cahn | Entries tagged with books:short-review

Okay, thanks to a suggestion by

julianyap, I'm going to try something new. I usually don't post about books unless I can write a long rant, but I'm going to try in addition posting a little bit about every book I read (except maybe the ones I don't finish).

Antsy Does Time (Shusterman): Fun and quirky (for example, a character called "Skaterdud") and darker than it first appears. YA. I liked!

Speeding Bullet (Shusterman): Less fun than Antsy. Judith Krantz for the YA crowd, gone somewhat-darkly wrong.

Photographing the Southwest, Vol 2: Arizona (Martres): These books rock. Arizona is beautiful, and this book is probably worth it for the pics of slot canyons alone. Though I think I might prefer Utah overall.

Throne of Jade (Novik): I thought I had this book on hold for, like, a year. Then it turned out I hadn't actually put it on hold. Anyway. Liked it, actually better than Her Majesty's Dragon (which I also liked quite a bit), except for the ending, where we find out that the villianous guy... is actually a villain. Whee.

Mothers and Other Monsters (McHugh): SF/mainstreamy-ish. These are really, really good stories, most of which broke my heart.

lightreads and

julianyap spring to mind as people who might like them.

nolly: Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer... etc.: Awesome. This is what graphic novels were meant for. (Well, in the nonfiction category, anyway.) This should be required reading for anyone who is interested in science/physics and the ways in which it interacts with society/politics. (And who, like me, is too lazy to actually read a non-graphic biography.) Also, YAY primary sources! My only complaint was that the changing artistic styles sometimes made it so that I could no longer tell who was who, but that may just be my non-artsy side showing up.

ase: Y: The Last Man (vols 3-10): So, Y did some good stuff. Then... they lost me by being one of those plot-heavy books that does not explain well a huge chunk of the plot. (Other contenders in this area include Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars series, which sucked that way, and Series of Unfortunate Events, which actually won huge points with me by managing to pull it off.) Still, a graphic novel worth reading if you can find it at the library. Better than V for Vendetta; I still like Watchmen better.

julianyap: Sean Stewart (Galveston, Mockingbird): I am intrigued by Stewart. I also suspect I need to come back to him in a couple of years. Lots of interesting family stuff (Galveston in particular hauled me in with its parent/child relationships), and he's clearly a good writer, but somehow it never quite all clicked for me. Mockingbird, I think, had the problem that I thought the main character was being a little... silly. Galveston had no such problem... if anything, maybe I identified a bit too much with the main female character.

lightreads and

abigail_n: Joe Hill (20th-Century Ghosts). I don't usually read horror. I think I will continue not to. The non-horror dark-fantasy stories in this volume (e.g., the title story and "Pop Art") were really well done. The horror stories were also well done, though I personally have a much harder time with horror in general. Still, if you like that kind of thing, I very much recommend the book.

-The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series (Alexander McCall Smith). I thought I wouldn't like these, as I rarely like cult classics, but I'm quite pleased with these. (

joyce (um, if you haven't read these... I seem to remember they weren't on your latest list of series, anyway), there are (as of my current reading) no murders! The books affirm the positivity of human behavior rather than the negative side! These are the books you were looking for!) The mysteries are, admittedly, not of the "gather clues and work out the puzzle" sort-- more the psychological/procedural "here's how we figured out what was going on and what to do about it," and aren't novel-length mysteries for the most part, which I actually liked quite a lot (though I'm glad the puzzle sort exist as well).

-Collected Stories (Alfred Bester). This Bester only counts as light because a) he's old and b) these are short stories. I seem to have read a bunch of these, one way or another, when I was younger, but they're a lot better than I remember (much like Austen, whom I didn't much care for in the sixth grade when I was too young to realize how howlingly funny and sarcastic she is). Bester is right up there for me. Love him almost as much as my hero Cordwainer Smith. Well, maybe half as much.

-Unnatural Death (Sayers). I was under the vague impression I wasn't such a big fan of Sayers' mystery novels before Strong Poison. Now that I've read this one, I may have to rethink that whole concept. It's still true that Lord Peter is a bit of a two-dimensional donkey in this one, but he does show signs of growing a personality someday, and Parker is brilliant, and Sayers' sense of humor is on grand display here. And I utterly, utterly adore Miss Climpson. I liked it a lot.

-Dante's Daughter (Heuston). I loved this one, but I love Dante, and I love the Divine Comedy, so I feel I can't speak at all unbiasedly about it. I loved it because it showed Dante as the man I think (from reading the Divine Comedy) he must have been-- full of life and passion, a great man in both his virtues and his flaws (of which he was the first to agree he had many). I am annoyed that ( Rather mild spoilers for history and epilogue ), but that's just my squeamishness showing through, I think. I'm super squeamish about my characters sometimes. Also, I enjoyed the shout-out to Mormons. I'm a sucker for secret allusions, too.

Yup, still on the hold list for Sons of Heaven. Someday...

Also, I am totally, totally lusting after an amazon Kindle. But early adopters Do Not Rule! I have to keep telling myself that (as I play with my clunky first-generation iPod-- um, that was a gift, by the way!)

-Ben Hur. Kid made us watch this over Christmas so then of course I had to read the book! It was okay. I love how all the Jews in the story, including Mary, have blond hair and blue eyes. I do have to say that the motivations of characters were a little better expressed in the book than in the movie, but I'll cut them some slack for having to keep it to 4 hours or so :)

-The King Must Die, Mary Renault. This book is awesome cool. When we had late Christmas with D's family, the house we rented in CO had this book, which I picked up because i thought I'd heard of it before. It's the story of Theseus, told in a way that tries to make sense of the myth. That is, there is very little in the way of supernatural events, and mythic elements are explained in a more-or-less naturalistic way -- although obviously the main characters believe that events are caused by the gods, etc. For example, the Minotaur is not a supernatural bull-man from a god/woman mating, but rather refers to a bull mask worn in a ritualistic setting. At the same time, the mindset is weird and cool -- very much concerned with fate and the responsibility of kings (in particular, their responsibility to sacrifice themselves for their people). Really, really enjoyed this.

Just got the sequel from the library. I'm not sure if she really meant to write a sequel at the time she wrote the first book... well, we'll see how good it is. I suspect it won't be nearly as good, though.

-Honor Harrington (David Weber) - So while I was feeling really tired, I needed some mindless candy to read, and this is it. The first time I started these, a couple of years ago, I could not deal with them at all, because they were touted as something a Vorkosigan-lover would like. Well, they're not in the Slightest like Bujold, unless you mean "set in space," which is I guess what they did mean. Two-dimensional paper-flat characters, and the main character (who is beautiful-in-an-unconventional-way and smart and talented and etc.) has a sentient animal sidekick, which cracks me up every time I think about it -- but the plots are kind of fun, and the two-dimensionality means that you never have to worry about whom to root for.

Oops, gotta go to lunch. Stay tuned for theological-ish books (Confessions of St Augustine, What St Paul Said About Women, and What St Paul Really Said, all of which I recommend highly!)

So when I went home I got much of my Ford (not his Trek books, I'm not sure how they got missed, and Scholars of Night, which is I-don't-know-where, and Fugue State, which I have given up hope of understanding) and brought them back with me and had me a nice little orgy of rereading. The Dragon Waiting I have in CA and have thus already reread.

-The Last Hot Time: I've only read this twice or three times now, so I'm still at the stage where there are whole plot elements that I'm still discovering. (This is part of why I love Ford -- each book contains at least three rereads worth of plot!) I like it a lot better than I did on first reading, possibly as a result of now understanding (most of) what is going on.

-Growing Up Weightless: I like this less than I did when I first read it... I know all the other Ford fans like this a lot, but I guess that I have a couple of problems: first, Matt's character is apparently supposed to be super cool, and I definitely got that super-cool sense about Ruby or Stringjack, but he just seemed like a more-or-less normal teenager, maybe one who was slightly better-acting under pressure. Second,... oh, ( cut this for spoilers ) Third, some of the revealed interactions between characters (here I am particularly thinking about Rubylaser) had no buildup from the rest of the book, as far as I could tell. Maybe it was a little too subtle for me. Maybe I'll read it in ten years and it will all make sense. But right now this is my least favorite of his books, though it is still a good coming-of-age book.

-Princes of the Air - This and Web I love, partially because I absolutely adore his far-future crazy imaginings. And I love Obeck, that insecure self-hating but still talented and dedicated diplomat (oh, that word!) - he's possibly my favorite Ford character, along with his crazy cool bigger-than-life friends. I identify with Obeck-- I know what it's like to have friends who know what they're doing, and while loving them feel insecure about what you're doing-- and to attain what looks like success while feeling hollow inside-- and not to be able to explain something to a friend because the friend is too good a person to actually understand the thing. This may be my favorite.

-Web of Angels- I saved this one for last because it's always been my absolute favorite Ford, though not one I usually give to people to try to hook them... and on rereading I remembered why. It's in WAY far future, and is very, very heavily allusive and poetical and whimsical and fantastical... Mr. Aristide speaks in a very mannered way that actually turned me off this reading until I remembered that that was just the way he was. (I think when I first read this book he reminded me of a certain physics teacher we had... which may be part of the reason I like this book.) The main character, Grailer, also kind of is annoying to me; as three times my age (due to the miracle of Lifespan) he acts like he's still a teenager. But I love the heavy religious (though it is not by any means a religious book) and poetic and literary allusions... some of which I am still getting on subsequent rereadings... I think this is the first time I've reread since my Dante kick, so I'm finally getting all the Dante references... and the scope of his weird universe is a lot of fun. And my gosh, his Webspinning, written before the internet was a force to be reckoned with, does seem rather prescient now.

Finally got to Time Traveler's Wife. It was better than I had expected, though somehow I never quite had enough empathy for the main characters to really feel for them properly. Also, I think it always vaguely frustrates me when people are caught in time loops. Hm, this explains (partially) why I like alternate histories.

Glasshouse, Charles Stross. This was entertaining. The first third of the book I spent going, "But... that doesn't make any sense!" The last two-thirds I spent learning that the holes I was picking in the first third weren't, usually, really holes at all (though sometimes the resolution was still kind of unsatisfactory for me). But it still didn't get me to care about the characters enough to really follow everything that was going on.

Sayers, The Devil to Pay and He That Should Come. A reread. No idea if this is in print, or what: I got this from a used bookstore on a whim (and because I adore Sayers). The latter is a nice Christmas story (and the reason why I reread; thought I should get into the Christmas spirit somehow). The ending of the former (it's a retelling of Faust, where the ending is somewhere between Marlowe's damnnation and Goethe's saving) always makes me cry. Because I do sympathize with Faust. Umm... this probably says weird things about me...

I keep meaning to use this lj to post on books I've read. However, lately I seem to be out of books I'm really interested in, and furthermore have entered a period of regression where all I really want to read are warm fuzzy books (I imagine I'll come out of it after Christmas or so). But anyway, here are some lists:

-Books I really really do want to read but am waiting on my silly D to buy (he's got this Problem that once he's bought a book in a series in paperback, he will only ever buy the rest of the series in paperback): Dzur, Brust. The Sharing Knife, Bujold (hmm, since this is the first in a series maybe I can sneak the hardback in as a Christmas gift for him?...)

-Mindless fuzzy stuff I've read recently: Far and away the best was Liane Moriarty's The Last Anniversary, which is fluffy and cute and chick-lit-ish, but better than chick lit, with awesome characters, and doesn't really deserve the "mindless" bit. Emily Giffen, Something Borrowed and the sequel Something Blue, which are mindless, and not nearly as good, but entertaining and better than most chick lit I've read, despite the annoying premise of the first book. Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Scion, which doesn't really belong in this list-- the first three books in this series, especially the third, were marvelous epic-fantasy works with interesting world-building and characters, but I found this one much less riveting, so here it goes in fuzzy category.

-Stuff I've reread lately that I really like: Emma Bull's "Silver or Gold" in After the King -- I've tried to read other stuff by Bull, I forget what now, and haven't been much impressed, but this story I absolutely adore. So presumably there is other stuff by her that I would like?? Great Expectations, which I read in high school and was like, enh, whatever, but recently reread and loved-- he gets being a kid who kind of doesn't really have a clue, and knows it, and is miserable about it, exactly right. It's almost painful to read.

-Books I keep trying to read: The Time Traveller's Wife, which I've heard from about fifty sources is good, but I keep putting it down after about two pages. Tale of Two Cities, after my other Dickens experience. Some great lines, but I haven't really gotten into it yet. Seems more potboiler than Great Expectations, at least so far.

-Stuff which the local libraries do not have because they are TOTALLY LAME: The first book of any series by Robin Hobb. They have ALL THE REST, just to tick me off. The last two books of the Emily sequence by L.M. Montgomery. WHAT?? Come on, guys, last time I checked SB was, you know, rich. Are you all completely uncivilized?

-What I read that just flipping electrified me, one of those things that there's a "before" and "after" you read it:
here. I've got to get this book, even though I have no interest in Yugoslavia in general. I may ask for it for Christmas.

-What I've actually been reading lately: Photoshop books, for the beginner-to-advanced-amateur. I'm more interested in photograph post-processing and less in Cool Photoshopped Effects. The Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements just completely rocks for me; I can see why other people might not like it (it's awfully dense, for one thing, and lacking in the way of pretty pictures) but it's like it was written for me. I also love Photoshop Wow! - I borrowed v. 6 from the library but am thinking about buying v. 7.