VioletReads

1984 with hope

2010-05-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

Doctorow, Cory. Little Brother. New York: Tor, 2010.

Little Brother> finally came out in paperback, and I picked it up at the LA Times Festival of Books a few weeks ago. Yesterday, I was feeling a bit icky and decided to relax and read for a little while, so I started Little Brother, and I didn't stop reading until I was done. It's extremely derivative of George Orwell's 1984, but I think I like Cory Doctorow best when he's riffing on Orwell. It's a lot more hope and action oriented than 1984, so that it feels like the kind of book that could change the world if kids read it at the right time. This is a book I want to give to people and make them read. I haven't decided for sure yet who I'm giving this book to, but I definitely need to pass it on.

This is the story of Marcus, who sometimes goes by w1n5t0n, a 17-year-old boy who is picked up by the Department of Homeland Security for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When San Francisco becomes a DHS police state, Marcus takes action and becomes, somewhat inadvertently, the hacker king leading an army of teenagers to question authority and overthrow the system. Throughout the book, Marcus learns (and Doctorow provides fun little lectures) about revolutions, civil disobedience, technology, and civil rights movements from the American Revolution to the Yippies and the EFF. Even better, there's just enough information about the technology to make it exciting and to encourage readers to want to learn more. It even made me want to take another stab at Cryptonomicon, which I have started about 5 times and never managed to get through the first chapter or two. Hopefully, this book will inspire young people to change the world, which is a scary and dangerous thought but also makes things exciting.

If I have one complaint about the book, it's the female characters. First, there are a lot of them, which is a good start. Marcus's mom, a female reporter, a female teacher, a female friend, a girlfriend, a female badguy, and a female nemesis all play important roles in the book, but they all mostly feel like functionaries defined only in relation to Marcus rather than actual characters with complexity and independent interests. I don't think the book passes the Bechdel test, but I welcome corrections if I'm wrong about that. I would love to see a version of this story about a female geek/hacker and I wish that characters from this story such as Marcus's female friend and his pink-haired hacker nemesis had appeared more and been more throughly developed. Nonetheless, I think that this is a story that girls will like because the story itself is fun and compelling, even though it is definitively a boy book. I just think the world needs the girl version of this. Who is out there writing it?

If you liked Little Brother, I recommend: 1984 (of course), John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale (because it has a (female!) teen protagonist doing her own thing in the midst of a kind of techno-war), and Daniel Suarez's Daemon (for a different kind of techno-revolution, although this one is much more adult and much less hopeful). I also want to check out Doctorow's new YA book, For the Win, as soon as possible (given my aversion to hardcover books) - it's about video games and gold farming and appears from the sample at the end of Little Brother to have at least one female main character.

Back to the World of Howl

2009-06-28T09:43:00.000-07:00

Diana Wynne Jones. House of Many Ways. Harper Collins: 2009.

House of Many Wayss is the next installment in the world of Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Air. Like many of Diana Wynne Jones' books, it takes place in the same world but with a different set of main characters; in this case the book stars a young girl who loves to read and has a talent for magic. She finds herself house-sitting for her great uncle the Wizard of Norland and working in the castle library trying to solve a mystery, where she runs into characters from the previous books, has great magical adventures, and runs into elves, kobolds, and the fearful lubbokin!

This is another fun adventure in Diana Wynne Jones' magical imagination and I highly recommend it for anyone who loves a good fantasy about wizards and fairy tale castles. I was impressed that Diana Wynne Jones created a character who loved to read and didn't know how to do anything practical, but her penchant for reading neither saved the day exactly nor did the story moralize about putting down the book and taking action. Instead, Jones made a balance between reading and practical experience an ongoing struggle and created a character with some very real flaws in her tendency to be intemperate and imperious and yet made her lovable and well-meaning as well. These touches make Jones' books smart as well as fun and magical and I will keep coming back as long as there are more to read. If you haven't read Howl's Moving Castle, you don't need it to understand this one, but it's a great place to start to become addicted to Diana Wynne Jones' books.

In My Mailbox

2009-05-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

In My Mailbox is hosted by The Story Siren and inspired by Pop Culture Junkie.

I broke down and ordered a bunch of the books I'd been craving since the book fair, and a couple I'd been waiting for in paperback for a while. In my mailbox this week:

Beige by Cecil Castellucci. Candlewick Press: 2009.

From Indie Bound:
Katy really doesn't want to spend two weeks in L.A. with her father, a recovered addict and drummer for a punk band. But she won't fuss. After all, she is a nice girl--a girl who is, well, beige. Or is she?

Freak Show by James St. James. Puffin Books: 2008.

From the publisher:
Meet Billy Bloom, new student at the ultra-white, ultra-rich, ultra-conservative Dwight D. Eisenhower Academy and drag queen extraordinaire. Actually, “drag queen” does not begin to describe Billy and his fabulousness. Any way you slice it, Billy is not a typical seventeen-year-old, and the Bible Belles, Aberzombies, and Football Heroes at the academy have never seen anyone quite like him before. But thanks to the help and support of one good friend, Billy’s able to take a stand for outcasts and underdogs everywhere in his own outrageous, over-thetop, sad, funny, brilliant, and unique way.

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips. Back Bay Books: 2008.

From the author's website:
Being immortal isn't all it's cracked up to be. Life's hard for a Greek god in the 21st century: nobody believes in you any more, even your own family doesn't respect you, and you're stuck in a delapidated hovel in north London with too many siblings and not enough hot water. But for Artemis (goddess of hunting, professional dog walker), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty, telephone sex operator) and Apollo (god of the sun, TV psychic) there's no way out...Until a meek cleaner and her would-be boyfriend come into their lives, and turn the world literally upside down.

Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder. MIRA books: 2008.

From the author's website:
About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered a reprieve. She'll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace, and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia. And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly's Dust, and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison. As Yelena tries to escape her dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and she develops magical powers she can't control. Her life’s at stake again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren’t so clear!

Magic Study by Maria V. Snyder. MIRA books: 2008.

From the author's website:
Yelena is on her way to be reunited with the family she'd been stolen from long ago. Although she has gained her freedom, she can't help feeling isolated in Sitia. Her Ixian background has changed her in many ways, and her newfound friends and relatives don't think it's for the better. Despite the turmoil, she's eager to start her magical training. But her plans take a radical turn when she becomes involved with a plot to reclaim Ixia's throne for a lost prince, and gets entangled in powerful rivalries with her fellow magicians. If that wasn't bad enough, it appears her brother would love to see her dead. Luckily, Yelena has some old friends to help her with her new enemies.

The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray. Delacorte Books for Young Readers: 2007.

From the author's website:In the third installment of the Gemma Doyle trilogy, it has been a year of change since Gemma Doyle arrived at the foreboding Spence Academy. Her mother murdered, her father a laudanum addict, Gemma has relied on an unsuspected strength and has discovered an ability to travel to an enchanted world called the realms, where dark magic runs wild. Despite certain peril, Gemma has bound the magic to herself and forged unlikely new alliances. Now, as Gemma approaches her London debut, the time has come to test these bonds. The Order, the mysterious group her mother was once part of, is grappling for control of the realms, as is the Rakshana. Spence's burned East Wing is being rebuilt, but why now? Gemma and her friends see Pippa, but she is not the same. And their friendship faces its gravest trial as Gemma must decide once and for all what role she is meant for.

Disappearance

2009-05-18T16:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, I disappeared last week. I apologize. I'm working on finding a happy medium between posting daily and posting flakily, and job interviews (yay!) and real life intervened last week. But really, the problem was that I didn't finish a single book last week! Really! After working so hard to post every day in April, I decided that for May I could take on some of the longer books that I'd been putting off reading. So I started Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell on audiobook and Lonely Werewolf Girl (which I received for my birthday way back in January!) in print. Unfortunately, each of these books is well over 500 pages (or 32 hours in the case of Jonathan Strange), which, when added to my general busyness, means that I'm only about halfway through each of them! So, I'm working on it, but work takes precedence and hopefully I'll finish at least one of these books soon!

Sunday Short Story: Coming Attraction

2009-05-17T14:48:00.001-07:00

Fritz Leiber. "Coming Attraction" (1950). audible.com: 2007.

I've always meant to read some of Fritz Leiber's science fiction. I downloaded this short story from audible, and it definitely whet's my appetite for more. It's a story about coming nuclear destruction, written in 1950 and focused on the Cold War. It's set in post-WWIII New York after nuclear destruction has left people carrying along with future technology among the irradiated ashes.

The focus of the story is on the transformation of American culture; Leiber creats an America in which the women all wear masks because a face free of radiation scars is the ultimate erotic body part. "Coming Attraction" refers to the post-apocalyptic world in which the story takes place, the sense of anticipation our main character feels at the possibility of seeing his date without her mask, and the world of professional wrestling (more like mixed martial arts or UFC fighting) that has become the most popular sport.

This is a really clever story that works on several levels as a commentary on both international politics and gender issues. It's science fiction in that it takes place in an imagined post-apocalyptic future, but it doesn't feel all that distant. It's more about culture than science and Leiber unfolds his prediction of coming attractions slowly throughout the story. I highly recommend this one.

Sunday Short Story: The Sexes

2009-05-10T23:43:00.000-07:00

Dorothy Parker. "The Sexes." The Portable Dorothy Parker. Ed. Marion Meade. 2nd Ed. Penguin Books: 2006. 24-28.

This is a short, quick slice of life in the form of a battle-of-the-sexes style argument. At this point, this story's portrayal of gender roles is clichéd, but Parker's economy of style and cynical wit make the story a bitterly fun little read anyway. It depicts an angry conversation between a man and a woman who are dating, but displeased with each other. The piece doesn't feel like a story so much as a snapshot of dialogue through which a relationship is illuminated. What I love about it is Parker's wry misogyny; in four short pages, she vividly illustrates the ways in which men and women manipulate each other through passive-aggressive posturing. This conversation could quite easily be overheard today, and yet it feels incredibly cynical to have it written down and published as a story.

Friday Non-Fiction: "May 2007"

2009-05-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

Nick Hornby. "May 2007"Shakespeare Wrote for Money: Two Years of Reading Begat by More Reading, Presented in Easily Digestible, Utterly Hysterical Monthly Installments. Believer Books: 2008. 47-53.

I picked up this book at the Echo Park Time Travel Mart and thus far I am enjoying it immensely. This book is the third and final collection of Hornby's columns about literature and reading from The Believer magazine. So far, I've read about half of the collection, but I wanted to single out "May 2007" as particularly representative. In this essay, Hornby discusses how "reading begets reading" (49) but also belabors that some of the classics may kill you, presumably by boredom. This is a great example of my mixed feelings toward Hornby's writing about reading; on the one hand he's incredibly smart and literate, but on the other hand he's a bit condescending and superior. I certainly wish I could write as well about books as he does, but I don't really love the things he chooses to read.

This essay is an insight into the divide between "literature" and everything else; it also demonstrates who gets to decide which is which. In other essays, Hornby discusses comic books and literature by women, but in this particular essay, he only reads and discusses books by men. He name-drops Stephen Frears as an arbiter of what he reads.

Overall, I love the project in which Hornby discusses what he reads every month, and Hornby is absolutely brilliant at doing it. The essays are smart, snappy, and only slightly superior and I love that he's talking about books. Mostly, I wish there were others, counterpoints to Hornby's voice continuing an intelligent, multivocal discussion about literature of all sorts. I think that's partially what book bloggers are here for, but I'd like to see people like Sarah Vowell (who wrote the intro to Shakespeare Wrote for Money) getting paid to write cleverly and professionally about what they're reading on a monthly basis.

Overall, I do recommend this book for anyone who loves reading good writing about reading. I will absolutely be picking up Hornby's earlier collections of columns, The Polysyllabic Spreee and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt to revel in the literary intelligence of these sets of columns, but I will continue to read them with a sense of skepticism toward the choices of books and remember that this is just one person's taste among many.

Review: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have To Kill You

2009-05-08T05:59:00.000-07:00

Ally Carter. I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have To Kill You. Hyperion Books: 2007.

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have To Kill You is an adorable book about teenage girl spies. Teenage girl spies are fabulous and awesome and kicka**, so I was pretty much predisposed to love this book. It's sweet and fun and fluffy.

In this first book in the Gallagher Girls series, we are introduced to Cammie Morgan, an "exceptional young woman" training to be a "pavement artist," a spy who excels at disappearing in a crowd. When, in the middle of a training exercise, an ordinary boy notices the girl whose major skill is going unnoticed, all of a sudden Cammie and her backup team of friends find themselves using all of their advanced skills in covert operations, assimilation, and infiltration to achieve their most dangerous mission so far: dating.

This is a short, straightforward little book that leaves me wanting more. It's written in the format of a report detailing the events of a previous operation, which creates an amusing sense of situational humor but also gives the novel a sense of sparseness. These are books that fall on the young end of the young adult range and would probably appeal to even middle grade readers. Like the Babysitters' Club with more awesome. As an adult reader, the books feel fun but insubstantial. I read the first two in a day and a half and I think I'll return to the series when there are more than a few books. They're totally addictive.

BEDA Wrap-Up: The State of the Blog

2009-05-05T09:39:00.000-07:00

So I survived Blog Every Day April, and I though it was about time to share what I learned and decided.

First of all, I'm pretty proud of myself for actually managing to blog every day until the last. It's disappointing to have failed at the very last minute, to have April 30th as the only day for which there wasn't a post, but I think the extenuating circumstances (my car was stolen and I was up all night looking for it and talking to the police, and therefore slept all day on the 30th) justify the silence. I read and reviewed 18 books (and two short stories), which I'm also quite satisfied with. I also did a reasonable if not fantastic amount of reading and commenting on other book blogs, which I think is important.

I really enjoyed writing reviews for every book I read to help keep up my evaluation and critical analysis skills. I also really enjoyed challenging myself to read things I wouldn't normally, such as the short stories. I definitely felt that I had some days where I wrote filler posts about my reading habits (and obsessing over the book fair) and now that I'm not trying to blog every day, those will probably fall by the wayside.

I also tended to pick shorter and easier books because I was trying to finish one every day whenever possible, and I think now that I'm not trying to blog every day, I will allow myself some longer and slower books and perhaps not devote as much time every day to reading. It's time to get back to the real world and my work.

So, what do I expect the blogging here to look like as I continue? I plan to keep on reading and posting my reviews of whatever I've read. These will continue to be a mix of YA, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, classics, and literary fiction depending on my whims at any given moment. I also plan to continue to read a Saturday or Sunday Short Story every week. These will probably be stories found online or more frequently from one of a couple collections that I own (Los Angeles Noir, Ray Bradbury's collected stories). I'm also going to implement a new feature, Friday Non-Fiction in which I read and discuss one literary non-fiction essay every week. I have a couple collections I should read and, like short stories, I tend to neglect reading short, general audience non-fiction essays. So expect some discussion of essays by David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, and Nick Hornby because that's what I have lying around at the moment.

I also really enjoy skimming everyone else's In My Mailbox and Mailbox Monday, so I believe I will make those posts if and when I have something to share (although hopefully that won't be too often because I don't have the money to buy books as often as I'd like and I don't have the connections to get them for free). In the meantime, I'll work on reducing my TBR pile to a normal human size.

So those are my thoughts about the future of the blog. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please share them!

Short Story Sunday: Pride and Prometheus

2009-05-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

John Kessel. Pride and Prometheus. 2008.

Technically, this isn't a short story; it's a novelette and it just won the 2008 Nebula Award for best novelette. It's a story that asks what if the characters from Pride and Prejudice met the characters from Frankenstein. It focuses on Mary, the middle Bennet daughter, who just happens to meet Victor Frankenstein well after the events of Pride and Prejudice and I believe in the middle of events in Frankenstein.

I should have read Frankenstein before this story, but it I think works pretty well without knowing either of the stories. I enjoyed it and thought it was clever, but it definitely feels like a male authorial voice, which I found strange in contrast to Austen's characters. It does do a good job of exploring some of the themes of both stories and bringing together social commentary with scientific and moral ruminations. I enjoyed its combination of gothic moodiness and wry observation, more reminiscent of Austen's Northanger Abbey than Pride and Prejudice.

I listened to the story as audio recorded by the author, which you can get for free here.

Review: Suite Scarlett

2009-05-01T17:12:00.000-07:00

Maureen Johnson. Suite Scarlett. Point: 2009.

Suite Scarlett is decidedly a book for me. It has backstage drama, a mysterious and eccentric patroness, and wacky antics in a fabulous art deco hotel. It's a sweet, lighthearted comedy in a realistic setting brimming with the sense of whimsy that contemporary New York often so desperately needs.

The book stars Scarlett Martin, the third of four children in the Martin family, whose parents happen to own and manage the Hopewell Hotel, a fabulous (if slightly run-down) hotel built in the 1920s. The family, facing financial troubles, has had to fire the staff and indenture the kids into a summer of manual labor and hotel management.

When the eccentric Mrs. Amberson checks in and offers Scarlett a well-paying job as her personal secretary, all of a sudden Scarlett finds herself hunting down obscure teas and health foods, taking notes for an ill-fated memoir, and helping to stage a production of Hamlet featuring her beloved older brother, Spencer, and Scarlett's crush, the handsome and comedic Eric.

This is a fun, light summer comedy. I found myself laughing out loud (really) at points during the novel. I highly recommend taking it to the beach or on vacation this summer. It's a super quick read and utterly delightful and silly. The characters are charming and the situations the slightest bit absurd (or at least unlikely). If you like a good wacky romp with lot of theater and a little romance, this is for you.

Personally, I can't wait for the sequel, Scarlett Fever. Also, when she's finished with the Scarlett trilogy, I'd love mj to write a novel actually set in the 1920s. Wouldn't it be fun if there were a mj version of Thoroughly Modern Millie meets The Great Gatsby? She already knows a lot about being fabulous.

Review: Zoe's Tale

2009-04-29T10:06:00.000-07:00

John Scalzi. Zoe's Tale. Tor Science Fiction: 2009.

I loved Zoe's Tale. It retells the exact same story I just read in The Last Colony, but tells it from the perspective of Zoe Boutin-Perry, a sarcastic, resourceful teenage girl who just happens to find herself in the middle of an inter-species conflict with an alliance of aliens. It fills in all the gaps that I noticed or subjects about which I wanted more information after The Last Colony.

The best thing about the book was Zoe's voice. It was light and snappy and utterly sarcastic in a way that I really identify with. Not everyone will, of course, but if you like to see a strong, witty female character in the middle of science fiction (which I do, A LOT) then this is a book for you. This is a science fiction adventure, but also a meditation on what it means to be a leader rather than a hero or a celebrity and about growing into your place in the world and the people who love you. The scenes between Zoe and her father (written, of course, by a man who highly identifies with the father) were truly beautiful in their combination of cleverness and affection. Now, I'm not necessarily claiming that this is an "authentic" teenage girl voice; I'm a little dubious about that, but I love it nonetheless.

My one complaint about this book is that it follows exactly the timeframe and most of the events from The Last Colony, which you will note that I read not long ago. Which means it took about 150 pages to get to any event that was really new to me. Seeing events from Zoe's perspective was interesting, but the events themselves were too fresh in my memory. I wish I had waited a year or so between these two books so there was some time for the details to fade in my memory.

I would LOVE to talk to people who read Zoe's Tale as a stand-alone novel, or people more familiar with the voice of a teenage girl (like, say, actual teenage girls). I'd love to know how this novel worked for other people. So would John Scalzi.

Elite Novels

2009-04-28T23:52:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to read the Elite series of YA novels for a while now. Author Jennifer Banash is giving away a

SIGNED ARC of Simply Irresistible, but ALSO a $25 Amazon.com gift card, a SIGNED ARC of The Elite (these are collectors items, people), AND a copy of the newest installment of The Luxe series, Envy

Pretty fabulous prizes! Help her celebrate the upcoming release of her new novel, Simply Irresistible. Go to here to enter!

The Books Not Taken

2009-04-27T14:36:00.000-07:00

This is more Festival of Books follow-up. I though I'd share the books I saw and wanted at the book fair but didn't pick up (mostly due to the overwhelming number of books already purchased). Most of these will I will probably purchase at some point, but they were somehow less urgent than the ones I ended up taking home. I'd love to hear your thoughts on these and how quickly I should rush out and get them.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie:
In his first book for young adults, bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist who leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white high school. This heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written tale, coupled with poignant drawings that reflect the character’s art, is based on the author’s own experiences and chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he seems destined to live. (From the author's website)

The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr:
In her cunning follow-up to Southland, Revoyr returns to L.A., this time to when Sunset Boulevard was just a dirt road and Jun Nakayama was a famous silent film star. Prompted by a journalist's visit in 1964, 42 years after he left the screen for good, Jun revisits his youth in Japan, his discovery at L.A.'s Little Tokyo Theater, his rise to stardom and the scandalous events that led to his abrupt retreat from public life. Mixing real people with fictional characters like principled Japanese actress Hanako Minatoya, troubled starlet Elizabeth Banks (not the one in Seabiscuit), ingénue Nora Minton Niles and dashing director Ashley Bennett Tyler, Revoyr creates a vibrant portrait of a time when the film studio was a place of serious work. As Jun reveals the secrets he has kept for decades, he uncovers new twists in his own history and comes to terms with other painful experiences he has repressed, namely his loneliness and the effects of the anti-Japanese racism he mistakenly believed he could overcome by being as agreeable—and American—as possible.(From Publisheer's Weekly via Amazon)

The Android's Dream by John Scalzi:
A human diplomat kills his alien counterpart. Earth is on the verge of war with a vastly superior alien race. A lone man races against time and a host of enemies to find the one object that can save our planet and our people from alien enslavement...A sheep.(From the author's website)

Beige by Cecil Castellucci
From the author of Boy Proof comes an edgy novel full of humor and heart. Katy really doesn't want to spend two weeks in L.A. with her father, a recovered addict and drummer for a punk band. But she won't fuss. After all, she is a nice girl--a girl who is, well, beige. Or is she?(From IndieBound)

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips:
Being immortal isn't all it's cracked up to be. Life's hard for a Greek god in the 21st century: nobody believes in you any more, even your own family doesn't respect you, and you're stuck in a delapidated hovel in north London with too many siblings and not enough hot water. But for Artemis (goddess of hunting, professional dog walker), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty, telephone sex operator) and Apollo (god of the sun, TV psychic) there's no way out...Until a meek cleaner and her would-be boyfriend come into their lives, and turn the world literally upside down. (from the author's website)

Janes in Love by Cecil Castellucci:
In this sequel to The Plain Janes, the Janes are back. But when the Janes become entangled in matters of the heart, they discover that in art and in love, the rules don't always apply. (from IndieBound)

Prom Dates from Helll by Rosemary Clement-Moore
Maggie Quinn knew high school was hell, but even she thinks the smell of brimstone is a little out of the ordinary. When she’s the only one to see that something supernatural is stalking the school’s ruling clique, it’s up to Maggie to channel her inner Nancy Drew and ferret out the origin of the ancient evil, before all Hell breaks loose at the Senior Prom. (from the author's website)

What Would Jane Austen Do? by Laurie Brown:
From the author of Hundreds of Years to Reform a Rake, a new time travel romance featuring a modern day career woman swept back in time to Regency England, where she thwarts a Napoleonic spy, chats with Jane Austen, and falls in love with a notorious rake.(from the publisher's website)

And there were a couple of books I came prepared to buy if I saw at the festival but that I didn't happen to run across. It's part of the luck of browsing that I didn't happen to see them, but I will probably pick these up soon, too.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman:
Mandella starts out as a foot soldier in man's thousand-year war against the Taurans and ends as a reluctant major. Spanning the stars at faster than light speeds, Mandella and his comrades age only months as the centuries zip by on an earth that becomes increasingly foreign. But few soldiers will return to the altered home planet; in battles fought with powered suits and other stranger weapons, the odds for survival approach zero. This war is the opposite of the one Heinlein glorified in Starship Troopers (1959)- bloody, cruel and meaningless. (from Kirkus via Amazon)

Jane Austen Ruined My Life by Beth Pattillo
Emma Grant has a major beef to settle with her literary heroine, Jane Austen. Austen’s novels taught Emma, a college professor, to believe in happy endings, but her own happy ending goes up in flames when she discovers her husband, Edward, in the arms of her teaching assistant, after which the two have her professionally discredited by claiming she plagiarized a paper. Disillusioned and disgraced, Emma flees the U.S. for her cousin’s house in England after being contacted by Gwendolyn Parrot, an elderly woman claiming to be in possession of a stash of lost Austen letters. Rather than simply handing over the letters, Mrs. Parrot sends Emma on a succession of tasks that gradually reveal a secret about Austen’s life previously unknown to scholars. Along the way, Emma reconnects with Adam, her former best friend whom she fell out of touch with after marrying Edward. (from Booklist via Amazon)

Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder
About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered a reprieve. She'll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace, and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia. And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly's Dust, and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison. (from the author's website)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith: Just what it sounds like: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!

As you can see, I may be in the mood for a Jane Austen takeoff marathon sometime in the future.

Musing Mondays: Nonfiction

2009-04-26T23:11:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure yet how much I'm really into participating in a lot of memes, but this is a question that felt relevant for me to answer.

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about reading non-fiction…

Do you read non-fiction regularly? Do you read it in a different way or place than you read fiction? (Musing Mondays is hosted at Just One More Page. This question is courtesy of Diane at The Book Resort)

I recently completed my Ph.D., so I read A LOT of nonfiction, particularly in the subjects of film, theater, gender studies, cultural studies, and literary theory. I also do some reading about technology, and recently I've been interested in California and Los Angeles history. I also teach composition, so I read short, popular non-fiction essays to stimulate discussion and serve as examples.

I tend to read in most of the same places (sofa, bed, floor, coffehouses), but I don't take nonfiction books into the bathtub or to the beach. I also always read nonfiction with a pencil and a highlighter nearby - I never write in fiction books, but I make notes all over my nonfiction.

From the Festival

2009-04-26T00:29:00.001-07:00

This post is in the spirit of the In My Mailbox posts hosted by The Story Siren and inspired by Pop Culture Junkie, though none of these books were in my mailbox - they all came from the LA Times Festival of Books, where I spent way too much money!

M.T. Anderson. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Volume 1: The Pox Party. Candlewick Press: 2008. - I've been meaning to read this for a while. I foresee a historical fiction streak in my near future.

Raised by a mysterious group of rational philosophers, young Octavian is dressed in silks and given the finest of classical educations. His regal mother entertains the scholars with her beauty and wit, but Octavian questions the purpose behind his guardians' fantastical studies. As the disquiet of Revolutionary Boston grows around him, Octavian dares to open a forbidden door, only to discover the hideous nature of the experiments - and his own chilling role in them.

Ally Carter. Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy. Hyperion Paperbacks: 2008.

All Cammie Morgan wants is a peaceful semester, but that's easier said than done when you're a CIA legacy and go to the Gallagher Academy, the premier school in the world... for spies. Despite Cammie's best intentions to be a normal student, danger seems to follow her. She and her friends learn that their school is going to play host to some mysterious guests - code name: Blackthorne. Soon Cammie and her friends are crawling through walls and surveilling the school to learn the truth about Blackthorne and clear Cammie's name

Ally Carter. I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You. Hyperion Paperbacks: 2006. - Yay! This sound like so much fun! Hooray for teenage spies!

Cammie Morgan is a student at the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women a fairly typical all-girls school - typical, that is, if every school taught advanced martial arts in PE and the latest in chemical warfare in science, and students received extra credit for breaking CIA codes in computer class. The allagher Academy might claim to be a school for geniuses, but it's really a school for spies. Even though Cammie is fluent in fourteen languages and capable of killing a man seven different ways with her bare hands, she has no idea what to do when she mets an ordinary boy who thinks she's an ordinary girl. Sure she can tap his phone, hack into his computer, or track him through town the skill of a real "pavement artist" - but can she maneuver a relationship with someone who can never know the truth about her?

Carol Higgins Clark. Jinxed. Pocket Star Books: 2002. - This just looked totally cute. I've always associated Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark with my mother, but I think it's time to give this one a try and admit I may actually like some of the same books as my mom (GASP!). Also, this appears to be the 6th book in a series. Oops!

A fun detective romp set in California wine country. Regan, a private investigator, must find Whitney, an actress, before her great-aunt Lucretia's wedding as Whitney's family, former hippies running the Altered States Bed & Breakfast and Meditation Center, will receive a fortune if everyone attends. Lucretia, an aging silent-film star, inherited a fortune and then made more money in a dot-com enterprise. Of course, the groom and his cronies are criminals out to thwart the family attendance by kidnapping Whitney so that they will receive more money. Add to this framework a motorcycle gang, two friends in their 90s, buried treasure, news coverage, and wildfires for an exciting mystery. (description from School Library Journal via Amazon).

Junot Díaz. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead Books: 2008. I hear such good things about this, and it won the Pulitzer, so it must be worth reading.

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú - a curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from the Dominican Republic to the United States and back again.

Denise Hamilton, Ed. Los Angeles Noir. Akashic Books: 2007. - I write about film noir and Los Angeles history in some of my academic work, so it's natural that I do a little fiction reading around it.

Los Angeles Noir brings the ethos of Chandler and Cain filtered through a twenty-first-century, multicultural lens. This is a literary travelogue from the Chinese mansions of San Marino to the day spas of Koreatown to the windy hills of Mulholland Drive, the baby gangsters of East Hollywood, the OG entrepreneur of Leimert Park, the old money of Beverly Hils, and the working class of Mar Vista. Los Angeles Noir offers tales of crime and passion and betrayal from some of the most innovative and celebrated writers working today.

Charlaine Harris. Grave Sight. Berkley Prime Crime Books: 2006. - Free with purchases from Mysterious Galaxy. I LOVE Mysterious Galaxy. I'm probably lucky it's in San Diego and not easily visitable.

Ever since Harper Connelly survived a zap from a lightning bolt, she's been able to find dead people, a skill that makes the protagonist in the first installment of Harris's new series a tad more bizarre than the mind-reading heroine of the author's Sookie Stackhouse books (Dead as a Doornail, etc.). Harper travels to the Ozark town of Sarne, Ark., to find a missing teenage girl's body, accompanied by her stepbrother, Tolliver, who acts as her manager and bodyguard and with whom she shares a thinly disguised physical attraction that they manage to keep at bay by engaging in casual sex with various partners. Finding the body takes no time at all, but leaving town afterward isn't so easy. When Harper's life is threatened and Tolliver ends up in jail on trumped-up charges, it quickly becomes apparent that something sinister is going on in Sarne. (from Publishers Weekly via Amazon).

Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack. Literacy and Longing in L.A. Bantam Dell: 2006. - It's set in LA and about someone who loves books, how could I resist? Looks like fun chicklit, but I'm a little worried that the story may reject books in the end, in favor of a man and "real" life. I'll have to read it and see!

Dora, named for Eudora Welty, is an indiscriminate book junkie whose life has fallen apart. She's coping with a painful separation from her husband, scraping the bottom of a dwindling inheritance, and attracted to an aspiring playwright who seems to embody all that literature has to offer - intelligent ideas, romance, and an escape from her problems. As she navigates the road between reality and fiction, Dora faces powerful choices: between two irresistible men, between idleness and work, and most of all between the joy of well-chosen words and the untidiness of real people and real life.

Rochelle Krich, Michael Mallory, Lisa Seidman, Eds. Murder on Sunset Blvd. Top Publications Paperback: 2002. - More noir short stories set locally.

There are a million stories along this Boulevard of Dreams. Murder on Sunset Boulevard contains twelve of them, imagined by members of the Los Angeles Chapter of the international organization Sisters in Crime. But more than simply a collection of tales, Murder on Sunset Boulevard is a veritable journey down the city's 25-mile -long mother road, revealing the desires, dreams, failures, hopes, and passions of the people who make up the diverse fabric of Los Angeles.

John Scalzi. Zoe's Tale. Tor: 2008. - YAY! This is the book I was most excited to get. It's not even supposed to be released until next week! I've started it already.

How do you tell your part in the biggest tale in history? I ask because it's what I have to do. I'm Zoë Boutin-Perry: a colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player and a pawn in an interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to history, Friend. Daughter. Human. Seventeen years old. Everyone on Earth knows the tale I am part of. But you don't know my tale: how I did what I did - how I did what I had to do - not just to stay alive but to keep you alive, too. I'm going to tell it to you now, the whole thing, the only way I know how: not straight but true, to try to make you feel what I felt; the joy and terror and uncertaity, panic and wonder, dispair and hope,. All through my eyes. It's a story you know. But you don't know it all.

Mary Shelly. Frankenstein (1818). Ed. Maurice Hindle. Penguin Books: 2007. It's almost a crime that haven't read this yet, and I couldn't resist the fabulous comic-style cover. Even though I could have gotten the story more cheaply, I love this edition.

A deluxe edition of Mary Shelley’s haunting adventure about ambition and modernity run amok. Now a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova and cover art by Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes, Mary Shelley’s timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor to the very brink of madness. How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship, scientific hubris, and horror. (Amazon product description).

Salman Rushdie The Enchantress of Florence. Random House: 2008. I thought this sounded lush and brilliant when it first came out in hardback, so I figured I should pick it up now that it's in paperback.

The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess the powers of enchantment and sorcery, attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. It is the story of two cities at the height of their powers - the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sonse, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolo Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way about the true brutality of power.

Connie Willis. To Say Nothing of the Dog. Bantam Books: 1998. - Humor and time traveling sounds like fun to me! I'm a little worried that I should read Three Men in a Boat first, though.

Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump. It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier. But the Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right -- not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.

Note: All descriptions from the back of the book (some edited) unless otherwise specified.

Saturday Short Story: Mulholland Dive

2009-04-25T22:10:00.000-07:00

Michael Connelly "Mulholland Dive." Los Angeles Noir.Ed. Denise Hamilton. Akashic Books: 2007. 21-38.

A departure from everything I've read and discussed here so far, "Mullholland Dive" is a short story set in Los Angeles, written in the noir style. It features Detective Clewiston, an accident investigator, as he attempts to explain what caused a brand-new Porsche to dive off the side of the road, killing the rich and famous driver who happened to be involved in a messy divorce.

While this story was slow to capture my attention, starting as it did with blood and crime scene procedure (including some unfamiliar police vocabulary), by the end I was impressed by Connelly's command of the form. It was a tight, clever, and perfectly illustrative of the noir style, particularly the work of James M. Cain. It also has an excellent sense of place, perfectly depicting the geography and spirit of the dark and twisty roads that divide city from suburbs.

This is a story for lovers of noir and lovers of Los Angeles, one of those short stories that leaves you with a wry smile on your face and an admiration for the author's skill.

Review: Year of the Griffin

2009-04-24T19:34:00.000-07:00

Diana Wynne Jones. Year of the Griffin. HarperTrophy: 2000.

I couldn't resist; I followed up Dark Lord of Derkholm with Year of the Griffin, and I must admit that I enjoyed the sequel enormously. Year of the Griffin takes place 8 years after Dark Lord of Derkholm in a greatly changed world. It focuses on Elda, Wizard Derk's youngest griffin daughter, Elda, as she leaves home to go to the University to study magic. Where Dark Lord of Derkholm was a bit of a clever spoof on sword and sorcery fantasy novels, this volume focuses on a group of magical first year university students, and thus feels highly influenced by Harry Potter. It's also, however, a scathing critique of the absurdities of academia and I personally enjoyed it on both fronts.

This book feels like a cross between the Harry Potter books and Terry Pratchett's Unseen University characters, and it is once again incredibly good-natured; you can't help but liking almost all the characters. Even the bad guys (in this case pompous and neglectful professors) don't seem exactly BAD so much as ignorant and lazy. I liked Jones' variation on the Harry Potter theme in which six members of the 1st year class ALL work together to learn what they aren't being taught. There's a strong sense of equality and cooperation between characters throughout the book, and they face challenges that, while not exactly common everyday events are at least not requiring one character to be the saviour of the world. The six students faces assassins, pirates, mice, jinxes and terrible cafeteria foods - and they defeat these problems with library books and teamwork rather than sheer magical power. These are such fun, sweet, clever adventure stories and I recommend them for anyone who's a fan of magic and wizards.

Review: The Dark Lord of Derkholm

2009-04-23T22:03:00.000-07:00

Diana Wynne Jones. Dark Lord of Derkholm. HarperTrophy: 1998.

I was in the mood for some fantasy with wizards and adventure, and this was the perfect choice. Diana Wynne Jones creates wonderfully imaginative magical worlds and Dark Lord of Derkholm was a brilliant meditation on tourism and exploitation in the form of a sweet magical adventure that also works as a spoof of other sword and sorcery novels. It's a clever novel without being ostentatiously so and it's a simple adventure in which all the characters are rather sweet and lovable and well-meaning (with the exception, of course, of the evil Mr. Chesney who exploits the the land with his magic tourism).

This is the story of the Wizard Derk, who has a lot of talent with plants and animals, but otherwise not much magical skill. He is chosen to play the role of the Dark Lord to harrow and intimidate the tourists who tramp through his land every year. Derk and his family must play their roles in an extended play creating adventure for the tourists all the while trying to find a way out of the demon-enforced contracts and financial dependence that place them at the mercy of the tourists from the non-magical world next door.

This book was great as a fast-paced magical adventure story filled with good, honest characters. The story kept my interest all the way through its 517 pages and I look forward to reading the sequel, Year of the Griffin. This has the feeling of Terry Pratchett's wizards but with less biting satire. If you like a good-natured fantasy adventure, this one is definitely for you.

Review: Cupcake

2009-04-22T16:31:00.000-07:00

Rachel Cohn. Cupcake. Simon Pulse: 2007.

Cupcake continues the tale of Cyd Charisse, the fast-talking, independent-minded heroine of Cohn's Gingerbread and SShrimp. In this third installment, we find CC living with her gay half-brother Danny in New York City getting ready to start on her adult life.

Even though I have nothing in common with Cyd Charisse's rebellious ways, I find this trilogy utterly delightful. I'm am particularly charmed by CC's unconventional voice and punk rock style. This series deals with very adult situations in such an honest, whimsical manner that I can't help but fall in love with it. Cohn has crafted vibrant characters that make real-world places and situations feel like fairy tales in which acceptance of others and living in harmony with family and friends are happily every after. It's the kind of world that makes me appreciate my own family of choice and the connections and choices we make in this world. It's a story of growing up and finding yourself and making a home among like-minded people and I love it for that.

This book reminds me of Dangerous Angels but feels more realistic in its portrayal of punk rock aesthetic New York with real-life actions and consequences than Block's fairy tale punk rock Los Angeles. I highly recommend it! I also love this cover, and I really wish I had these covers for Gingerbread and Shrimp as well!

Book Zen

2009-04-21T18:22:00.000-07:00

My fabulous BEDA buddies asked if I read a book every day, and though I've been reading a lot, the answer is a resounding no. I've been pushing myself to finish books quickly in order to facilitate the blogging every day, but some days I just don't make it. Jane Eyre, for example, took me four days. And I'm certainly not going to finish anything today - I have plans tonight. A lot of books, however, I can finish in a day if I want to. If I get hooked on a series, like I recently did with The Dresden Files, I will stay awake far too late in the night to finish one, then foolishly pick up the next one the next day. I love getting caught up in a world for extended periods of time.

This month, with my push to blog everyday and the resultant push to read every day, I've been working my way through some of the books on my bookshelf. I haven't bought any new books, and I've mostly chosen to read short books and YA books so that I can keep up the reading pace. Part of this has to do with anticipating the book-buying binge that I anticipate at the Festival of Books and part of it has to do with money and guilt over the books I've bought but not read.

The thing I love about the Festival of Books is that I spend time before it anticipating it and thinking about what books I want, and then I end up coming home with things that are completely unexpected. It's a true browsing experience, where I get to be around smart people who love books and they get to show me what's exciting that I might not even know I want! Even though I spend a lot of my time reading YA and science fiction, I often come home from the book fair with general fiction, or chick lit, or mysteries and I read them and love them. Part of this has to do with the fact that I go to the festival with my parents and even though I'm a grown-up, they always buy me the books, which is a wonderful treat, but also leads me into getting things that they might like so that we can share. It's like a mini book group. So even though I'm looking forward to the festival, I'm also considering buying the Gallagher Girls and the Secret Society Girl series because they sound so fun and cute. Even though I know that in a week I'll have a pile of new books to destract me for a while.

So, what are your favorite book zen finds that you stumbled upon where or when you least expect it? And what do you recommend that I keep my eyes open for at the book festival while still trusting to chance and fate and parents to help me decide what to read?

P.S. It was this interview with Diana Peterfreund that reminded me that I've always meant to read the Secret Society Girl Series. Now Peterfreund and Reviewer X are giving away a set of the whole series on Reviewer X's blog, so go here to enter.

Review: Zamora's Ultimate Challenge

2009-04-20T21:32:00.000-07:00

M.K. Scott. Zamora's Ultimate Challenge. Quake: 2008.

Zamora's Ultimate Challenge is the story of two brothers, Mason and Conner, who are sucked into a video game and must fight through many challenges and monsters in order to rescue their baby sister. Along the way they are constantly reminded to believe in themselves, love each other, and "trust the light from within." I enjoyed the video game concept and the adventure throughout the story, but I found the book a little heavy-handed with the life lessons about love and light. The book had some great moments when the brothers teamed up to overcome their own fears and insecurities and there were some fabulous bad guys including dinosaurs, pirates, and poison fairies. I liked that the boys faced both intellectual and physical challenges, but the book moralized a too much for me.

I am clearly not the intended audience for this book - it's aimed at boys around 10-years-old, and that's a little young for my normal reading level. I'm going to give it to my mom's 4th grade classroom, where it will find its way into the hands of some kids who will probably love it; I can't wait to hear what they think of it! If you have a boy who loves video games and adventure, this might be the book for him.

I won this book from a giveaway at drey's library and I'm really glad I did. I wouldn't have read it otherwise, and I did enjoy it even if I had some problems with it. It definitely made me want to read more books about being sucked into videogames. I remember reading Piers Anthony's Killobyte when I was in jr. high or high school and loving it. Are there any other video game books I should check out?

Now I'm off to play some Legend of Zelda; this book put me in the mood for adventure!

Review: Lament

2009-04-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

Maggie Stiefvater. Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception. Flux: 2008.

I bought this book after reading about it on Unshelved - it sounded too good to pass up, and I'm so glad I picked it up. I was a little wary about a book that focused on characters playing musical instruments (I'm a musical dunce, despite living with musicologists), but Stiefvater's mythology employed music in a way that was entirely engaging and required absolutely no knowledge, understanding, or affinity for it.

What I loved about this book is it's a fairy tale that's not afraid of how truly nasty faeries are mythologically. The faerie aspects of the story unfold slowly, so for a large part of the novel there's just a suspenseful sense of faerie menace. There are so many wonderfully evil characters that I wanted to bask in the feelings of danger. While sometimes I've felt that I've read too many stories about faeries at the moment, this book didn't make me feel this way - it withheld the answers to the end so much that I HAD to keep reading.

My one complaint is that this book felt like it ended really abruptly - I would have liked to see a little more wrap-up and clean-up at the end. There's a sequel, Ballad, coming out in October, but in the meantime, there are so many more things I want to know! But if you can handle not having all of your questions answered, this is a great book that was suspenseful without being scary. I'd say it's like Holly Black's Tithe series with more drama and fewer answers.

P.S. Bookluver-Carol is giving away a copy of Lament here!

Short Story Saturday: A

2009-04-18T11:10:00.000-07:00

Neil Gaiman. "A Study in Emerald" Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders: 2007. Audible.com: 2006.

I downloaded this story for free from audible, or you can listen to it here. It's delightfully weird - a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Lovcraftian Cthulhu mythology, in neither of which am I really an expert. This story asks for intense listening - I wanted to stop and pay attention to it. It's short and sweet and its pacing unfolds perfectly.

What I loved about this story is that it felt wonderfully self-contained and yet opened the possibility for whole worlds of other stories at the same time. I wished for more glimpses into that world, and yet I was satisfied with what I read. I highly recommend you check this out - it's sort and sweet and free and it's an excellent demonstration of storytelling craft.

Short Story Saturday

2009-04-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

I'm playing with this idea as a weekly feature. In general, I'm not in favor of memes that force me into a weekly schedule, but weekends are tough for me to find time to read and write in general. I also don't generally read short stories very often. I prefer long form fiction - I'm more into sagas and series than short stories. If I like a story, I want more, so short stories are often frustrating. There are a lot of short stories out there, including many cheap or free on audible and I have a couple short story collections kicking around my house that would be good for me to pick up. So, we'll see how long I can keep this up as a weekly meme.

Review: Metatropolis

2009-04-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

Jay Lake, Tobias Bukell, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi, Karl Schroeder, Ed. John Scalzi. METAtropolis. Audible.com: 2008.

This book was originally conceived as an audiobook project in which five great scifi authors collaborated on creating a world, and then each author wrote their story separately and then they were published together. It's now being released as a book, but really the audiobook is worth hearing. I don't know if it's still going on but here Scalzi explains how to get the audiobook for free to celebrate it's Hugo nomination.

Anyway, this is post-apocalyptic scifi set in a very near future that feels all too present. That's what I was constantly amazed by in these stories - how current and possible a complete societal collapse and restructuring feels. In it, the U.S. has partially broken apart and re-formed into independent city-states, some of which are loosely affiliated with each other. They're separated by wilds of abandoned suburbs. The stories explore new ways of getting things done and organizing activities and people in less wasteful ways, from collectives and communes to underground rogue states to online games that overlay the real world. I'm impressed by how brilliant and engaging each of the individual stories were.

I bought this audiobook because I'm a fan of John Scalzi and because I've been meaning to read something by Elizabeth Bear for a while, but I was pleasantly surprised with how much I loved each of the stories. I was particularly impressed by Jay Lake's "In the Forests of the Night," narrated by Michael Hogan, which takes place in a forest in the Pacific Northwest when a stranger makes his way into a very private underground commune. I also loved Karl Schroeder's "To Hie from Far Cilenia," which explores what is possible when cities go virtual and political and social affiliations exist in layers on top of the current political reality. I think I'm going to have to check out more of each of these authors' works sooner rather than later.

If you like science fiction that makes you rethink your current reality, this is for you. I'm having trouble comparing it to anything because each of the stories is pretty different, but lets say the universe is sort of Blade Runner meets Little Brother with some Michael Pollan and Jared Diamond thrown in for good measure.

Review: Jane Eyre

2009-04-16T14:49:00.000-07:00

Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre (1847). Wordsworth Classics: 1992.

"A classic [is] something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read" - Mark Twain

Jane Eyre was one of those books that I was never made to read in school (somehow I ended up studying 17th and 18th century novels, but not 19th!) and that I therefore could never make myself read, mostly because it was a classic - old and long and presumably stuffy. It's been on my bookshelf for years, picked up for $3.00 (price tag still on the cover) at some discount book warehouse store. I thought I knew the general plot, and I didn't think I was missing much by not reading it; I was wrong.

This book felt as engaging as a contemporary novel set in Victorian England. It's the story of a plucky teenage heroine mistreated at home and sent away to a horrible school, who then falls in love with her employer at her first job. It has fantastic Gothic elements - although they never appear, you get a strong sense of the ghosts and fairies haunting Jane's imagination as if they literally populated the English countryside. Once I had started the story, I wanted to finish it; both the mystery and the romance kept me engaged, even though I knew how it would end.

I could easily do a feminist reading of this, but I think this is the place for me to just say: I'm glad that I finally read this, and I admit that the prejudice (in the Jane Austen sense) that kept me from it in the past was foolish. It's an impressively well-written book, of course, but it's also the Victorian version of a great YA romance. It was a lot slower to read than most of the novels I read these days, and there were many words I didn't recognize (and I have a pretty good vocabulary - look for an edition with good footnotes*, if you can), but overall it was a highly enjoyable reading experience.

Now that I've finally read Jane Eyre, I'll have to start checking out the many derivative works that refer to it, like Wide Sargasso Sea and The Eyre Affair.

*My Wordsworth Classics edition pretty much only translated the French and gave the references for Shakespeare and Bible quotes. There were times I definitely wanted more historical and cultural information. I'd generally go for the Norton Critical Edition, which will have way more information than you need, but in this case I might choose this illustrated edition instead.

Too fun not to share!

2009-04-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

I got the link from GreenBeanTeenQueen:

Brooke Taylor Books is offering readers an opportunity to win Geektastic, which looks like a super awesome book full of short stories about all sorts of geekiness by fabulous YA authors. Here's the description:

Acclaimed authors Holly Black (Ironside) and Cecil Castellucci (Boy Proof) have united in geekdom to edit short stories from some of the best selling and most promising geeks in young adult literature: M.T. Anderson, Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, Tracy Lynn, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith, David Levithan, Kelly Link, Barry Lyga, Wendy Mass, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfield, Lisa Yee, and Sara Zarr.

With illustrated interstitials from comic book artists Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O'Malley, Geektastic covers all things geeky, from Klingons and Jedi Knights to fan fiction, theater geeks, and cosplayers. Whether you're a former, current, or future geek, or if you just want to get in touch with your inner geek, Geektastic will help you get your geek on.

Anyway, you enter the contest by telling her what makes you a geek, which is fabulous. I'm finding it totally addictive to think of all the things that make me a geek.

Enter here!

Choosing Books

2009-04-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

There are several discussions out there right now about how you choose what to read. Some of them are selecting books in preparation for the 24-hour readathon, which I wish I could participate in, but I have theater tickets Saturday afternoon that will interrupt my reading time. Others are about requesting ARCs and writing reviews, which isn't an issue for me at this point. I've just started blogging and am mostly working on reducing my TBR pile of books I've bought. But if you want to know about ARCs, check out The Story Siren and her very important reminders about manners and humility. The Bookgirl Reviews is offering readers an opportunity to select what books they want her to review next. So I thought I'd let you all know how I choose what to read.

Mostly, I'm new at this, so it is in no way systematic. I'm a compulsive book-buyer, so I have a huge TBR pile at any given time. I have certain authors and series that I follow and will therefore pick up and usually read immediately a new book as soon as it comes out (in paperback). I also read a lot of (mostly YA and scifi) book review blogs, and when something has amazing buzz, I will pick it up as soon as it comes out. But unless it's something that rockets to the top of the TBR pile, I mostly pick novels off my bookshelf on a whim. I will tend to read genres in spurts. I will read a bunch of, say, vampire novels (recently the entire Anita Blake Vampire Hunter seriesand several Sookie Stackhouse books) and then I will all of a sudden be in the mood for realistic romances and I won't want to look at anything supernatural for a while. Then I'll slowly work my way back into scifi or fantasy. So right now, I'm only reading things that have gotten my attention enough that I've felt compelled to buy them, but I will skip around between genres depending on my mood.

I also (sort of) read more than one book at a time. First, I'm usually reading one book and listening to a different book on my ipod for when I'm driving and doing chores. Right now, I'm reading Jane Eyre and listening to METAtropolis. I tend to start several different books in different genres, and a few pages or sometimes a few chapters in, I will decide that one of them is the one I really want to be reading at this particular moment and I will continue with and finish that one. That one often leads to others like it, and so I'll have several other books that I've opened and started that I'm sort of but not really reading at the same time. You'll notice that the 4 books I've listed as the ones I am currently reading in the side bar aren't the ones I'm actually currently reading as I stated in this post. They're all books I've started, read a few pages of, and mean to and want to read, but that for one reason or another I picked up something else and got engrossed in that instead.

In addition to picking up books on a whim, I try to follow along with the reading at the Sword and Laser podcast and the Galactic(a) Watercooler Book Club, but if those aren't what I'm in the mood for, they often fall by the wayside. I will also gladly entertain recommendations and suggestions from friends, readers, and fellow bloggers. If you want to request a review of a certain book, I love to have people to talk about books with, so I will gladly be guided by the stars (or the readers) to pick up a book you want me to read or review sooner rather than later.

I tend to read more YA and fantasy than anything else because I can generally read them pretty fast, whereas hard core scifi (or Jane Eyre, which isn't that long but is somehow a lot slower than other the things I've been reading) can require an investment of a week or two. This is mostly relevant because of BEDA; because I'm trying to blog every day, I need to have new things to blog about, so I'm trying to read more books more quickly than I normally would. Usually, I don't care if it takes me a day, a week, or a month to finish a book, but I want to establish a baseline of several reviews on this blog to give readers a sense of my taste and style. I'm reading both recent and older books at the moment, both in order to demonstrate who I am and what I like to read, so that my book discussion isn't just about the newest, shiniest books out there but actually establishes a sense of who I am and what I like to read.

I also this week won my first book on a blog giveaway (yay! super exiting!), so when that book arrives, I might move it to the top of the pile just because it was free and I was excited to win something and I appreciate that someone bothered to give it away. If I ever happen to get to the point where publishers or authors actually wanted me to read and review things, I assume that this would be my policy, too - that, assuming it was something I was interested in reading, I would move it to the top of the pile. Right now, though, I'm just enjoying reading and writing about whatever I want as the spirit takes me.

Perhaps I will, like Bookgirl, catalogue some of the books on my TBR pile and ask the internet what they want me to read next. I wonder if it would work? I wonder how that would change my reading habits?

My Favorite Holiday

2009-04-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

Coming up soon is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books here in Los Angeles, and I must say I can't wait for April 25th. This is a huge outdoor festival where local bookstores, authors, publishers etc set up booths for the weekend and sell and sign and discuss books all over the UCLA campus. I think it was here 5 years ago that I really started picking up YA books on my own (other than Harry Potter, of course) - before that I just stole books from my mom's elementary school.

Because I go with my parents, I'm sort of constrained by their interests, so I'll probably be attending a panel on writing California history and not attending the panel on YA lit moderated by Cecil Castellucci (sigh), but I will be able to pick up books from all of my favorite indie bookstores at once. Yay! At the book festival, I tend to have the most success finding science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, young adult books, and quirky, intelligent general fiction. There's not a noticeable queer presence, but I usually pick up an offbeat queer book or two.

I'm always sure to pick up several books at the Mysterious Galaxy booth and usually do well at Book Soup and Skylight Books as well. It's always fascinating to see what all the different bookstores choose to bring as recommendations and representations of their own unique identities. Of course you can find major bestsellers at many different booths, but this festival is a great way for bookstores and publishers to highlight things I don't really know about yet. I love it!

So, I'm asking the internet to help me prepare. What offbeat or lesser-known books do you think I should look out at this year's festival? What do you predict I will fall in love with? What titles or authors should I look for? What new releases might I find there first? I'd be glad to take recommendations or suggestions for my annual book-buying binge! And if you're in the LA area, this event is definitely worth attending - I find it such a beautiful, idyllic day to wander among bookstalls in the spring weather.

Review: Tattoo

2009-04-13T22:18:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Lynn Barnes. Tattoo. Delacorte Books for Young Readers: 2007.

Tattoo is a fun little book about a group of four teenage girls who get temporary tattoos at the mall and find themselves possessed with superpowers. Soon, they are caught in the middle of a supernatural battle between life and death that combines Celtic and Greek folklore into a fun mythology adventure.

Personally, I liked this story quite a lot. It's in no way a challenging read but it moves quickly and it presents a playful vision of mythology mixed with contemporary teenagers. I loved the group of four girls with a loving, unproblematic friendship; they laughed and quarreled and teased each other and loved each other. Each of them was distinct, although their characteristics were more descriptions and quirks than character development, but that's at least partially because the book was short - there may be more development over multiple books. I totally love Zo, who wasn't our main character but she was the one who wasn't into clothes and boys and the mall. She was a little athletic and protective toward her friends. But really, all four of the girls were cute and likable.

I must admit, I only picked up this book because the cover of the sequel, Fate, is so awesome. I really do love it, and I liked Tattoo enough that I'm excited to read Fate. Tattoo is a good, quick read and lots of fun. You'll like it if you like mythology. It's a girly version of <The Lightning Theif* without the adult supervision. It's not great literature, but I enjoyed it anyway.

*I keep comparing things to the Percy Jackson series for some reason. Am I missing diversity in my frame of reference, or is it just because I like those books so much? What else should I be comparing this book to?

Re-Reading Report: The Mysterious Affair at Styles

2009-04-12T23:10:00.000-07:00

Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Affair At Styles. (1916) Audible.com:1996

I found myself re-reading (well, listening to) Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair At Styles this weekend. I went through an Agatha Christie period in high school where I read pretty close to all of her books, so listening to this was familiar and comfortable. Returning to one of them was a fun experience, but not nearly as entertaining for me as when I was younger.

Although I didn't remember the details, returning to this story didn't keep me enthralled as it did the first time. I grew impatient with the idiosyncrasies of Poirot and Hastings and the story unfolded more slowly than I would have liked. I think this might have been a side-effect of listening rather than reading - when I read I have more control over the pace.

This was a nice little domestic mystery in which a rich old lady is found poisoned while all of her friends, family, and heirs are staying at her house. There are many blinds and false turns, but in general the story is intricately plotted in the manner you expect of Christie. Personally, I prefer Miss Marple to Poirot as detective, but this was a perfectly fine return to a classic mystery. I recommend reading rather than listening for this one, but the audiobook was just fine.

Review: Death's Daughter

2009-04-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

Amber Benson. Death's Daughter. Ace: 2009.

Summary (from the publisher):

Calliope Reaper-Jones so just wanted a normal life: buying designer shoes on sale, dating guys from Craig’s List, web-surfing for organic dim-sum for her boss...

But when her father—who happens to be Death himself—is kidnapped, and the Devil’s Protege embarks on a hostile takeover of the family business, Death, Inc., Callie returns home to assume the CEO mantle— only to discover she must complete three nearly impossible tasks in the realm of the afterlife first.

Review:

This is a cute book with a fun premise, but I found it incredibly irritating. The narrative voice was too deliberately flippant for my taste and I felt the whole thing could use another round of editing. It was trying to be sassy supernatural chicklit, but the pop culture references felt forced and possibly dated. The heroine's voice was deliberately superficial in a way that wanted to be cute but was too wordy and too stupid for me. It wanted to be Undead and Unwed crossed with The Lightning Theif, but both of those series were better. I was annoyed by the heroine and her constant horniness for every man she saw, and I knew exactly how the whole book would unfold when I was halfway through. Plus, there were a lot of incomplete sentences, bad grammar and awkward word choices that were probably intended to capture the voice of the character but which I just found irritating. The tasks were predictable and the plot unfolded like a video game: heroine is abducted into a strange world, given a series of tasks to perform, and is then confronted by a final boss while accumulating a companions along the way.

Despite all of its problems, by the end of the novel, I was kind of interested. The idea of Death's daughter as a contemporary young woman struggling with her heritage is a premise I'm predisposed to like (I love Terry Pratchett's Susan Sto Helit, and if this were a series (preferably a slightly better-written one), I would probably pick up the next one. Amber Benson will be a good Young Adult or Chicklit author if she spends some time practicing and revising, but I think her name got her published a little before she was ready. Right now, I'd say that if you like the Queen Betsy series and are looking for something else in that vein, and if and vanity and silliness in a main character don't bother you too much, then this would be a fun choice for you. Otherwise, pass it by and pick up something by Amber Benson after she's been writing for a while.

Review: Certain Girls

2009-04-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Weiner. Certain Girls. Washington Square Press:2009.

I've been a Jennifer Weiner fan since Good in Bed; Certain Girls continues the characters developed first in Good in Bed and In Her Shoes, but as Weiner has grown and developed over time, so have her characters and plots. This novel isn't as light and fluffy as a lot of chicklit - it depicts serious subjects, romance doesn't solve all problems, and there's only a little discussion of shoes and outfits. What it does offer, though, is a great combination of female voices and female characters struggling with issues that relate to real womens' lives.

In Certain GirlsWeiner alternates the chapters between the voices of Cannie Shapiro (the heroine of Good in Bed) and her 12-year-old daughter Joy as they struggle with Joy's growing maturity and independence and Cannie's desire to protect her daughter, even from Cannie's own past. The transition between narrators at the end of each chapter could be jarring, particularly because Cannie's voice felt so familiar and natural to me. Joy's chapters, however, would make an excellent young adult novel and I would be pleased if Weiner branched out into this genre. The two stories wove together into a beautiful exploration of the troubled relationships between mothers and daughters and the love and tragedy that affect ordinary womens' lives.

I loved this book, at least partially because I love Jennifer Weiner's smart, sarcastic, literate voice. Combining that with the angst and struggle of a YA book, and I couldn't help but love it. It's sort of Gossip Girl meets Good In Bed and it's even better for the combination. While this is not intended for Young Adult audience, there's nothing too graphic, but there are some serious dramatic moments.

Review: Jane Austen Book Club

2009-04-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

Karen Joy Fowler. The Jane Austen Book Club. Plume: 2005.

I didn't love The Jane Austen Book Club, but I enjoyed and admired it, and the more I think about it, the more I like it. It's incredibly intelligent and well-crafted pastiche of Jane Austen's books and the contemporary state of life and literature. In this novel, 6 contemporary Californians, mostly middle-aged, meet to read and discuss Jane Austen's 6 novels. Vignettes from the characters' lives parallel and enhance the discussions of the books.

Fowler's novel takes the witty social observation of a Jane Austen novel but juxtaposes it with contemporary attitudes toward marriage and romance and the whole thing feels a lot less substantial than in Austen's novels. The book club's discussions are facile and silly and the romance in the story is halting and unsatisfying, but that's part of the point. This is not a book by Jane Austen. This is not a romance inspired by Austen like Shannon Hale's Austenland, but rather a literary and social commentary in the form of fiction. It's smart, but it feels brittle; it's a little too simple and subtle to be blindingly clever and without the heart of a great romance or even a satisfying chick lit novel. It's good, but too purposely unsatisfying to be great. I like it, but I don't love it. I'm glad I read it, and mostly I admire Fowler's intelligence. I look forward to checking out her other books. I definitely plan to pick up Wit's End when it comes out in paperback later this month.

Review: The Graveyard Book

2009-04-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

Neil Gaiman. The Graveyard Book. 2008. Audible.com. Narrated by Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman is an expert storyteller of the best sort, and The Graveyard Book provides an excellent example of that skill. The Graveyard Book tells the story of Nobody Owens (Bod for short), a young boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard after his parents are murdered. It references Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, where folk tales and the supernatural replace the wilds of India. It's a story of a boy becoming a man in the face of danger; Gaiman tells an old story with the best, making it feel new and exciting despite the familiarity.

This novel won the 2009 Newberry Medal and the audio recording won audible's Tournament of Audiobooks. There's a reason this book is getting lauded. It's a beautiful, simple, excellently crafted and thoroughly entertaining story. It makes the fantasy elements of ghosts and phantoms and witches both homey and mysterious, crossing old familiar folk tales with new twists and strange mythologies and it does it in such a way that I just enjoyed the story washing over me. Hearing Gaiman read his own novel is as familiar and comforting as my own father reading bedtime stories when I was little. It made me want to download the rest of Gaiman's audiobooks. If you like ghost stories or Gaiman, you should definitely check this out, either in book or audio form.

On rewriting the classics

2009-04-07T17:20:00.000-07:00

At the moment, I'm reading Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, a novel that intertwines the lives of 6 contemporary characters with the plots of Jane Austen's novels. So far, it's a fun book (more later), but it got me thinking about novels that reference, reimagine or rework classic literature.

Personally, I love intertextality and references to other works, but it does make me feel guilty if I don't know or don't remember the previous works. I've been meaning to read the Thursday Next novels for a while now, but I (shamefully) haven't read Jane Eyre. It's on my bookshelf, but I haven't managed to get around to it.

Usually, a good author will make sure that knowing the reference material enhances the the reading experience but lack of knowing doesn't seriously detract. John Scalzi's Old Man's War is strongly based on Heinlein's Starship Troopers (which I've never read) and yet I found OMW intelligent and engaging and perfectly comprehensible without knowledge of the references. I may someday go back and read Starship Troopers and then reread OMW, but I'm not really in any hurry to do so.

I like that here are people out there writing good books that pay tribute to the stories that they've read in the past. I like that these contemporary works remind me to read the classics because there's a good reason they're classics. I like that a modern twist or revision can make me look at an old favorite in a new light. I just need to do my homework more, so that I'm prepared for the references when they've come. I've read all of Jane Austen's novels and watched the movies inspired by them, and yet I find myself struggling for the details while reading The Jane Austen Book Club - there's a lot I've forgotten since last I revisited Emma and Persuasion particularly (I found myself referencing Clueless instead of Emma for comparison). I want to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? before I read Scalzi's The Android's Dream, for example. And I want the former fresh in my mind when I read the latter. That's a lot of planning for my reading schedule!

So, what do you think? Do you like postmodern intertextuality? Modernizations of the classics? What are the best and worst that I should read or avoid?

Review: The Last Colony

2009-04-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

John Scalzi. The Last Colony. New York: Tor, 2007.

The Last Colony is the third book in John Scalzi's Old Man's War universe and it continues the characters and conceits of the series impressively.

Personally, I love this series and Scalzi's unique voice in it - the sardonic humor and genuineness of lead character John Perry bring humanity to a scifi novel about space exploration and war, subjects that don't inherently excite me. What I love most about this series is the fact that despite that this is a novel strongly focused on a male hero, there are several strong female characters fleshing out the world and that they clearly have the admiration and appreciation of the male characters. In addition to Perry's (kickass awesome) wife and daughter, this novel adds the character of Savitri Guntupalli, Perry's hilariously sarcastic assistant. I totally want to know what happened on Savitri's one abortive lesbian date. Perry, and by extension Scalzi himself clearly appreciates and respects women, and for that I can't help but love the novels.

This third novel in the series follows Perry and his wife and daughter as they lead a new colony settling on a distant planet. In addition to the struggles of establishing a brand new settlement (with some fun references to the original American colonies), soon the colony is facing hostile natives and worse: colonial politics and interspecies warfare.

This book reads really quickly and I never felt compelled to put it down; I was engrossed from beginning to end. The plot moves rapidly with quick changes of alliance and power which accentuate our main characters' roles as both leaders and functionaries trapped between greater powers. Throughout it all, the characters impressed me as incredibly real and genuine as people placed in difficult situations. I believed Perry's voice all the way through. The writing style is incredible straightforward and as such it may put some people off - there's a lot of action and voice and very little description. For me, that totally works. My only complaint is that Scalzi left some loose edges, particularly the colonists' encounters with native species seemed abrupt and left dangling. There are certainly several questions I would have loved to have answered that Scalzi left unresolved - yes, sometimes bigger problems come up and life doesn't answer all questions, but I still prefer my fiction to resolve all of its issues. But really, this is a minor issue for a largely extremely compelling scifi novel that makes fascinating subjects I wouldn't always find compelling. This novel has all the strengths of classical scifi with aliens, exploration, and politics without having the misogynist voice or missing female characters that plague so much scifi from the '50s to '70s.

Review: Avalon High

2009-04-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

Meg Cabot. Avalon High. HarperTeen. 2007.

Avalon High is the story of King Arthur and Camelot, reincarnated in a contemporary high school. It's a super, fun book enhanced with Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" and aspects of Arthurian Legend. I'm a sucker for a good Arthurian story (I've read The Once and Future King twice and studied Arthurian Legend at NYU for summerschool) and this one was light and fun. I recommend this for YA lit fantasy fans who might appreciate a cross between Mists of Avalon and light teen romance. It's a quick little read but very fun.

Nerd that I am, my favorite part was out heroine, Elaine's, relationship with her parents, both Medieval scholars. The parents were hilarious images of academics: nerdy, a little distracted, inept at housework, and yet loving and supporting. I loved them.

In honor of the book, here's The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse, my favorite Pre-Raphaelite painter.

Re-Reading Report: Dune

2009-04-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

Frank Herbert. Dune. 1965. Audible.com.

I listened to Dune rather than reading it, this time. I read it back in high school, but decided to revisit it when The Sword and Laser chose it for their April book discussion. It's a classic science fiction messiah story, telling the story of a boy becoming a man and a leader of people on a strange foreign planet. It's an excellent combination of adventure and politics.

That being said, the novel's excellence being commonly acknowledged, and me being who I am, I didn't love the portrayal of women in this novel. Paul's mother being a significant character in the novel is a fascinating choice and I love that, but she was more of a burden on him than a fully-fleshed character. The stigmatization of Jessica (and almost all other women in the novel) as a "Bene Gesserit witch" interested primarily in power and eugenics makes female power seem monstrous in this novel. While our hero Paul's powers are miraculous and messiah-like, his sister is an outcast and condemned as horrific because of her supernatural knowledge. It's a novel in which marriage is primarily an arrangement of political power and women seem so happy to ally themselves with powerful men that they then fall in love no matter how poorly they are treated by those men. Herbert attempts to establish Paul's alliance with Chani as a romantic relationship and to glorify this as love, even though he won't marry her because the relationship isn't politically advantageous. However, Chani is portrayed as a capable Freman equal before she meets Paul, but after they are together she must be rescued and sent away from danger because he loves her so much. She has very little character development except when it is necessary for Paul's character.

Similarly, the true bad guy is lasciviously homosexual in a way that may be vaguely pedophilic, so the novel doesn't offer much alternative to heterosexual patriarchal power. Homosexuality is just another way in which the villain, Baron Harkonnen is evil and horrific.

In addition to the gender problems, Dune is a story of colonization, in which the offworld political powers loyal to the Emperor attempt to dominate and control the Freman native population of Dune. It does reveal some of the problems with this colonization (and European involvement in the Middle East) but it still offers only the offworld ruling class Paul Atreides as the messianic solution to the oppression of the people of Arrakis.

So despite the problematic political overtones, it's a powerful, well-crafted hero story. The portrayal of Arrakis as both obstacle and strength and the development of Paul as he matures are compelling strengths of Dune as a novel. The intricate storytelling kept me interested in reading, and even re-reading (hearing) the story. Overall, I very much enjoyed the story even a second time, and it was a lovely novel to hear read; it felt as comforting as a parent reading a story to me as a child and it was a familiar enough story that it was easy to pay attention while driving and doing housework.

Now I am left with a question: do I continue reading the series? I believe in high school I read Dune Messiah, the second novel, but I believe I lost interest and didn't continue reading the series after that. I don't know if I want to get involved with the saga of the Atreides again, but there's certainly promise of future stories the end of Dune that makes me want to continue. I'm tempted to get the next one as an audiobook, but I find it hard to justify buying the audio of a novel that I could probably pick up used for a couple of dollars and that I should have a copy of somewhere already. What's a girl to do?

Review: An Abundance of Katherines

2009-04-03T10:15:00.000-07:00

John Green. An Abundance of Katherines.

An Abundance of Katherines feels like it wants to be a cross between Catcher in the Rye and a Judd Apatow movie. I feel that it's closer to A Separate Peace meets Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (with math!), which is still pretty darn good.

An Abundance of Katherines tells the story of Colin Singleton, hapless smart kid obsessing over making the transition from smart kid to genius while also dealing with being dumped by the 19th girl he's dated named Katherine. It does a great job showing the questions and anxieties that come with growing up and wondering if you'll ever manage to live up to your potential in a way that feels incredibly real. So, like all great works of literature and film, he grabs a sidekick (or, technically, the sidekick grabs him) and goes on a roadtrip. The roadtrip wasn't that important and ended pretty quickly (in Gutshot, TN) where our intrepid heroes met girls, got jobs (of a sort) and found themselves. But, of course, wacky hijinks ensued.

This novel makes brilliant use of footnotes! The footnotes kept making me laugh out lout (really!). There were graphs and everything. The math was hilarious and adorable (and I never think math is hilarious and adorable!). John Green is a master of voice and character development in a way that made this novel particularly amusing and does an excellent job at capturing nerdiness in the wild.

This novel is cute, and funny, and feels painfully real. It's also well-written in a way that makes me suspect that Green's novels will be read in schools and taught as literature sometime in the future. But it is very much a boy novel. That's not a bad thing, but it makes me worry that I associate a masculine voice with being important "literature." Could this book be written with female characters and a female perspective? In a way that's a stupid question, because that would be an entirely different book. But my question is, what novels about two very smart women hanging out, growing up, and finding themselves are award-winning literature? I should read those books. And if you know any teenage boys, they should read this one.

Will I be reading more John Green novels in the future? Absolutely. I can't wait for Paper Towns to come out in paperback. I read Looking for Alaska a while ago, and it is a beautiful, touching novel that I really loved.

How I read

2009-04-02T22:40:00.000-07:00

Recently, Justine Larablestier asked about reading paperback vs. hardback novels. Personally, I have a strong preference. I almost never buy hardback books. This is a function of both price and preference. I actively dislike hardbacks - they're heavy, difficult to read with one hand, and I feel guilty that I might mess them up. I hate slipcovers and inevitably lose or rip them. I like having a paperback I can slide into my purse or backpack and not worry about accidentally splashing with water or food or whatever. I break the spines by putting them down open to mark my page. I read at the gym, while walking anywhere, waiting in lines, and in the bathtub. I don't treat books particularly well, and don't want to feel guilty about that. I want books to be living and breathing, comfortable companions rather than precious artifacts. I keep the vast majority on my bookshelves, although I pass particularly good ones on to friends.

I much prefer the books I would like to read to come out as paperback originals. Personally, I would gladly read and review them. When a new book, particularly a young adult book, comes out in paperback first, I am much more likely to buy and read it in a prompt manner. In fact, I'm pretty sure the Harry Potter books are the only YA books I've ever bought in hardback. In fact, that's the only reason I haven't read past the first book in the Twilight series. I read Twilight years ago, and I enjoyed it, but it wasn't worth going out and buying New Moon in hardback. It took at least two years for the second book to come out in paperback; by the time it did so, I lost all interest and momentum in the series. I can generally hold out a year or so, but I was actively angry at how long they took to release the series in paperback. I'll read the rest of the series sometime, but honestly, I'm over it.

Generally, hardbacks are just not worth the expense or inconvenience to me. There are so many great books out there that I might as well read the ones that are cheap and convenient. I'm more than willing to wait for the books I want to come out in paperback. Like, for example, Suite Scarlett, How to Ditch Your Fairy or The Graveyard Book. I'm excited to read them, but I still don't want them in hardback. This is probably not the greatest, most supportive thing I could do for authors or the publishing industry, but it's the way I read; I buy enough books that the difference in price does indeed matter to me. I firmly believe in paperback books, and I find it absurd how, particularly in YA and genre fiction, more and more books are being released first as expensive hardbacks. I'll gladly read them, if people pass them on to me or otherwise give them to me, but generally, I'd much prefer to read paperbacks. It may mean that I'll never be on the cutting edge of popular literature, but I pay attention to the buzz and the reviews and I'll pick up the books once they come out in paperback.

BEDA

2009-04-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

Maureen Johnson is going to Blog Every Day in April to promote her new ning site and the paperback release of Suite Scarlett.

I figure since this blog is brand new, blogging every day would be good for me to develop it and practice this subject and format. I really don't know if I'll have something new to say about books every day, but I'm going to try! There might be a lot more discussion of my favorites and recommendations, since I can't possibly read a new book every day in April to review.

So here's the BEDA rules and Manifesto:

THE RULES OF BLOG EVERY DAY APRIL (BEDA)

1. Blog every day in April.

THE BLOG EVERY DAY IN APRIL MANIFESTO

I commit to this idea and am determined to create something EVERY DAY in April, including weekends. Every day, I will find something to say. I embrace the reality that there is always something to talk about, if you are willing to take the time to look for it.

I VixenReads promise to blog every day in April.

Maureen suggests rewarding yourself if you succeed, but my reward will be Suite Scarlett, which I have already pre-ordered, so I guess I win no matter what!

OK, so that's it! Em at Em's Bookshelf is apparently also doing this, so that's at least two book blogs to check out daily. Yikes!

April Fools' Day

2009-04-01T13:43:00.000-07:00

This is inspired by A Reader's Respite's review of King's Fool to celebrate April Fools' Day. Reading it reminded me that I have a favorite literary fool: The Fool from Robin Hobb's Farseer and Tawny Man Trilogies.

I found Hobb's books wonderfully, horribly addicting. A friend read Assassin's Apprentice on a plane flight and recommended it to me, and the next thing I knew I was knee-deep in a trilogy of trilogies (nonogy? Is that a word?). I tried to quit after the Farseer trilogy, really I did, because I thought the Liveship Traders series was too much about ships. For some reason, I am completely uninterested in books set on ships. I was wrong. I picked up the first book in the Tawny Man trilogy, which continues some of the characters and events from the Farseer trilogy and I discovered that it also continues some of the ideas from the Liveship Traders trilogy, so I had to go back and read all three of those, and it turned out I loved them as well. In fact, I became so engrossed in the series that I bought the last two of the Tawny Man trilogy in hardback, which I never do!

What I love about these series is the light touch of magic that is truly unique to Hobb's world. There are magical, fantastical elements that I've never seen anywhere else, but there are also fabulous adventures and intrigue regardless of the magic. The first trilogy focuses on FitzChivalry Farseer, the illigitimate son of the king whose magical talents lead him to be trained as an Assassin. This series is a great combination of fantasy, politics, and adventure.

But about the fool - he's a strange and mysterious guide and teacher for our hero, and comes into his own in the Tawny Man trilogy. He is both loyal and enigmatic, frequently offering wisdom couched in riddles, and changed as much by Fitz and his adventures as Fitz is changed by his tutelage. He's everything and nothing a royal fool should be, with great dignity despite his seemingly demeaning occupation.

I highly recommend this series! Help celebrate the fool!

Review: Changeling

2009-03-31T15:55:00.000-07:00

Delia Sherman. Changeling.

This book is delightfully clever. Sherman's vision of New York Between, in which fairly tale creatures from all sorts of countries and mythologies mingle with new urban fairies native to New York City. The setting and ideas in this novel bring new pleasant surprises on every page. The novel tells the story of Neef, a mortal changeling girl raised among the fairies of Central Park. When she snoops into a forbidden fairy dance, she is exiled from the park and must go on a quest to be allowed to return to her home.

I love the ideas of this book. The characters and setting are excellent. Even better is the portion of the book set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I would love to see whole adventures set in this fairytale version of the museum in which the exhibits act as docents and the Curator maintains order. Neef is a darling protagonist and her adventures are daring and clever in perfect fairytale storybook fashion.

However, twice I started this book and stopped around page 50 before I finally managed to get engrossed in the story and read it all the way through. I wonder if perhaps that would not be true for someone of the reading level intended for the book (12 and up according to Penguin). Once I got through to page 55 or so, where the real adventure starts, I very much enjoyed the book, but overcoming the inertia of putting it down and not picking it up again was a serious problem for me and one that I don't understand. Intellectually I enjoyed this book very much, but for some reason it just didn't keep me coming back to it.

Anyway, this is a great book for young urban readers who will love and understand the magic of that lurks in the City. I now want to read The Good Fairies of New York for comparison purposes, and re-read From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for more Metropolitan Museum action. What is it about the Met that I love so much?

Favorites: Megan Whalen Turner

2009-03-31T01:25:00.000-07:00

Megan Whalen Turner. The Queen's Thief series.

I read The Thief and I was hooked. This series is the absolutely delightful story of Gen, a young thief sent by his king on a dangerous and nearly impossible mission to prevent a war and save the kingdom in which he grew up. I love the way Turner creates a clever, talented, resourceful hero who I nonetheless find engaging and funny rather than arrogant. He gains in power and maturity throughout the series in surprising and compelling ways. The story takes twists and turns that kept me reading avidly from one book to the next (and waiting anxiously for the third book). While Gen is clearly the hero (and personally I prefer female leads), all of the characters are interesting and the plot takes some unexpected twists and turns that kept me hurtling from page to page. It really is simply delightful storytelling at its best, and I recommend it to anyone who likes young adult fantasy and adventure.

Guilty Pleasure(s): Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter

2009-03-30T03:39:00.000-07:00

Laurell K. Hamilton. Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter.

These are definitely a guilty pleasure. They infuriate me if I think about them too hard, and all of the errors make me want to become a copy editor, and yet I find myself staying up all night to finish them and picking them up compulsively one after another. I believe I read the 15 books in the series currently out in paperback in two or three weeks. I had the first novel, Guilty Pleasures, languishing on my bookshelf for years before I picked it up on a whim as part of my recent urban fantasy kick. They're incredibly addictive, if you don't think about them too much.

This is a series focused on Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter in the city of St. Louis. She raises zombies as a profession and consults with the police on supernatural investigations as a sideline. Over the course of the series, she faces increasingly powerful vampires, wereanimals, and various other forms of supernatural bad guys. I very much enjoyed the attempts to make a kickass female heroine with a lot of power. Sometimes it didn't work, but for the most part I appreciate the fact that she could handle herself in a fight and that the boys weren't the only ones with supernatural powers.

The best and worst aspect of this series is the sex. The novels progress from our female protagonist agonizing over who to date to lots of explicit sex scenes as it gets further into the series. Sometimes I found the scenes kind of fun, but sometimes I was overwhelmed by the amount and explicitness of the (pretty much always heterosexual) sex. I was also annoyed by the heroine's occasional stabs of conscience and the weird combination of prudery and licentiousness. The ambivalence about increasing kinkiness and the awkward attempts to reconcile old beliefs with new desires and behaviors feels very authentic as Anita struggles with her own sexuality, but it was at times annoying to read no matter how realistic it might feel.

Overall, this is a fun series with lots of good vampire, werewolf, and zombie power, complete with a kickass female lead who even sometimes manages to do some investigation. The Dresden Files are better in terms of developing the investigation and private eye aspects, but there's a lot more sex and relationships in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. Overall, I'd say it's good, dirty fun but not for the faint of heart.

Favorites: Maureen Johnson

2009-03-30T02:35:00.000-07:00

I love Maureen Johnson as much for her blog as anything else. She has an amazing, fabulous sense of humor and an irreverent wackiness that always makes me laugh.

I first picked her up because Bermudez Triangle deals with three girls who are friends while two of them struggle with coming out and their growing feelings for each other. This isn't, however, my favorite mj book - I found it a little bit traumatic. Perhaps it hits a little too close to home.

mj really impressed me with Devilish and Girl at Sea. These are sweet, fun, playful teen chicklit romances with lots of adventure and humor. They're great for reading at beaches and coffeeshops and anytime I need a pick-me-up. When I finish, I always want more. I'm super excited for Suite Scarlett, which comes out in paperback this month. I will totally be devouring it the minute it arrives!

Favorites: Boy Meets Boy

2009-03-30T01:53:00.000-07:00

David Levithan. Boy Meets Boy

I like a lot of David Levithan's work. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is super fun and Wide Awake presents a beautifully aspirational political vision, but Boy Meets Boy is by far my favorite. It creates a high school world in which friends love and accept each other in all their queerness and individuality to such an extent that it feels like science fiction even though there's nothing futuristic about it. It feels surreal just because it has hope and acceptance instead of the pain and suppression that most of us associate with high school. I read this book while trapped in an airport and scuzzy motel in Vegas when a flight was delayed and cancelled. Even though it was the worst travel experience I've had so far in my life, I was laughing and crying and happy because of this book. I love the beautiful, hopeful, accepting world and the vibrant, unique characters that Levithan creates. This is a book for anyone who has struggled with acceptance and identity and I found it wonderfully healing for a sweet gay love story.

Favorites: Shannon Hale

2009-03-30T00:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not even sure which Shannon Hale novel I read first or why. It may have been Austenland, because I do love a good reimagining of Pride and Prejudice and this one was quite fun.

My introduction to Shannon Hale may have been The Goose Girl, but if so it was probably because of a review from bookshelves of doom. Anyway, whatever the reason, I have read all four of the Books of Bayern. I love the fairy tale feel of Hale's stories. They're lovely, sweet, compelling stories with just a touch of magic. The vaguely medieval world is beautifully described and each of the four Bayern novels focuses on a different character, but each has a strong, compelling personality. These are books I've passed around to all my friends because it's so easy to fall in love with them!

Favorites: The Dresden Files

2009-03-30T00:11:00.000-07:00

Jim Butcher. The Dresden Files.

I thought I'd introduce myself by telling you something about some of the books I love. My favorites change frequently, but I've been on an urban fantasy kick recently, and my love for The Dresden Files series is both a cause and a symptom. I picked up Storm Front (The Dresden Files, Book 1) on a whim, and pretty much stayed up all night reading it. I read the whole series compulsively and now I'm dying for more. I can't wait for Turn Coat (The Dresden Files, Book 11) to come out in paperback. I love the combination of the fantasy genre with the hardboiled independent protagonist of a mystery novel, and Jim Butcher does it just right!

The Dresden Files focus on Harry Dresden, a wizard in Chicago as he fights vampires, faeries, warewolves and even other wizards, when he only wants his wizarding skills to support himself as a private eye. Soon, he'd consulting for the police and fighting plots within plots in supernatural politics. The books have an amazing sense of humor and great character development, and I highly recommend them for anyone who likes urban fantasy for more than just the romance. Think Buffy meets Raymond Chandler.

Hello, internet

2009-03-27T22:00:00.001-07:00

I'm newly amused with reading blogs about books. I've always been a bookworm of diverse interests, so I'm enjoying very much hearing a lot of different perspectives on what they're reading and what's out there. I'm a sci-fi geek at heart, and thus have been following Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi for years. I also try to keep up with the reading at The Sword and Laser and Galactic(a) Watercooler.

I'm also reading a lot of YA books. For the purpose of full disclosure: I am fully a grown up, and exceptionally over-educated, so all I can say is, they're fun, quick reads and there's a lot of really good writing in the YA classification. I started reading YA books as a break from my dissertation, and I find the genre addictive and delightful. My favorite writing about YA lit out there is at bookshelves of doom. I also totally enjoy reading the blogs of Maureen Johnson, Justine Larbalestier, and Sarah Beth Durst on a regular basis.

However, just recently I stumbled into a wider reading circle, and all of a sudden I find myself reading Wands and Worlds, SciFiChick, Lauren's Crammed Bookshelf, The Shady Glade, The Story Siren, A True Reality, YABOOKNERD, SciFiGuy, GreanBeanTeenQueen, Worth the Trip and I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I Read?

As you can probably tell from my blog selection, I read a lot of sci-fi, fantasy, and urban fantasty, queer lit and some young adult and chicklit. But really, I'll read anything and I love to talk about fiction, so if you have suggestions, I'll take them.

My plan is to start out with a few posts about some of my favorite authors and series to sort of introduce myself and get started, but then to report as I'm reading. So we'll see how it works.