Category Archives: Books

Fiction/Mystery: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson

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Read in October. Since I’ve been doing reviews in any old order…I’m almost caught up!! Yipee!!

Also known as Book 3 of the Millennium trilogy. I am SUCH a huge fan of this trilogy. I picked up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on a whim. Blew through it like a crazy person. LOVE. Then I was so excited in Dublin last February to find The Girl Who Played with Fire already out there. Loved that one just as much. As SOON as book 3 was released in the UK, I ordered it from amazon.uk because HELLO I could NOT wait.

And it was completely worth it.

These are dark, nasty, sadistic books. They are also exquisitely plotted with seriously intelligent, persistent, strong and attractive (in more than one way) characters. They are entertaining and deep and completely fascinating and honestly it is so hard to get anything else done when you are reading them because you just do NOT want to put them down.

So bummed that there will be no more books by this dude (he died shortly after turning in all three manuscripts to his publisher) because they are some of the best books I’ve read in years.

Stieg Larsson and Tana French: revolutionizing the SMART mystery category. These are so far above genre books. Truly literature. Truly fantastic.

YA/Fantasy: Liar, by Justine Larbalestier

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Yay thanks to Stephanie for sending me this for my birthday, because she knew of my love for Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness trilogy.

This was SOOOO different than those books. And SOOOO GOOD. Such deeply written characters. Tangible emotions. Poignant. Sometimes funny. Very affecting.

As you move from section to section in this book, you get absolutely turned around. Fantastic.

YA/Fiction: The White Darkness, by Geraldine McCaughrean

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Our challenge book for October. I can’t remember what led us to pick this book; I know we (or I) read about it somewhere.

We both LOVED it. It doesn’t hurt that we’re both South Pole/Antarctic junkies and have already read lots of books on the topic/subject/area (including great books by Sara Wheeler! “Terra Incognita” and “Cherry”).

Sym is so smart and fantastically imaginative. It’s one of those books that, rather than having an unreliable narrator, it’s a narrator who doesn’t know everything but as she figures it out, the revelations start coming out fast and crazy and the whole world changes before your eyes. Her obsession with Captain Titus Oates is both humorous and touching.

There’s some really sad stuff and some really amazing stuff and you are just ROOTING for certain things to happen…

Fantastic.

YA/Fantasy: Midnighters (Books 1-3), by Scott Westerfeld

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A(nother) series by the guy who writes Uglies, Pretties, whatevers. I had read his stand-alone Peeps (but not the Uglies, Pretties, whatevers).

1: The Secret Hour
2: Touching Darkness
3: Blue Noon

These books are great. Our world…but with an extra hour that happens at midnight that only a select few are “awake” in. A band of losers whose common ground is the midnight hour, when it turns out they have a few special skills of their own.

I really loved these. I loved the members of the group (particularly Dess). I LOVED all the wordplay (fantastic!). I loved how the slithers seemed related to something deeply dark and ancient. I loved the transformation of the group and how their relationships changed.

I am really going to regret that I read most of these from the library. Definitely buying up the set when I have income again!!

Memoir: Toast, the Story of a Boy’s Hunger, by Nigel Slater

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I read (and loved) The Kitchen Diaries. I’ve cooked from his books “Appetite” and “Nigel Slater’s Real Food”. (His “unctuous” potatoes are delicious.)

But I guess I wasn’t really prepared for the tone of this memoir. The bits about food are great. But some of the anecdotes made me really sad. And some were kinda creepy. He just put it all out there.

The ball aways hits me in the face or brings a shower of sand with it. My father sighs one of those almost imperceptible sighs that only fragile boys who regularly disappoint their father can hear.

It was brutally honest. I didn’t love it. But you might.

Mystery: Even Money, by Dick Francis (and Felix Francis)

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Let me just put it out there that I LOVE DICK FRANCIS. I do. I LOVE most of his books. I got completely addicted to them the summer I lived in the UK with my cousins and I’ve never stopped reading (and re-reading) them since. I know they’re all horse centered and I know some of the main characters are really similar and sometimes you really get the sensation of this just being one long ongoing story and I know they can be cheesy….

But I love his writing and I particularly LOVELOVELOVE “Bolt” and “Break In” and they are two of my very, very favorite all-time books….

But this book? “Even Money”? SUCKED. Worst Dick Francis I’ve ever read. I was sorely disappointed.

Read “Bolt” or “Break In” and know the love. Avoid this book like the plague.

SciFI: Mother of Storms, by John Barnes

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A loaner from Anne, who’s been borrowing all my books!!! 😉 Hee hee just teasing. It came with the recommendation that it’s one of her all-time faves so I was excited to delve in.

Totally wicked modern sci fi basically detailing a (slightly into the future but mostly “our”) world falling into catastrophe set off by one tiny thing. It’s so freaking BECAUSE IT SO COULD HAPPEN. I mean really the entire time you’re reading it, you think “this is ENTIRELY plausible and it is FREAKING ME OUT!” Lots of characters in different storylines with loose connections; like the Robert Jordan books in that if you don’t like certain characters, you just hang in there because the ones you like will have another chapter shortly…

Really entertaining. Really scarily plausible.

YA/Fantasy: The Sweep Series (Books 1 – 15), by Cate Tiernan

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Since I’ve already read the Twilight set (yup, this one also) and the Stackhouse books, it seemed I should read these also.

1: Book of Shadows
2: The Coven
3: Blood Witch
4: Dark Magick
5: Awakening
6: Spellbound
7: The Calling
8: Changeling
9: Strife
10: Seeker
11: Origins
12: Eclipse
13: Reckoning
14: Full Circle
15: Night’s Child

This series is focused on wicca, with no vampires!, so there are good witches and bad witches and it’s primarily about a teenager girl named Morgan who discovered she’s a blood witch and then becomes entangled in the magical world through successive boyfriends.
These were certainly entertaining and I really enjoyed the first 10 or so / I didn’t like some of the later ones as much, particularly the one from Hunter’s point of view…

But they had some of those same problems that a “YA series rushed out” tends to have. Too repetitious / too much explaining or “reminding” the reader of things that the reader JUST read like 20 pages ago, or in the previous book. Do YA editors think kids can’t remember things? Because if they explained about being each other’s mùirn beatha dàn (soul mate) one more fucking time, I was going to scream. [I enjoyed reading them anyway, but some of those things were really glaring, especially when you are reading so many of them one after the other.]

If you like reading about magic, and you like having that “all caught up in your emotions” teenage feeling again, then you will probably enjoy these! And if you are sick of vampires – they are vampire-free!! 🙂

Fiction: A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy

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Our September challenge book.

Dad really enjoyed it, I really did not.

It’s an earlier Hardy (almost 20 years before Tess of the d’Urbervilles and more than that before Jude the Obscure) but its immaturities writing-wise really didn’t bother me. And Dad’s right, there is some really beautiful descriptive writing in it. (Some of the descriptions of the cliffs and the countryside would really take me away for a moment and I’d think “oh that sentence was lovely.”)

But I found the characters, especially Elfride, and the plot and the ridiculous romantic contretemps — all of which could have been avoided just by somebody opening up their mouth and being honest once in a while — So. Fucking. ANNOYING! I mean, yes, I know, it’s a thing of its time, and society was a very different animal and women had such a struggle to even be allowed to have opinions… YES I KNOW all that. That doesn’t make me enjoy it any more or want to be more patient with it. I really never found anyone in the novel interesting enough or attractive enough to be more than irritated by their behavior and the events.

Dad on the other hand could find more sympathy for it.

In his own words: I ended up liking it a lot–i think Hardy has the gift of life, always makes the characters live (for me, anyway). Did you notice he stopped being so maddeningly allusive as he got closer to the end–he started to trust his own tale and didn’t need to refer to Hamlet, etc. And the way his poor people a) get stuck with carrying these torches of love beyond all reason and b) ALWAYS running into the wrong person or the wrong room or being seen in the wrong company. Poor Elfride!!!! Leaving that note for that ghastly woman!! What a schmuck Knight was. Also like Hardy’s scenery, the way the places and landscapes become characters. Great cliff scene, no? And, for a Victorian, lots of erotic buzz.