Lisa
Tantalizingly good premise:
A scout mission is sent to a planet 50 light years away to make contact with the inhabitants and test the viability of gathering resources. The 4 scientist group find the planet, Lithia, to be a veritable paradise. The aliens living therein are an inviting, moral, civilized race and welcome the earthlings. Father Ramon, one of the scientists, is a Jesuit who cannot come to terms with the fact that this alien race has achieved perfect morality without religion. He believes the entire planet to be a ruse crafted by Satan. He recommends against further contact with the planet.
As you might guess, he is outvoted. A Lithian he has befriended during the journey sends him back to Earth with a Lthian embryo as a goodwill gift. The alien hatches and develops on Earth, but without the moral societal framework of Lithia, he becomes sort of a douchey Tyler Durden who embraces the worst in human behavior. Everything falls apart.
The beginning of this book was terrific and things got really muddled in the middle.
Tree Girl centers around a young girl about to celebrate her quinciniera (I'm sure I spelled that wrong) in Guatemala. The story takes place during the awful civil war that tore apart native Mayan villages. This is not a book with a riveting story or 3 dimensional characters. But it is sort of a no-holds-barred introduction for teen readers (it's a little grim for younger audiences) into that period in history and the fact that human beings have the potential to be really, really awful. Lots of talk about Mayan tradition, which is cool and informational.
This was like...Dan Brown meets Greg Bear. Which is really insulting to Greg Bear.
It was also a total confused mess. There's the genius scientist who makes a lizard boy hybrid and she's got all kinds of daddy issues. Then you have the nebbish mountaineer who's coerced into being a New Testament era bodysnatcher. Oh but there's also a billionaire business tycoon who buys, catalogs, and sometimes eats black market religious relics and unwittingly unleashes a plague that turns people transparent and has a 100% mortality rate.
I don't even know. I finished it, I'm not sure why. Parts of it were cool.
Very interesting look at the investigation of the union labor disputes and subsequent bombing of the LA Times building at the turn of the century.
Learned a lot about unions (knew next to nothing) and lots of cool tidbits about the birth of motion pictures tied in.
If you liked Devil in the White City, you'll probably like this.
I have mixed feelings about this book. I'm not a saucy book reader in general, so this was way out of my wheelhouse and all the naughty parts just...smacked of Twilight in their repetition. But it was about time travel, so I plugged along. I found parts of the book very intriguing, like the ‘witch' Claire befriends. Frankly, I found her a bit more interesting than Claire.
Can't say if I'll pick up the sequels to this, they are doorstops and my to-read list is a mile long.
I love Scotland though, and it was a treat to read about highlanders and all the clan stuff. Loved it for that.
This was like Ursula Le Guin's Tales of Earthsea mixed with Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories. That's high praise coming from me. Really neat little story about a boy who is apprenticed to a bard/skald and goes on adventures into the land of the trolls.
I'd been looking for The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm by Nancy Farmer on ebook for a while now when I ran across this and decided to read instead. Glad I did!
This is one of those books where I felt like I owed it to the book to finish, which is usually not a good feeling. I'm not sure what my hang up was, the premise was very intriguing. Post-apocalyptic future where crop disease (and human disease) has given food suppliers an enormous amount of control over the fate of nations. Alternating narrators eventually cross paths.
I just wasn't very invested in the characters, the story seemed sort of clinically cold and a bit meandering, That being said, I really do appreciate that this was not set in the United States featuring a rag tag group of survivors who live off the land in the wake of an EMP. Or zombies. Or a nuke.
Nice twist on this genre and really neat to read a book that takes place in Thailand.
This started out as a relatively benign survey of golden and silver age comic lore and then just flipped off the rails when Morrison decided he would tell us about each and every acid trip he ever took and how he was so grateful for every grubby royalty dollar he earned from comic book nerds to fuel his drug habit. I've read much better analysis of comic heroes and really, is it all that complicated? They're a reflection of what we want most for ourselves. Who wouldn't want to fly? Have nifty gadgets? Sock it to the bad guys. Walk through walls. Have a skeleton made out of adamantium... Okay maybe the analogy only goes so far. Annoyed I spent the better part of a week reading this.
After completely failing with book one, I got hooked on the show and decided to give the second book a shot. Managed to finish the book and season finale in the same evening.
The book was terrific, but I just couldn't get in to everyone's backstory. I loathed Stannis (maybe that's the point?), got so bored with Catelyn Stark weeping over her totally unimportant father (glad they cut that out or the show). Arya's chapters were far and away my favorite, Tyrion as well. I need to read short books for a while after finishing the behemoth, but I'm definitely roped in for book 3.
