Holy crap I read a lot of books this month! Sadly, that list includes the worst book I've ever read, but what can you do? It's gotta be read sometime.
I read a lot of thrillers this month because apparently it's "recommend thrillers" month everywhere, and they were mostly okay, except for the aforementioned worst book ever. I'm not sure what it is I don't like about thrillers, but I think I'll trade them in for more mysteries next month if I can find some good ones.
I also finished two challenges this month, holy crap again! I finished off my 45th book for the Countdown Challenge, which seemed to take forever! I had six of the years done by February and the seventh by May, but it took then two more months to finish off 2007 and 2009. The latter I understand, since I had to wait until January to start those, but I wonder why books from 2007 didn't make it to my list much.
The Chunkster Challenge is also officially finished, with six 450-page monsters finished. I'm going to keep listing books there until November, though, in case you find yourself hankering for giant book recommendations in the future.
Other things I did this month: I tried to start some discussions, but failed miserably! If you want to give me a months-early birthday present, you could go check them out.
Wisconsin Library Debate
On Serialized Novels
Alternately, you can tell me that you come here because I'm pretty and I should keep my non-book thoughts to myself. :)
Onto the numbers!
Days spent reading: 27
Books read: 15
...in fiction: 15
...in fantasy: 6
...in thriller: 4
...in speculative fiction: 3
...in historical: 1
...in mystery: 1
...in young adult: 2
...in children's: 4
Series reads: Codex Alera, Old Man's War, Harry Potter
Favorite book: The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster (Review) 9/10
Challenges
Countdown Challenge: +3 books for 45/45 Completed!
Summer Lovin' Challenge: +6 books for 6/10
Chunkster Challenge: +1 books for 6/6 Completed!
The Baker Street Challenge: +0 books for 0/3
My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge: +2 books for 3/12
Orbis Terrarum Challenge: +0 books for 8/10
31 July 2009
30 July 2009
Booking Through Thursday (30 July)
Today's Booking Through Thursday is a simple question, or is it? "What’s the funniest book you’ve read recently?"
Paging through my blog, I am noticing that I haven't read any, say, "officially" funny books in a while. The last set of humorous short stories I read was Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim back in May. It was pretty funny in parts, not so much in others, you know.
But in the category of "books that aren't only funny but have good chuckle-y parts" there's The Android's Dream, which was pretty entertaining and had me giggling at the sheer absurdity of it all.
Maybe I should read another "officially" funny book. Any recommendations?
Paging through my blog, I am noticing that I haven't read any, say, "officially" funny books in a while. The last set of humorous short stories I read was Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim back in May. It was pretty funny in parts, not so much in others, you know.
But in the category of "books that aren't only funny but have good chuckle-y parts" there's The Android's Dream, which was pretty entertaining and had me giggling at the sheer absurdity of it all.
Maybe I should read another "officially" funny book. Any recommendations?
Castle, by J. Robert Lennon (28 July)
This. Book. Was. Awful. Do not read this book. Do not pick up this book, because you will think that maybe it can redeem itself and you will be wrong but you will finish the book and then your brain will hurt and you will have nothing to say except that this book is awful.
I have no idea where I heard about this book. I searched my Google Reader archives — nothing. I checked a couple of non-RSS book review sites I read. Nothing. But somehow, sometime, I thought this book would be good. In fact, there are lots of glowing reviews of this book around the internets. They are wrong. I will now spoil the whole book for you so that you will not be tempted to read it.
From the beginning, this book was iffy for me. Lennon writes such sentences as, "It would please me to be able to say that I felt, upon my return to the house, a reprise of the confidence and enthusiasm that had braced me the previous day, when I announced to Jennifer that I wished to buy it." And he writes such sentences with alarming frequency. The narrator is basically that jerk in your freshman comp class who wanted to prove that he knew big words and as such threw them into his speech and papers all willy-nilly. But Lennon, a writing instructor himself (really), at least uses the big words correctly.
But I was at the beach, and it was the only book I had, and I knew that for whatever reason I had wanted to read the book, so I continued.
The premise is, at first, possibly interesting. Jerk-face Eric Loesch comes back to his childhood hometown and buys some land and a house. Yay. He then smugly fixes it up with his apparent expertise in all areas. Whatever. But then he's looking at the history of the house and notices that the previous owner's name is blacked out and also that there's a bit of land in the middle of his still owned by Redacted Man. He's curious. He bitches at some people to find out who this owner is, and eventually someone comes through for him with a name; Avery Stiles.
Loesch goes to the library (yay!) to find out more about Stiles; he finds out that Stiles's family is dead and that he used to work at a nearby university. Loesch then, for whatever reason, goes to the university to talk to a woman who wrote an article that mentioned Stiles to find out more about the man. He leaves. Also, he explores his giant 612-acre property to get to some giant rock formation in the middle but gets lost, which is an affront to his spectacular directional skillz. I hate Loesch.
Then some stupid stuff happens, and Loesch ends up back in the woods, searching for Stiles at Stiles's castle in his property in the middle of Loesch's property, and finds him, and gets all tied up by him, and then we find out that Loesch totally knows Stiles (uh, okay) because Stiles trained (read: tortured) Loesch for many years when Loesch was a kid, teaching him to only do what he was told and no more and leaving him naked in the same forest, at the same castle, and why on earth did Loesch ever act like he didn't know who owned this property???
And then Loesch escapes, sort of, and climbs the giant rock from before and Stiles is up there and then there's some sort of message passed between them that I don't understand, and then Stiles jumps off the rock but also Loesch looses an arrow at him that goes through his heart, so Stiles is totally dead. And then Loesch is suddenly terrified of the woods for whatever reason and tries to run back to his house but falls in a giant pit and then sees himself leaning over the rim and then flashes back to the time he was an officer at Abu Ghraib (well, not really, but a similar place) and he killed a kid prisoner and then he was indefinitely furloughed and then he came back to his childhood hometown.
And then we're back in the present, and Loesch is rescued from the woods and goes to the hospital and gets all fixed up and then he packs his duffel and then is picked up by someone who's probably a soldier and is off on a mission and then the book is done. The end.
If you can explain this book to me, please do. But I don't care enough to figure it out for myself.
Rating: 1/10
I have no idea where I heard about this book. I searched my Google Reader archives — nothing. I checked a couple of non-RSS book review sites I read. Nothing. But somehow, sometime, I thought this book would be good. In fact, there are lots of glowing reviews of this book around the internets. They are wrong. I will now spoil the whole book for you so that you will not be tempted to read it.
From the beginning, this book was iffy for me. Lennon writes such sentences as, "It would please me to be able to say that I felt, upon my return to the house, a reprise of the confidence and enthusiasm that had braced me the previous day, when I announced to Jennifer that I wished to buy it." And he writes such sentences with alarming frequency. The narrator is basically that jerk in your freshman comp class who wanted to prove that he knew big words and as such threw them into his speech and papers all willy-nilly. But Lennon, a writing instructor himself (really), at least uses the big words correctly.
But I was at the beach, and it was the only book I had, and I knew that for whatever reason I had wanted to read the book, so I continued.
The premise is, at first, possibly interesting. Jerk-face Eric Loesch comes back to his childhood hometown and buys some land and a house. Yay. He then smugly fixes it up with his apparent expertise in all areas. Whatever. But then he's looking at the history of the house and notices that the previous owner's name is blacked out and also that there's a bit of land in the middle of his still owned by Redacted Man. He's curious. He bitches at some people to find out who this owner is, and eventually someone comes through for him with a name; Avery Stiles.
Loesch goes to the library (yay!) to find out more about Stiles; he finds out that Stiles's family is dead and that he used to work at a nearby university. Loesch then, for whatever reason, goes to the university to talk to a woman who wrote an article that mentioned Stiles to find out more about the man. He leaves. Also, he explores his giant 612-acre property to get to some giant rock formation in the middle but gets lost, which is an affront to his spectacular directional skillz. I hate Loesch.
Then some stupid stuff happens, and Loesch ends up back in the woods, searching for Stiles at Stiles's castle in his property in the middle of Loesch's property, and finds him, and gets all tied up by him, and then we find out that Loesch totally knows Stiles (uh, okay) because Stiles trained (read: tortured) Loesch for many years when Loesch was a kid, teaching him to only do what he was told and no more and leaving him naked in the same forest, at the same castle, and why on earth did Loesch ever act like he didn't know who owned this property???
And then Loesch escapes, sort of, and climbs the giant rock from before and Stiles is up there and then there's some sort of message passed between them that I don't understand, and then Stiles jumps off the rock but also Loesch looses an arrow at him that goes through his heart, so Stiles is totally dead. And then Loesch is suddenly terrified of the woods for whatever reason and tries to run back to his house but falls in a giant pit and then sees himself leaning over the rim and then flashes back to the time he was an officer at Abu Ghraib (well, not really, but a similar place) and he killed a kid prisoner and then he was indefinitely furloughed and then he came back to his childhood hometown.
And then we're back in the present, and Loesch is rescued from the woods and goes to the hospital and gets all fixed up and then he packs his duffel and then is picked up by someone who's probably a soldier and is off on a mission and then the book is done. The end.
If you can explain this book to me, please do. But I don't care enough to figure it out for myself.
Rating: 1/10
29 July 2009
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling (25 July — 27 July)
My goodness, this book was long. How did I read this in one night when it first came out? A mystery of the universe, that.
So. HP4: A New Hope. Harry goes to the Quidditch World Cup, where quidditch happens but also some bad wizards do bad things and then the mark of the Bad Wizard shows up in the sky and everyone flips. Then, at Hogwarts, there is a Tri-Wizard Tournament going on with four champions — someone put Harry's name in the Goblet even though he's underage, and now Harry has to fight dragons and merpeople and a hedge maze. But, oops, at the end of the maze Harry gets transported to meet the Bad Wizard, who does some magic and is now scarier than ever. Then three more books happen.
A few days ago, I would have told you with absolute certainty that this is my favorite Harry Potter book. Now I'm not so sure. Azkaban may have beaten it this go round, and of course there are still three more books to go. But it was really long, and even though it was really long most of the scenes still felt truncated! I had forgotten just how short the World Cup really is, how little there is to the Tournament, how much I don't care about house-elves... bah.
But! I did like the fact that, knowing the story well, I could see how things would fit into the ending — Winky at the World Cup, Moody and his dustbins, Bartemius Crouch in Snape's office. And I like that all of the help Harry was getting was really part of the story, instead of convenient to the end (Dobby bringing Harry gillyweed vs. Ron's expertise at wizard chess).
Also, Fudge is an idiot. But more on that, sadly, later.
Rating: 7.5/10
(Summer Lovin' Challenge)
So. HP4: A New Hope. Harry goes to the Quidditch World Cup, where quidditch happens but also some bad wizards do bad things and then the mark of the Bad Wizard shows up in the sky and everyone flips. Then, at Hogwarts, there is a Tri-Wizard Tournament going on with four champions — someone put Harry's name in the Goblet even though he's underage, and now Harry has to fight dragons and merpeople and a hedge maze. But, oops, at the end of the maze Harry gets transported to meet the Bad Wizard, who does some magic and is now scarier than ever. Then three more books happen.
A few days ago, I would have told you with absolute certainty that this is my favorite Harry Potter book. Now I'm not so sure. Azkaban may have beaten it this go round, and of course there are still three more books to go. But it was really long, and even though it was really long most of the scenes still felt truncated! I had forgotten just how short the World Cup really is, how little there is to the Tournament, how much I don't care about house-elves... bah.
But! I did like the fact that, knowing the story well, I could see how things would fit into the ending — Winky at the World Cup, Moody and his dustbins, Bartemius Crouch in Snape's office. And I like that all of the help Harry was getting was really part of the story, instead of convenient to the end (Dobby bringing Harry gillyweed vs. Ron's expertise at wizard chess).
Also, Fudge is an idiot. But more on that, sadly, later.
Rating: 7.5/10
(Summer Lovin' Challenge)
28 July 2009
The Android's Dream, by John Scalzi (23 July — 25 July)
So, remember when I said that I'd never experienced a story/cover mismatch that bothered me? Well, now I have, and this is it. The Android's Dream cover looks like this, and there are absolutely no androids in the novel! I was expecting androids, people.
But that's not to say that this wasn't an excellent book, because it was. And it was a good way to break up the Harry Potter hullabaloo, even if it's really just jumping from one obsession to another (I love the Scalzi). And while it wasn't about androids, it was about sheep, which is apparently another Philip K. Dick reference I need to go learn about.
Anyway. This is one of those books where the first lines just really set the tone for the story, so here they are: "Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out."
Yes, really. And he does succeed, though perhaps not in the way he thought he would, and it falls to the State Department of Earth to rectify the slight against the Nidu race, one of their closest allies. Oh, dear. To do so, the Earth's government must find and procure one sheep of the Android's Dream variety (with electric blue wool, of course) for the Nidu ruler's coronation ceremony, which cannot happen without such a sheep. Unfortunately, someone out there knows this and has been killing all such sheep. But then Harris Creek and his truly intelligent computer (which has the brain of Harris's long-dead best friend, no, really) find the last remaining sheep, which is good, but Creek and the sheep are being well followed by some people who would like to see the sheep gone. So they go on a cruise. Really. And there's more, but then you'd just get confused and not read this book, and I strongly advise against that.
This book is really funny and packed with pop-culture references of awesome and is in that spectrum of weird where, sure, this story could totally happen, maybe. I call it perfect light reading for these oddly cold summer days.
Rating: 8/10
But that's not to say that this wasn't an excellent book, because it was. And it was a good way to break up the Harry Potter hullabaloo, even if it's really just jumping from one obsession to another (I love the Scalzi). And while it wasn't about androids, it was about sheep, which is apparently another Philip K. Dick reference I need to go learn about.
Anyway. This is one of those books where the first lines just really set the tone for the story, so here they are: "Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out."
Yes, really. And he does succeed, though perhaps not in the way he thought he would, and it falls to the State Department of Earth to rectify the slight against the Nidu race, one of their closest allies. Oh, dear. To do so, the Earth's government must find and procure one sheep of the Android's Dream variety (with electric blue wool, of course) for the Nidu ruler's coronation ceremony, which cannot happen without such a sheep. Unfortunately, someone out there knows this and has been killing all such sheep. But then Harris Creek and his truly intelligent computer (which has the brain of Harris's long-dead best friend, no, really) find the last remaining sheep, which is good, but Creek and the sheep are being well followed by some people who would like to see the sheep gone. So they go on a cruise. Really. And there's more, but then you'd just get confused and not read this book, and I strongly advise against that.
This book is really funny and packed with pop-culture references of awesome and is in that spectrum of weird where, sure, this story could totally happen, maybe. I call it perfect light reading for these oddly cold summer days.
Rating: 8/10
27 July 2009
Musing Mondays (27 July)
Today's Musing Mondays question is: "Do you have an account with an online book database site (LibraryThing, Shelfari, GoodReads etc)? If so, do you have a preference? Do you use it for - your own record keeping? finding new books to read? social networking?"
I do have a LibraryThing account, very new and exciting! I don't know anything about the other services, but I really like this one. I'm using it mostly for record-keeping at the moment because I don't really know anything about any other aspect of the site; if you have things to share, let me know! I do very much like being able to keep track of the books I have, especially being able to tag books and add them to my "unread" library. I tend to forget that I have unread books on my shelves; maybe this will help!
I do have a LibraryThing account, very new and exciting! I don't know anything about the other services, but I really like this one. I'm using it mostly for record-keeping at the moment because I don't really know anything about any other aspect of the site; if you have things to share, let me know! I do very much like being able to keep track of the books I have, especially being able to tag books and add them to my "unread" library. I tend to forget that I have unread books on my shelves; maybe this will help!
26 July 2009
On Serialized Novels
In case you haven't noticed, my "pile I'm reading" sidebar has two books that have links on them, Makers and Dracula. These are the two serialized novels I'm currently reading and the first ones I've ever read as they were serialized. I have, of course, read a few Victorian serials in my life as an English major, but those were already put together as books! So what's with this return to the serial?
While I sit around and read books cover-to-cover all the time, I know that there are employed people out there with less time on their hands for whom reading a quick blog post is much easier than picking up a book. There are also people, of which I was one while employed, who have some downtime at work but can't be seen reading a book. To the internet!
An interesting thing is that I'm reading these two novels in serialized form for entirely different reasons. Dracula is a book that I've always meant to read, but never wanted to enough to just sit down and read it. Makers is an entirely new book that will be published as a whole in October but is being serialized from now until January. I started reading it because it's by Cory Doctorow and I enjoyed Little Brother, and now I'm reading it because I'm curious about Doctorow's vision of the future even if I think the book kind of stinks. And I can do that, because a new installment only comes out every other day and there are lots of other things I'm reading in between installments.
On the reading experience: Makers is easier to follow along, because installments come out regularly and are a chapter long each time. Dracula, the original novel, is epistolary and the blog version has a new post for each letter, with dates matching up in "real time" as it were. So near the beginning there were lots of journal entries from Jonathan Harker; right about now I've been reading many shorter entries from other characters. I think the blog is a great conceit, but some of the entries are so far apart, and the topics so disparate, that I have no idea what's going on!
What do you guys think? Are you interested in serialized novels? Can you keep track of the action? Is there a book you've put down that you might read as a serial? Is there a serial you've stopped reading that you would have preferred as a book? Is your RSS reader too clogged up already?
While I sit around and read books cover-to-cover all the time, I know that there are employed people out there with less time on their hands for whom reading a quick blog post is much easier than picking up a book. There are also people, of which I was one while employed, who have some downtime at work but can't be seen reading a book. To the internet!
An interesting thing is that I'm reading these two novels in serialized form for entirely different reasons. Dracula is a book that I've always meant to read, but never wanted to enough to just sit down and read it. Makers is an entirely new book that will be published as a whole in October but is being serialized from now until January. I started reading it because it's by Cory Doctorow and I enjoyed Little Brother, and now I'm reading it because I'm curious about Doctorow's vision of the future even if I think the book kind of stinks. And I can do that, because a new installment only comes out every other day and there are lots of other things I'm reading in between installments.
On the reading experience: Makers is easier to follow along, because installments come out regularly and are a chapter long each time. Dracula, the original novel, is epistolary and the blog version has a new post for each letter, with dates matching up in "real time" as it were. So near the beginning there were lots of journal entries from Jonathan Harker; right about now I've been reading many shorter entries from other characters. I think the blog is a great conceit, but some of the entries are so far apart, and the topics so disparate, that I have no idea what's going on!
What do you guys think? Are you interested in serialized novels? Can you keep track of the action? Is there a book you've put down that you might read as a serial? Is there a serial you've stopped reading that you would have preferred as a book? Is your RSS reader too clogged up already?
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