By the author of the Sirantha Jax books, that’s why I picked it up. Didn’t like it as much. This is more a magical world rather than a sci fi world, so that may be part of it.
Also: product placement in a fantasy novel? REALLY jumped out at me. Bizarre. I guess I just don’t love this main character the way I love Sirantha.
The third book in the Sirantha Jax series. I really love this character and this world but I felt a little disjointed for the first bit. I guess I didn’t remember clearly enough what happened at the end of Book 2… And it’s going to suck when Book 4 comes out and I can’t go back and look at the end of this one again since I checked it out of the library! Oh woe is the unemployed student.
Love the action, love the world, love the Vel character. Really into this series.
Very cool sci fi that I picked up on a whim at the library. A little further ahead in a grimier version of our modern world, where the immigration problem has become “shifters”, people who take a mysterious drug called “slip” that slips or shifts them into other, parallel universes. Charles is one of the immigration officers involved. Lots of cool thoughts about identity and choices and time and linearity. Very cool!
I had read and really enjoyed Hustvedt’s intense novel “What I Loved” (if you search for “Hustvedt” on this page you can hear more) and although I am not a big reader of nonfiction, one day in the bookstore this just insisted on coming home with me.
These are really interesting essays. My favorites were the literary ones – ponderings on The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), The Bostonians (H. James) and Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) – and, as someone who was a New Yorker at the time, her essay on 9/11 from a NYer’s point of view.
The Minnesota stuff is all very familiar to me, I can picture those places not just from my own experiences in small towns there, and my undergrad experience at Gustavus (very similar to St. Olaf, where she went), but also from having been to many of the actual places.
She makes herself very vulnerable here. Way beyond anything I could ever commit to print. And at some points as similarly intense as in her fiction. Burning brightly.
Another fantastic duo, I would recommend these just as highly as the Kristin Cashore books, but note that they are very, very different.
The dystopian universe here is almost Dickensian in its shadings (although with fewer of the finer details) and it definitely makes you, the reader, long for escape for these characters, for survival, for even just the littlest bit of hope.
Unexpectedly cruel with odd kindnesses. And, as in much YA, some growing up and self discovery along the way.
An adventure of endurance… You’ll want to block off a day for these as you will find yourself unable to do anything else.
And if you’ve read the story “Wealth” in Margo Langan’s “White Time” collection, it almost seems like they come from the same world. In fact, I drove myself insane for an entire afternoon trying to figure out where that story was from as they felt so much of a piece.
I absolutely loved these books; they sucked me right into their world and I didn’t really ever want to leave. (A third book is being written…. Wahoo.)
A world where people have “talents” or “graces.”
Graceling: a novel of growing up, of standing one’s ground, of discovering the hidden layers, of coming to know oneself.
Fire: a different sort of animal, a story of someone already grown but not always allowed to grow, already knowing oneself, but coming to better know others.
Lyrically written, they both made me cry at points. They both made me yearn.
Note: Fire is a prequel but I’d say DEFINITELY read it second as it gives away something that you want to figure out more slowly as you read Graceling.
A trilogy about “selkies” / shapechangers who are seals in the water and humans on land / with some demons and intrigue thrown in for good measure.
Sexy, sexy fantasy. Mmmmm.
Perfect for some bedtime readin’ on the iphone/Kindle.
Woodrell’s later book “Winter’s Bone” was one of my very favorite books read in 2007 and I’ve finally gotten around to reading one of his earlier works.
This novel has a similar focus on a downtrodden, lonely teen in a harsh poverty-struck landscape. But this book is a LOT creepier than Winter’s Bone and you are not (at all) left with the same sense of hope. That’s not a denigration / more of a gentle warning.
Lovely lyrical rhythm to his writing. But woah to come to that end…
Some of this book is entertaining, some of it’s really impassioned about things I have a hard time feeling much oomph about, and overall it just really, REALLY made me want to eat a crapload of sugar. Which was not the authorial intent. 🙂
It was interesting and thoughtful, on one hand. On the other, isn’t it a little sickening how intensely we insist on (over)analyzing each and every choice we make in every aspect of our lives these days? Sometimes a girl’s just gotta LIVE, ya know.
Our challenge book for July and what a behemoth it was. As DadReaction described it: “Some gremlin keeps adding chapters to this sucker, so no matter how much I read there’s still more to go. and more, and more, and more…”
It’s weird how what we all remember / socially think / this book to be about is Becky Sharp yet in fact she disappears for chapters at a time, as sometimes do Dobbin and Amelia as well. (You could easily abridge about several hundred pages out of this thing and lose nothing of the main plot lines.) There are passages about which members of society are at a party that read as thrillingly as the genealogical sections of the bible.
GirlReaction: The problem with most of the older (in terms of when they were published!) books we’ve read this year is insipid heroines. I just get bored by the helpless female (Amelia) and the crafty female (Becky) is just as one-dimensional in her own way (although a bit more entertaining). I sometimes feel that as you read “old classics” you can pick out a bit of WHY they were so renowned in their time (or shortly afterward) but it seems very old hat now (i.e., the things that were original about them don’t seem original if you happen to have read their (many, and later) imitators first).
DadReaction: Reminded of what Samuel Johnson said of Paradise Lost: everyone can see its value, but no one ever wished it longer. Amen. Becky, the one live wire, keeps vanishing–didn’t you think it would be more about her? And the old men–Sedley and Osborne–are just monsters!! It’s like suddenly you’re in a Eugene O’Neil play. Very much an 18th century feel to the book, though. More like Tom Jones than, say, Great Expectations. Names too are tres 18th siecle: e.g., Castlemouldy. Dobbin’s a complete idiot.