Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach

Ah, Mary Roach. It's been awhile. How you been? Oh, you've been gallivanting around the world talking to astronauts and wannabe astronauts and chimponauts and people who pretend to be astronauts for SCIENCE? Tell me more!

And she does! There is much more than I would have guessed to tell about space, that final frontier and whatnot. Some of it I had heard before, like the bit about how a certain president was not a fan of lady astronauts, and oddly some of it I heard on a podcast referencing Packing for Mars after I had started the book but before I got to the part they referenced. That was odd.

Other bits I had not heard but made sense, and were kind of intriguing, like the whole chimps in space program and how it totally ruined the start of our space race and how at one point there was a human testing a spacesuit to see if it was humane for chimps, except that the point of the chimp wearing the spacesuit was to see if it was safe for humans. Oh, science. And the part where she goes off to Japan to visit their astronaut training camp or whatever and you find out that Japanese astronaut candidates have to fold 1000 paper cranes for luck and psychological testing. On that basis alone, I am not cut out to be an astronaut.

And, of course, in true Mary Roach fashion, there were also bits about sex in space and poop in space that I didn't know I didn't need to know until I knew them. Darn her! Suffice it to say that it is difficult to do both, and so NASA at least tries to avoid them when at all possible. Also, you shouldn't talk about your poo problems on a live microphone. For your sake AND everyone else's.

I'm wondering if my lack of love for Spook is content-based or narrator-based, because the woman who narrates this one also did Bonk and I liked the latter equally as much as this current one. I think this narrator has an excellent blend of "Wow, did you know this?" and "Wow, did you need to know this?" and sometimes, "Wow, you definitely don't need to know this but it's written down so I'm gonna have to tell you anyway," like when Roach writes about her lack of knowledge about body odor in the crotchal region, not for lack of trying ew. Sorry. I heard it, so you have to, too!

I promise most of the other fun facts in this book are actually fun, and it's about space! I really don't think you can go wrong.

Recommendation: For lovers of SCIENCE and crazy people who write about science and obscure factoids disguised as science.

Rating: 8/10

(What's in a Name Challenge)

Space space wanna go to space yes please space. Space space. Go to space.
Better buy a telescope. Wanna see me. Buy a telescope. Gonna be in space.
I’m in space.

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

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle (11 September — 12 September)

A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite books as a kid, probably because it has a cool girl protagonist and also a super-smart five-year-old, both of which I wanted to be/have been. :) I re-read it once in undergrad and I remember liking it, but I don't remember it going by so fast! I think I was also reading lots of the A Series of Unfortunate Events books at the time, so it probably didn't feel so rushed.

Anyway! Like you don't know (and if you don't, you should fix this immediately!), this book is about a girl called Meg Murry who has the hard life of any teenager, plus a little bit: she hates school, she's constantly picked on and getting in fights, and her dad has disappeared amongst rumors that he's left his wife for another woman. Fun! Meg doesn't believe that last one, so when her super-smart little brother, Charles Wallace, introduces her to some crazy old ladies who say they can help get Mr. Murry back, she's game. But, of course, this adventure requires some space-folding and other-planet-visiting and moral-learning.

Reading it now, I can see some problems with the book: namely, everything seems to happen in the span of a day and there's no time to digest what's happening before something else happens. And the moral-learning part is more than a little heavy-handed. But I think it's perfect younger young adult reading and the images of the book (especially the sameness of everything on Camazotz) have stuck with me since childhood, so that's a point in L'Engle's favor.

Rating: 8/10
(Summer Lovin' Challenge, My Year of Reading Dangerously)

See also:
Library Queue
Rhinoa's Ramblings

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

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (11 August)

I read this series of books for the first time in my senior year of high school (about five and a half years ago), after meeting a person who carried a towel around with him and asking him just why that was. He explained it was a Hitchhiker's Guide thing, to which I said, approximately, "A who in the what now?" Well. I promptly purchased the full five-book trilogy (um, yes) and devoured it within a couple weeks. Maybe just one. Maybe it was a few days. I don't remember, but it was rather quickly.

When I mentioned to my friend Nick (not the towel-carrier, in case that's not clear) a few weeks ago that I was going to re-read them, he warned me that they wouldn't hold up well to a second reading. I doubted him, but he was mostly right, at least with this first one. We'll see how the rest go, I suppose.

For those still going, "A who in the what now?", The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a British humor novel about travelling the galaxy. Sort of. The story starts off with our main protagonist, Arthur Dent, finding out that his house is going to be demolished by the local planning commission to make room for a bypass. He is understandably displeased, and has a lie-down in front the bulldozers to protect his house, at least until his friend Ford Prefect shows up to lead him off to the pub and inform him that the world is going to end in about twenty minutes. Then the Earth is vaporized. Meanwhile, we meet Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Imperial Galactic Government, who, at the unveiling of a fancy new spaceship that he then steals. Then Ford and Arthur have a series of improbable adventures, having managed to hitch a ride on the spaceship that eliminated the Earth, and eventually meet up with Zaphod and have more improbable adventures.

There's not much of a plot, and the humor really depends on its unexpectedness, which is where the book falls apart on a second read. It's still funny, but not nearly as much so as it was five years ago. Alas.

Rating: 8/10
(Summer Lovin' Challenge)

See also:
Book Nut

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

Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card (7 August — 8 August)

I found this book in the adult sci-fi section of my library, even though the back of the book clearly states "for ages 10 and up." I'm not sure what the librarians are trying to say here. :) Also, the back of the book totally spoiled the end for me, so I suggest not reading that if you can help it.

So. In this story our hero is a young boy, whom we meet when he is six and selected to go to something called Battle School. This turns out to be a place where other small children battle each other in preparation for joining armies and fighting bad guys in the future. The people in charge think that Ender's going to be their savior in fighting some aliens called buggers, so they isolate him from making friends and push him ridiculously hard. He takes it as much in stride as he can and becomes a pretty good fighter-type.

You'd think that would be the story, really, considering how many pages are spent on it, but the actual story happens after that, and in the span of not very many pages. But if I sum up the actual story, I'll give it away.

That's pretty much why I'm giving this book a low score; I was interested in the beginning of the book but all of that plot doesn't really matter to the end except that it gives Ender some experiences to draw on. And then after that, everything happens really quickly and it's all kind of weird. I didn't like the bugger fight, I didn't care for the side plot with Ender's siblings, and I was incredibly confused by the Giant's Drink part at the end. Very very confused. I still don't get it, though I guess I understand what happened now, after consulting the internets. Meh.

Rating: 6/10

See also:
Library Queue
Trish's Reading Nook

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

Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi (5 July — 6 July)

I didn't intend to re-read this book so soon... but as mentioned in my last post, I was on vacation and ran out of books! I had brought this book just for Scott to read, which he did and of course he loved it, but when our plane got held up in a taxi line in Atlanta, I "resigned" myself to reading it.

In case you don't remember, I read this book in December and enjoyed it enough to go back to the beginning of the series and read the other three. Then, when I got to The Last Colony, I thought it might have been better to have read this one last. Well, now that I've read it both first and last, as it were, I would definitely say it's better read last. It certainly stands alone and is awesome at it, but it makes infinitely more sense having read the first three books. Especially I would recommend reading The Last Colony and Zoe's Tale in quick succession, because the story is so much fuller that way.

Also, I cried again, at the same two points in the story, so either I have overactive tear ducts or Scalzi is a damn fine writer. Possibly both.

Rating: 8/10, again, because it's still excellent!
(Summer Lovin' Challenge)

The Last Colony, by John Scalzi (19 March — 20 March)

Another good book! Hooray!

This is the last book for me (but not the actual last book) of the Old Man's War series. I started with the previously linked book and then went back to the beginning to see what I'd missed. A lot, apparently. :)

Anyway, this book tells the last story of the original trilogy, which is the formation of the colony of Roanoke — aptly named. John Perry and Jane Sagan, our friends from the previous books, are put in charge of the colonization as it is being done not by humans from Earth, as is the usual MO, but by previous colonists, a first for the Colonial Union. John and Jane have to convince 2500 people of 10 different homeworlds to like each other, and it's not easy. And, of course, when they do start figuring it out, other things come in to play, like the fact that the Colonial Union has been lying to everyone about the nature of the colony. And that there're some people out there who want to destroy the colony. And that maybe it's okay if that happens. Oh boy.

This was very interesting to read after reading Zoe's Tale, since that book is just a retelling of this one from Zoe's point of view. I can see why Scalzi wanted to write that second one... although this story is very good in and of itself, there are a lot of weird jumps and convenient things happening that I could forgive because I knew what happened by having read the other book. If I did it again, though, I'd read them in order.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi (6 March — 8 March)

I finished up this book really early this morning (really, how does one wake up at 7:30 EDT on the first day of Daylight Savings when she doesn't usually wake up until 8 or 9 in the first place?), and I must say that I was pretty much ready to move on once I did. I liked the book, for sure, but it suffers from that second-book-in-a-series problem of wanting to keep the story moving but also wanting to get people ready for a third book. And maybe I'm too ready for the third book, since the book that started me on this whole thing (the fourth in the series) is a retelling of it.

But it was good! Scalzi abandons John Perry for the moment to focus on Jane Sagan and, more particularly, a new Special Forces soldier called Jared Dirac. Dirac is special because he was created to house the consciousness of one Charles Boutin, who turned traitor on humanity but conveniently left a copy of his consciousness behind (he does consciousness research, it's not that far-fetched...). It doesn't take, and Dirac is just trained as a new SF recruit under Sagan, who knows his history and is understandably upset and skeptical about his abilities.

Thus the first half of the book takes a good look at the Special Forces (also called the Ghost Brigades) and what it means to be part of it, with lots of speculation about the soullessness of both the Special Forces soldiers and those who made them. Then, when (spoiler alert?) Dirac finally unlocks a bit of Boutin's consciousness, it's time to go track down the traitor and figure out whether Dirac or Boutin or anyone, really, is the ethical person in this shenanigan.

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 4/10
(Chunkster Challenge)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi (7 December — 11 December)

I'd seen this book making its way around the various blogs I read, and everyone seemed to like it, so I picked it up from the library. It's not quite what I was expecting, but it was definitely good.

This is a book in Scalzi's Old Man's War series, but I haven't read those so I can't comment too much on how it fits in, except that Scalzi writes in his acknowledgements that the book runs parallel to the events of The Last Colony. Sweet, I guess?

This novel is the story of Zoë Boutin Perry, a teenager who is part of the first colony of colonists — where her planet was settled by people from Earth, she and a bunch of people from other planets are settling a new one. The problems start when the Colonial Union, who is sanctioning this colonization, informs the travellers that they are being hunted by a group called the Conclave who don't want anybody but themselves colonizing anything.

Things get worse from there, with all of the colonists forced to give up on electronics (gasp!) and the weird animals of the new planet — Roanoke — trying to kill the settlers and vice versa. Zoë is also told by her bodyguards (read the book!) that she may personally be being hunted, so she has to step up for some intensive combat training in addition to school and founding a civilization without a PDA.

I liked the book quite a bit; it was very light-hearted and definitely sounded like it was narrated by a teenager. And Scalzi really makes the characters real. I had cried twice by the end of the book, and I don't care what you think! I will definitely have to pick up Old Man's War at some point in the future.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell (9 September − 13 September)

Read this book. Seriously.

The Sparrow mostly follows the story of Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest who, through coincidences (or God's work?) ends up on a mission to a just-discovered planet near Alpha Centauri. The book follows two timelines, one starting when Sandoz returns to Earth, as the last surviving member of the crew, several years after some very embarrassing and horrifying information about Sandoz has made its own way back. He is to report on the mission to his superiors, but has to get over what happened to him before he can face the other priests.

The other timeline starts back at the beginning, with the events leading up to the discovery of the planet, then details the mission and what happens after the crew lands on Rakhat. This second timeline slowly fills in the large number of blanks left in the first, and helps make Sandoz's alleged crimes understandable.

I don't want to be too specific here, because a lot of what I loved about the book was the way Russell would bring in a fact without explanation, causing me to say, "What? When did that happen? Why?" and then a little while later the narrative would answer my question.

I loved this book a whole ridiculous bunch. It's an interesting take on what would happen if we found life on another planet and went out to meet it, and if meeting that life would go just how we might expect it. I'm a big fan of the dual timeline, and Russell uses this to her great advantage.

The one thing I didn't like terribly much is that the ending happens so fast − you spend a lot of time leisurely following the stories and then all of a sudden Russell is throwing in forced exposition in order to tie up the story. I would gladly have read another hundred pages (the book is about 400); the rushed ending was unnecessary and made the religious tie-ins at the end seem a bit trite.

Rating: 9.5/10