The Ring of Solomon, by Jonathan Stroud

Okay, so, we've already established that I heart Bartimaeus. I find him delightful and wonderful and lovely and all sorts of other good adjectives. But it turns out that I like him a heck of a lot more when compared to lesser beings rather than when he's just being awesome all the time. It's kind of like how you can't wait for summer to come and be warm all the time, until summer gets there and you're sweltering and envisioning snowball fights.

So, yeah. This is, I guess, the fourth Bartimaeus book, though it's not directly related to the other three except for its protagonist. This one takes place in the time of Solomon, who is the boss of a magician who is the boss of Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus is all collecting ice and stuff until such point as he meets a wannabe assassin called Asmira, whom he rescues and convinces to convince his boss to free him. Well, the boss "frees" him into a bottle where he's meant to stay trapped, but then Asmira summons him up all magician-like and then instead of letting him be free she coerces him to help her kill Solomon.

The plot is definitely excellent, with the intrigue and the subterfuge and the awesome. But while I enjoyed Bartimaeus and his trickery, I couldn't have cared less about Asmira, who is quite possibly dumber than Nathaniel and not nearly as entertaining when bad things happen to her, because who cares?

On the plus side, I'm still also in heart with the narrator, Simon Jones, and his soothing voice got me through several hours of stickers and data entry. So... yeah. It's a fun read, even if you haven't read the other books, but I wouldn't say it's as good as the trilogy proper. So go read that instead.

Recommendation: For fans of fantastical swashbuckling, and of Bartimaeus.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge, What's in a Name 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)

The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, by Trenton Lee Stewart

Here's another series that I'm enjoying on audiobook... I listened to the first book about a month ago and have just now gotten to this first sequel. It's definitely great for work because the plot is quite simple so there's not too much stopping and going back any time my work area gets too loud or I have to go chat someone up.

The idea of this book is the same as its predecessor... children who are very smart and talented in different ways work together to solve seemingly insurmountable problems. But whereas in the first book this idea was set against a plot of trying to take down an evil genius from inside his base of operations, here the plot is a bit... weaker. The same evil genius is back, and he's kidnapped the titular Benedict, but for the most part his existence and actions are just there to give the story a time limit of sorts. The real plot follows a path of puzzles that Benedict had laid out for the children to follow for funsies, before he got all kidnapped and whatnot.

This plot is both better and worse than the one before it. Better, because I liked the puzzling parts and enjoyed having more of them to try to solve myself (where possible). Worse, because outside of the puzzles there is very little to this book. The characters do their thing, I guess, but it's not terribly interesting.

But! The puzzles are generally interesting, and some of the scenarios the characters find themselves in are in fact intriguing, and if you're listening to this book while doing something else you can skip all the boring parts. Sweet!

Recommendation: Good if you like puzzles!

Rating: 7/10

One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, by Jasper Fforde

Jasper! It has been so long! And even longer back to the last Thursday Next! I have missed you so much.

Okay, soooooooooooo. I tried explaining this book to my husband, but it is in fact quite difficult to explain without the help of five previous novels to get across the whole BookWorld concept. But, basically, there is a BookWorld and it is inhabited by all the characters of all the books you ever or never read, and whenever you read a book these characters are like, "Oh, time to pop on stage!" and act out your book. This is why books are slightly different every time you read them, see? It makes perfect sense.

Hanyway, we found out in the afore-linked last novel that the Thursday Next books have been published within the world of Thursday Next, but they're not the same as the ones we here in our world have been reading, and the chick what plays Thursday is not... not really Thursday-ish. She's kind of a hippie rather than a badass. Nonetheless, in this book the written Thursday gets a big taste of real Thursday life when not only does a strange book-crash (I cannot explain that) mystery leads her to, among other things, find out that Real Thursday is totes missing, which is a problem on many levels.

I thought this entry was brilliant, possibly because I've been severely lacking Fforde in my life recently and possibly because this book was much tighter, I think, than others in the series, and more subtle (especially compared to the last). I also loved that it's from the point of view of a written Thursday, and therefore gives us more insight into the BookWorld, which is decidedly less complicated than the real Thursday's world, and also more predictable but predictably amusing. Because the book has a different protagonist and all, I would say it's difficult to read this without having read the others, but I don't think impossible.

Worrisome is the fact that the book wraps a lot of things up quite nicely, which leads me to think that all of the Thursdays might be getting shelved soon, though if it's in favor of new and exciting series I might be okay with this.

Recommendation: If you like literature and you like satire, this satire of literature is for you. But you should probably start back at the beginning for optimum effect.

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Ptolemy's Gate, by Jonathan Stroud

Eep! Oh, hey again, Bartimaeus, back so soon? I suppose that's what happens when your story is so good...

Soooooo in this book, we've popped forward in time a bit again. Nathaniel is as insufferable as ever, Bartimaeus is sick of suffering him, and Kitty is a burgeoning magician. Wait, what? Yeah.

Story-wise... hold on, I'm going to have to look this up. Doo doo doo. Oh. Right. Okay, so there's a war on in America, and Nathaniel is the new minister in charge of making up stuff that gets people to sign on to fight in the war. That's a fun job. But of course, people aren't happy and there's civil unrest and whatnot. Also, more non-magic types are discovering a resistance to magic that lets them escape demons unharmed or see them even while they're disguised. Not terribly useful for the magicians. Also, Nathaniel is alerted to the suspicious actions of some lower-level government types and goes to investigate. This last bit is the important one, but I quite enjoyed seeing how it all played out so I won't say any more.

Now, if I had been reading this book in print, I have to say I might have given up on it. Most of it is wonderful and up to par with the rest of the series, for sure. But somewhere in the last third of the book, Stroud goes off on what seemed, listening to it, to be a long and tedious tangent about the "Other Place" where demons spend their time when not being enslaved. I was interested to know what it was like, sure, but after just a few sentences of description, I was like, okay, I get it, let's move on? Please? There's also a lot of metaphor and meaning imbued into this Other Place, and I would have at least put the book down and walked away after a few pages of that.

But luckily, I was listening to it at work, which meant I could just ignore the book for a bit and focus on the other tedium around me. :) Then, when the action kicked back in, I was ready to go! Of course, when the end happened, I may have become a bit less productive... I won't say it's an especially good ending, but it was very satisfying. Unlike a few other series I could name...

Recommendation: This series is totally worth your time. Go read it now.

Rating: 8/10 (though the series is a 9 on the whole)

The Golem's Eye, by Jonathan Stroud

Hullo again, Bartimaeus! You are my good friend. Let us hang out.

This book picks up a couple of years after the Amulet Incident, with our hero Nathaniel/John Mandrake using his saving-the-prime-minister karma to move himself up in government. Yes, that's right, our idealistic young magician has grown up into an ambitious but uninspired slightly-less-young magician. I really dislike Nathaniel (pretty sure I'm supposed to, so that's good!).

But! Lucky for me, he breaks his not-summoning-Bartimaeus-anymore promise and my favorite djinni is around to make sarcastic remarks in Nathaniel's direction, which really makes the kid more tolerable. Also interesting, if expected, in this book is the introduction of Kitty Jones, who was in the previous book briefly as a petty magical-stuff thief and returns as a more practiced and awesome magical-stuff thief.

The first part of that last sentence is important; I absolutely loved the first book in this series because it went against every fantasy trope that I anticipated. This book, less so. Lots of fairly obvious things happen, and things that you know are going to be important later are totally important later.

But! I loved the story nonetheless. Kitty's in a group called the Resistance that is made up of non-magicians and is out to undermine the magician ruling class. Nathaniel/Mandrake is charged with stopping the Resistance. Someone else is wreaking major havoc on London and blaming on the Resistance, but Nathaniel's pretty sure it's more sinister than that. And, of course, it is. Love it.

Recommendation: Oh, really, just read this series. Unless you don't like magic or fantasy. No, even if! You might like this!

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Dead Man's Folly, by Agatha Christie

I am slowly working my way through Christie's novels in a quite haphazard fashion... this one I had originally picked up because it was the only Christie audiobook at the library, but I ended up reading it in print from the beginning after the CDs were too damaged to play and the book took so long in getting to me that I had forgotten all the important bits! Dedicated, I am. Sort of.

I say this both to impress you and to impress upon you that I have read/listened to this book 1.5 times, and still when I got to the ending I was like... what. It is possible, I suppose, that a keen mind could have pieced together the clues that led to this ending, but mine was not that mind. Alas.

The story is delightful — Christie brings in her alter-ego, Ariadne Oliver, who is off at some rich person's house concocting a murder mystery event. Things get weird, so Oliver contrives to enlist the help of our good friend Poirot, whose moustaches are fine indeed. Oliver tells Poirot that things are hinky and that she's worried that her murder mystery puzzle will turn into a true murder mystery, but Poirot writes off her intuition. Until, of course, someone turns up dead. And someone else doesn't turn up, missing. Sacre bleu!

There are a ton of characters in this novel, and therefore many suspects, and I felt things got a little busy trying to sort out how everyone was related and all of their backstories and whatnot. And a lot of the actual mystery solving takes place off-page, Holmes-style, which was a little disappointing. But regardless, Christie writes a fine mystery and even though I was a bit baffled by the solution, it still affected me as it should. And how can you argue with her wonderful descriptions? You can't.

All in all a successful story. Which should I read next?

Recommendation: For anyone who likes a classic whodunnit.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge, Vintage Mystery Challenge)