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 Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 2:07 pm
There was something screwy going on with the posts in the other thread, so I'm starting a new one...as with before, I'll try to post a short review of every book I read, and I'd be interested to see anyone else's.
Today I finished The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. I can't say I'm a big fan of the writing style of the period (1895) but I thought I ought to get around to reading H.G. Wells. The Time Machine is short, and a lot better than I'd expected. The mechanism for time travel isn't really explained, but otherwise, I think this book contained some pretty advanced science for the time period. Beyond that, it is intensely sociological, a sort of anti-utopian commentary on the class system that the Industrial Revolution was underlining. I expect I missed quite a bit of his meaning, not being that familiar with politics of the time, but I am still glad I read it, and I'll be working my way through some of Wells' other stuff.
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Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 6:13 pm
It's not much of a "book" but I read The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling today. I was surprised that the fictional fictional tales were actually pretty good, and the "commentary" was interesting. At least to me.
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Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 6:43 pm
And in counterpoint, I finally finished Under the Dome by Stephen King...more than five times as long as the previous two books combined.
Anyway, I thought it started out a little slow...the characters seemed a bit flat and stereotyped to me, but it picked up and I ended up liking the story very much. The basis of the story is very simple: A small town gets trapped under a dome. The interactions of the people, however, are very complex and I m impressed at how well it all fits together with so many characters. Even more intricate is the question of what the dome is... and as this question is slowly answered, it raises many more concerning what our entire existance means.
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 5:26 am
With all the attention it's drawn, I should mention a book I've given up on: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I am a great admirer of Jane Austen, and I think I'd have to say she's by far my favorite author of her era. In fact, probably my favorite between Shakespeare in the early 17th Century to Heinlein in the 20th.
When I first picked PP&Z up, it was funny. It was neat to read a familiar story with the spoofish twist at first, but as the pages dragged on I realized something...it was really only funny because Jane Austen herself is funny. It's her prose with truly random bits of zombie-killing thrown in. It stopped being diverting, and became irritating.
Seth Grahame-Smith has done something different, but I can't see that it takes any talent. The story is still good because the book is good, but the zombie parts seems contrived and shoehorned in. They do not fit, and the result is a perversion. I hate it, and will not be looking for any of the others.
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 6:58 pm
Club Dead by Charlaine Harris is the current book I finished. Things I liked: It revealed more about how vampires interact with humans and introduced werewolfs. Things I didn't like: It seems to me that these books are kind of dry; to me, there could be a bit more description and character development. I like them but they are a little lacking at the moment. I am going to give the rest of them a chance though.
Clover, Needful Things was the first King book I ever read and I liked it a lot. The ending was strange though, if I remember correctly. I hope you enjoy it!
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Posted: Sun Dec 20, 2009 10:09 am
I've been doing a lot of reading, bouncing around, so this is actually the first book I've finished in nine days, even though I read over a thousand pages last week. Anyway, I finally did complete Makers by Cory Doctorow, which is a new book (just out last month).
I liked the book, but I can;t say I loved it. It's a sort of near-future science fiction story, following different threads of technology and business. There's a lot of high tech stuff, but I think the story is really more about the people involved wih the technology than the tech itself. It can get a little mushy, to be honest. Besides that, I thought there was too much self-rigteous feel-good Politically Correct nonsense...the evil of giant corporations, the nobility of the homeless. It just seems to be laid on a bit thick in a few places. I would recommend it to SF fans, but this is definitely not one that's easy to breeze through. The closest counterparts I can think of are William Gibson's cyberpunk and some of Crichton's cutting edge tech novels like Prey and Next.
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Posted: Sun Dec 20, 2009 4:37 pm
and for the double...I also finished our "book of the month" - The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - today. I think I underestimatd this one because of the "YA" sticker on the spine. This book was very sad, but brilliantly written. Maybe one of the best I've read all year.
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Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2009 8:02 pm
Today I finished Dominick Dunne's final novel, Too Much Money. He passed away a few months ago (at age 83) when this book was already slated for release. I wouldn't recommend picking up Too Much Money without having read Dunne's other novels. They are not a series, exactly, but there are a lot of the same characters (real people in thin disguise) and this book was almost a sequel to his earlier novel, People Like Us from the '80s. These two books focus on New York society more than a particular crime like most of his other novels. It was very good. I wonder if Dunne knew he was dying when he wrote this. It was a lot like a farewell.
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Posted: Sat Dec 26, 2009 1:28 pm
I just finished Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp by Stephanie Klein. It was interesting, but odd. She includes some very unkind things about other people, and I am not sure how appropriate that is.
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Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2009 11:31 am
I finished Night Shift by Stephen King today. This is his earliest collection (from 197 cool , and there are a lot of good stories in it. I will review the particular stories in my blog.
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 6:24 pm
Today I've finished The Integral Trees by Larry Niven. It has a very imaginative world, but I thought the story and characters were pretty dull.
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Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 6:52 pm
I've read that. The sequel, Smoke Ring, isn't much better. I am currently reading Storm Front, which is the first book of the Dresden Files.
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Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 10:49 am
I liked Storm Front and want to read the rest of them. It's about a wizard named Harry Dresden who is hired to solve two sperate murder cases that may or may not involve magic. I don't want to say too much more and ruin it.
Dead to the World is the best one of the Southern Vampire Series that I have read so far. I was getting king of bored with them but this one got me interested again.
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Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 5:14 pm
I've read the first six of the Dresden Files books...I liked them all, but I think the first was the best, and I had a harder time getting into the others.
I forgot to post that my last book of '09 was Finch by Jeff VanderMeer. I was a little disappointed to realize that this is the third book in a cycle about the alternate-history country of Ambergris. VanderMeer says they are stand alone novels, but link together, and I wish I'd read the others first.
Anyway, it's a really neat setting, where there are mysterious creatures called "gray caps" that have taken over, making humans subservient. All their technology and building material is based on fungal life. The main character is a "detective" named John Finch who himself has a very mysterious past.
The writing style is very strange. It uses stream of consciousness sentence fragments to convey flashes of imagery. It's not bad, but it does make the flow of the story a little tough to follow sometimes.
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Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2010 4:06 pm
This week I've finished Breakfast at Madeline's by Matt Witten and The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines.
The first is a mystery witten by a local author, set here in my home town of Saratoga Springs, NY. It's interesting to me for the local names and places, but is honestly not at all well written, and I do not like the main character very much.
The second is a "fairy tale fantasy" book based on the old (and not so Dinsey-ishly pleasant) tales of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty. It is somewhat light in tone, but it conceals some pretty dark themes. It's not brilliant, but I liked it.
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