allow "go the f to sleep." Anyone know how to fix that?

Right, anyway, some of the rhymes were off, and also, for as short as this book is, it seemed like Mansbach ran out of steam after the first few poems, because they become increasingly nonsensical and also more "angry" than "tired and frustrated and irritated," which is how the book begins and ends, so I'm not sure what happened in the middle there.

Now I've spent more time writing this book up than reading it! Nuts! Uh, sorry, I guess I didn't save you any time after all!

Recommendation: If you're gonna read it you're gonna read it. At least it's quick!

Rating: 5/10

I Saw You..., edited by Julia Wertz

This is an odd little book. It has a long subtitle, like so: "Comics Inspired By Real-Life Missed Connections, filled with near misses, brief encounters, strange sightings, lusty longings, and a little hope for love." I'm... not really sure what to say about it.

Okay, well, so it's a series of comics, that's a good start. And they're all based on Craigslist "missed connections" ads, which can be awesome or depressing, and are therefore sometimes awesome and sometimes depressing. I'm not clear if all of these comics are actually based on specific Craigslist postings or if some are just sort of made up, but they all sound pretty plausible.

Also, each comic is done by a different artist, so there are a lot of different art styles and different takes on how to illustrate a missed connection — some are straightforward and beautifully rendered, a couple take the Craiglist ad and turn it into something super-creepy (though I suppose some of the ads are!), most are somewhere in between. All of them give you a little insight into the kind of person that might find themselves writing to a hottie they've possibly barely spoken to.

For the most part, I found the comics a bit boring and/or predictable, but a couple really stood out and made me happy in my heart, so it wasn't a total loss.

Recommendation: For people who surf the missed connections, because maybe there's something you need to know. :)

Rating: 6/10
(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)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

Hey, look at me, catching up to pop culture circa two years ago! Three? Regardless! I am SO AWESOME.

Or something.

So ba-hasically, I avoided this book and its friends like the plague when they were all popular and stuff originally, but then they made a movie and now they're making another movie and while I probably won't watch either of them I sort of feel like I need to actually be able to converse in Stieg Larsson. See also: that time I read Twilight and then made my friend summarize the rest of the series for me.

Hey, anyone want to summarize the rest of this series for me?

In case you are like me from a week ago, here's the gist of this first book: There's a dude, and he's a journalist, and he does a bad-journalist thing and publishes some libel, and then he gets a big fine and a jail sentence. Then, a very rich dude decides to pay the journalist dude a zillion dollars ostensibly to write the rich dude's biography slash family history but actually to solve the murder of the rich dude's... crap, let me go check the convenient family tree provided by Larsson... the rich dude's grandniece, whose body disappeared under mysterious circumstances like forty years ago. Oh, to be a rich dude.

Meanwhile, there's a chick, and she's a sort of background checker slash private investigator slash hacker who is very very good at digging up dirt on people. She gets hired by the rich dude to investigate the journalist dude, and she does a good job, and then we find out that holy heck does she have some issues and HOLY HECK can she take care of herself regardless of said issues, holy heck, and then she ends up working with the journalist dude to solve the murder mystery and then another mystery besides.

That's the basic plot, anyway. The HOLY HECK parts another big point of the story, and since Larsson throws in a lot of statistics and information on sexual assault of women, I think you can figure out what those parts might look like. This book is not for the squeamish. It can in fact be quite uncomfortable.

I'm not really sure what Larsson was going for with this novel. I mean, it's pretty obvious that he was trying to make a Statement about violence against women, but this Statement is very uneven, what with the squicky parts and then the rest of the novel that basically pretends the squicky parts didn't happen. And then of course there's another point in there about Rich People and their propensity to be Horrible People too, and the awfulness of closed communities, and also how corporate espionage is bad stuff. So... yay? I learned things?

But Larsson did know what he was doing in the engaging writing department; even though I wasn't totally onboard with this book I stayed up past midnight (shut up that's WAY past my bedtime) glued to the pages as the mystery unraveled. And even when I got to the ending and was like, "Well, yeah, I saw that coming," I was still also like, "But man, he did a good job bringing it here." I can see how this ended up on many a beach in its prime.

Recommendation: It's a brain-candy thriller, except for the unpleasantness. I'll let you do your own math on it.

Rating: 6/10
(Global Reading 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)

The Sea of Trolls, by Nancy Farmer

Sooooooooooo. This book. I wanted to like it a lot — there's Norse mythology and bards and Beowulf and a titch of magic and adventures and Adventures and seafaring and it's all fairly exciting. I think I just read this at the wrong time.

See, the book I finished right before this was The Amulet of Samarkand, and part of my fangirl gushing over that book was the way that everything was so opposite of what I expected from a fantasy novel and so dark and intriguing. This book? Exactly what you'd expect of a fantasy novel, not dark, not really terribly intriguing. It's a sort of action book, primarily, and I just wasn't mentally prepared for that.

The story is of a kid called Jack, who becomes apprentice to a bard, which in this world is not just a teller of tales but also a bit of a magician, using the tale-telling business to tap into the... I don't remember... crap... Google says Yggdrasil (pronounced eeg-druh-sill), which is right, but there was another name for it. We see how much attention I paid while listening to this book. Sigh. Anyway, the stories have some magic to them that can have varying effects on the listeners. But that's not really the story. The story is that at some point, the bard to whom Jack is apprenticed is attacked and in the ensuing chaos Jack and his sister get kidnapped and taken aboard a slave trading vessel and eventually gets to a Viking village and then he slights the queen but good and then has to go on an epic quest to fix the slight and then spoiler alert he succeeds and goes home.

So there's a lot of stuff happening here, and it's all quite predictable because you can tell it's meant to be a riff on old Norse mythology and whatnot and according to the internet the print book mentions this explicitly at the end, and also mentions that what I felt was a really horrible sort of throw-away joke at the end was actually kind of the point of the book and wow that is neither in the audiobook nor implied by the text itself.

Taken as a sort of epic poem, the book is pretty good, though it drags in parts. I quite enjoyed the Norse setting that I haven't seen too much of elsewhere, and I enjoyed the humor that Farmer puts into her writing. I had some problems with the aforementioned joke, which almost ruined the book for me (I'm not sure if I would have felt different knowing about it in advance), and with the main female character whose role in the story was apparently to be kind of lame and then blossom into a lamer person. Ugh. There are apparently sequels to this book, even though the book itself can stand alone, but I won't be reading them.

Recommendation: For those interested in a bit of Norse mythology and lore and who like an Adventure.

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, by Bryan Lee O'Malley

So. The movie version of this series came out a while ago, and I was intrigued but not movie-going-money intrigued, but my brother was like "OMGSCOTTPILGRIM" and so I decided to get the first book and see what it was about. Of course, the queue for it at the library was forever long, so it took me like a month or two to get it, and by then I wasn't really super-interested anymore, but then last week I realized it was due back at the library the day after I looked that information up, so I figured I'd read it.

And boy, am I glad it was short, both because I was able to finish it before it had to go back and because I didn't really like it. Now my brother is going to complain at me.

But... really. There's this kid... well, I say kid, but he's 23 and I'm pretty much that old too, so whatever. This kid, Scott Pilgrim, and he's dating some high-school chick, and he has a band, but then some girl starts entering his dreams, like LITERALLY, and then he meets her and he likes her but he has to fight her evil ex-boyfriends first but that's okay because Scott's the best fighter in Ontario which we find out when he's fighting the first ex and also there's some musical-style choreographed backup dancing fighting something....

That's pretty much the entire story. Sorry for spoiling it for you? But I'm still very very baffled. I think this might actually be something I'd like more if I could watch it. Onto Netflix this movie goes!

Recommendation: Good for people who don't need any of that fancy "logic" stuff interrupting their story. Also people who are rock-band-y nerds, I think.

Rating: 5/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

The Night Bookmobile, by Audrey Niffenegger

Oh, Audrey. I know we've had our differences before, but I was hoping that maybe if you wrote another book with a librarian in it, we'd be good as new. Sadly, I am still ambivalent.

This is a super-duper short story, told in a graphic format, and there's not much I can say without giving the whole thing away. Baaaasically, there's a thing called a Night Bookmobile, which is a sort of mobile library that comes when you need it. Or something. And it holds all of the things you've ever read in your life. And the main character, Alexandra, finds her bookmobile and becomes a little obsessed with it, as I imagine one might.

And so that's an interesting premise, but then the story goes a little crazy at the end, there, and a whole host of issues crop up that would be interesting to address but that do not get addressed. Niffenegger writes in the "After Words" that this is the first installment of a larger work, so I hope that perhaps I will get to see that larger work and that it will tell me what the heck is going on.

Recommendation: Eh, it's a quick read and it's certainly ripe for discussion... probably an interesting pick for a voracious reader.

Rating: 5/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich

The other day at the library, I asked a woman if I could help her find anything. She was standing in front of the "new mysteries" section, and she said that she'd read all of these already and asked if I could help her find a good action or adventure mystery. I was like... um...

Because I haven't read an adventure-y mystery in a really long time! Most of my fare is either classics or literary-style mysteries, neither of which would probably have appeased this woman. And in fact, I realized that of all the mystery authors who get multiple shelves with multiple copies of each book? I've read exactly zero. I decided I ought to rectify this, so I grabbed a copy of One for the Money and went to town.

Well. I suddenly remember why I like the classics and the literaries. Stephanie Plum is not a detective; she's an unemployed lingerie-buyer who conveniently has a bail bondsman cousin who, with a little blackmailing, is willing to let her "shag" (you would not believe how happy I was to discover the 1994 definition of that word!) a bail jumper for a cool ten grand. And this jumper is none other than some guy who diddled her in kindergarten and then again in high school. And he's a cop. Who killed someone. And Plum is totes going to get him. Somehow.

I will grant that it was interesting watching Plum be a complete idiot (V.I. Warshawski she is NOT) about... everything related to nabbing a bail jumper, and also to watch the strange cat and mouse game that she and the guy were playing. But the whole story just required this drastic suspension of disbelief that I just could not manage. Many things were incredibly convenient, many people were conveniently very stupid and/or bad at their jobs, and Plum seemed pretty much devoid of common sense and yet still managed to get her man.

It makes the brain hurt.

Please, suggest to me another popular mystery author, and perhaps a title of his/hers that won't make me want to cry over the inanity?

Rating: 5/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Dead-Tossed Waves, by Carrie Ryan

So I kinda sorta rather enjoyed The Forest of Hands and Teeth, to which this book is a companion (not so much sequel). Forest was full of interesting zombies and deep dark secrets and a trial of faith and although I didn't think it a particularly good book, I thought it was very entertaining.

This book... less so. At first I was all excited because the main character here is Gabrielle, not Mary of the first book, and in the first book Gabrielle is the zombie chick that caused a lot of problems. I thought perhaps this was going to be a sort of companion book that talked about Gabrielle's life and how she ended up in Mary's town. Then, crushing disappointment when I found out that the Gabrielle in this book is actually Mary's daughter.

So we have fast-forwarded many years to the future. And nothing much has changed. Mary has settled in by that ocean she had longed for, where Gabrielle — Gabry — has learned all about the Mudo (previously the Unconsecrated) and how lame they are and how they want to nom people. Nonetheless, she sneaks out with a bunch of people to go play in Mudo territory and of course the Mudo attack and Gabry's boy-thing is bited and she runs away and her friends get caught and sentenced to a Really Bad Rest of Their Lives and then Gabry's bff blackmails her into going out to rescue said bff's brother slash Gabry's boy-thing. But of course, this is not very easy, especially when Gabry starts falling in love with another boy.

And that is where I got distinctly displeased with this book. It was like the Hunger Games books all over again, with the indecision and the boys mooning and FOR SERIOUSLY it needs to stop. Bring me more zombies!

But the zombies are mostly lacking in this book, at least until the end when there are a disgustingly large amount of them, and the love story was certainly not as compelling as the deep dark secrets of the first book. Like the Hunger Games before it, I am sure I will read the third novel in this series in the hopes that it will be as awesome as the first book. I hope I'm not disappointed again!

Recommendation: Not for the zombie lover, or those with an allergy to dramaful love stories. At this point, I would definitely stop after The Forest of Hands and Teeth.

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

See also:
Chrisbookarama
Shhh I'm Reading...
Book Addiction
Persnickety Snark
Devourer of Books

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

Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles, by Kira Henehan

This list of Novels I Don't Understand, Not One Bit is getting longer by the week! I picked this one up primarily because of the title, but also because the jacket copy made it sound like it could be a long-lost cousin of the Thursday Next series, which I adore.

However, Finley (the heroine of this story) has nothing on Thursday. Nothing at all. Unless she does, which I wouldn't know because I know next to nothing about Finley! She's a detective, of some sort, and she may or may not be Russian, and she may or may not be an amnesiac, and she definitely does not like puppets except for tiny ones, and... that's it, I think. That's what I've got.

And I might have given up on this book, except that unlike The Quickening Maze, there seemed to be at least some sort of discernable plot line — specifically that Finley was meant to be investigating a guy who makes puppets. I don't know why, even now, but it seemed like I might find out. But I didn't. I got to the end and there was a "reveal" that revealed NOTHING and I really have no idea what happened in this book. Like, at all. It is possible that I went temporarily insane during the read-a-thon and forgot how to read and that's why I don't understand this book... but it's probably actually the book's fault. Can someone come explain this to me? Please?

Recommendation: Read this book if you've ever thought to yourself, "I like Samuel Beckett, but there's just too much meaning in his works. I want something more abstract."

Rating: 5/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds

-makes face- -makes another face- -twitches-

I think we're going to have to file this one under Novels I Don't Understand, Not One Bit. My impetus for starting this book was the A to Z Challenge, but then the prologue was just so darn good and I thought, hey, this could be awesome. And then it was confusing and odd and more confusing, but those first three pages! Good! And so I continued on, hoping that maybe the book would start to make any sort of sense and it didn't and it was never as good as the beginning. -pout-

I can't even give you a summary of what this book is meant to be about. There's this guy, right, and he has an asylum, and people... live there? And they go about their lives? And they tend to be crazy? And then this guy what runs the asylum, he has a Plan for going into business, and he gets people to invest, and then it fails. I think. It's going to fail, anyway.

And one of the investors is Alfred Tennyson, whose brother is a patient at the asylum, and another patient is John Clare, who I didn't know was a poet but apparently he was pretty okay, so maybe this book is about poetry, right? And then that makes a lot of sense, because I don't understand poetry, either, usually. There are a couple of poems in the novel. Maybe that's something.

What really bothers me is that part of the Thing of this novel is that it's based on actual things that happened to Tennyson and Clare, but... you know... I feel like there are other, more interesting, things that one could write about the lives of poets. Is that it? Is this book about how even poets live crappy lives and get swindled? But I already knew that. Maybe the whole book is just an asylum fever-dream. I could get behind that.

I will offer again that the first three pages are beautifully written, and in fact much of the novel is made up of pretty words that make pretty sentences and paragraphs and whatnot. But I can't survive on pretty alone.

Recommendation: I recommend this novel only for perhaps historians who are very well versed in the histories of Tennyson and Clare, or maybe also for people who have been told the secret of what this book is about. If you're one of those people, could you share?

Rating: 5/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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 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.

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.

Tell-All, by Chuck Palahniuk

What a... very odd book. I'm not really sure what to say about it. I definitely would not have picked it up except that my book club is reading it this month, and I almost didn't want to read it anyway.

Maybe it's because I don't follow a lot of celebrity things and have never read a tell-all book, but I really really really hated all the name-dropping, made even more irritating by the fact that every proper noun was in bold face. It's mostly spread out, but every once in a while there's a sentence like, "By now, Lillian Hellman wraps two fists around the invisible throat of Adolf Hitler, reenacting how she sneaked into his subterranean Berlin bunker, dressed as Leni Riefenstahl, her arms laden with black-market cartons of Lucky Strike and Parliament cigarettes, and then throttled the sleeping dictator in his bed." And then I cry.

The really exciting bit (one might call it the plot) doesn't come until halfway through the book, but once it starts it's quite interesting. I was sure the book was going to end one way, and it sort of did but there was more to it that I had not at all anticipated. I like that. But I wouldn't read this again, or make you read it, either.

Rating: 5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Clue of the Broken Locket, by Carolyn Keene

It was kind of a bad idea to read this book basically immediately after reading In the Woods, but it was all I had left to read so that's what happened!

It's your average Nancy Drew story... we have doubles, and a sinking canoe, and someone trapped in a house... I could probably go on, but I just don't want to think about this too hard.

Sadly, I think I'm going to have to call it quits on the Nancy Drew Challenge. I've gotten through 11 of the 56, and I think the other 45 are just going to have to wait until next year. Or the year after. Or when I'm really old and can make my descendents read them to me — they are so much easier to take in audio form!

Rating: 5/10
(Nancy Drew Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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