Skip to main content

Losing My Mind, One Book at a Time

Whew! Thank you to everyone who recommended some books for me to read and review this coming April. I still have a couple of spaces to fill, and my list has changed a little bit.

I've started, but...this is quite the list. I'll get as far as I can. If nothing else, this has forced me to read a lot more than I normally would be reading right now. Here are some mini-reviews and thoughts, in case I don't have time later.

Have finished:

Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones: Fairy Tale Retelling/urban fantasy

This one was good, but...weird. In a surreal way. It took me a while to figure out what the ending meant. Also, the undercurrent of pedophilia was icky. Tom is set up as a father figure for Polly from the beginning, but then she has a crush on him, and he turns into a love interest after she's 19. And he says "at least I can ask you now," implying that he's had feelings for this underage girl for years. It wouldn't be so bad except that Tom's real age is never mentioned. Ever. And also the fact that his immortal ex-wife first "adopted" him when he was a child, eventually marrying him/casting a spell over him...and then he ends up in a relationship with a much younger person...So, it's evil when the Fairy Queen ensnares young boys, but it's OK for the main characters? 

Also, he and Polly start out as pen pals whose fantasy world ends up coming true. Polly wrote in a romance between them in the fanfic of their lives, which ended up coming true. Would he have fallen in love with her if she hadn't done that? She basically did to him what his ex-wife did. The romance in this one is all kinds of fucked up. It's the only thing that kept me from completely loving this otherwise fantastic book.

The Lord of Opium by Nancy Farmer: YA sci-fi/dystopian


The House of the Scorpion (the first book) has been my favorite for years. I love it. The sequel, amazingly, did not ruin it. I really liked the sequel, too, despite the love triangle.

This book is ultimately hopeful, but also heartbreakingly tragic. It will stab you in the heart and then twist the knife a little just to hear you scream. BUT my favorite character didn't die!!! FOR ONCE. I wish some of the old characters got more "page time," but the new ones are great, too.

The Shining by Stephen King

I found this to be overly sentimental crap. Which is odd for a horror story. But the amount of screaming and running away is dwarfed by the amount of time characters spend crying and hugging each other and spouting life lessons and wisdom. It also uses several storytelling tropes that I despise -- but which, I'm happy to say, King seems to have grown out of in his later books.

Have started:

Apollo Academy by Kimberly P. Chase: NA sci-fi

Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig: YA urban fantasy

Hollow City by Ransom Riggs

Mind Games by Kiersten White: YA paranormal/sci-fi
      The stream-of-conscious writing makes it really hard for me to concentrate on this one. 

Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence: Dark Fantasy 
      Basically a fantasy dystopia. Plot twist -- I bet it's Earth in the future. Or at least alt-Earth.

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas: YA high fantasy
     I am honestly dreading the love triangle in this one so much that it makes me not want to read on.

William Shakespeare's Star Wars: The Empire Striketh Back Is "nerd heaven" a genre?

The Year of Shadows by Claire Legrand: MG horror
     I am over halfway through this one. It's really good. I like to see angry characters done well.

Despite the facetious title of this post, I'm enjoying all this reading. The point of reading is to lose one's mind/thoughts in a good book, after all. I think we all need a break from reality every now and then.

Comments

  1. You are reading all those books at the SAME TIME? Haha I don't know how you do that. I'm with you - I have no idea how many I will get through but we shall see!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've at least *started* them all. I'm farthest through Year of Shadows and Hollow City. :) I'm only on first chapters with the rest of them.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Comments make me happy, so leave lots! :) I will usually reply to each one, so click Notify Me to read my replies.

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Hemlock Grove, ep. 1 and 2

Hello! I'm back from my blogging hiatus. I've been on a horror kick lately, and most recently, I watched the first two episodes of Netflix's Hemlock Grove. I'm a bit late to this series, but for what it's worth, here's my review. I have some...issues.  Pacing It's based on a novel, and you can tell. Once the show introduces something that might be interesting or lead to tension and conflict, it snatches it away like a precious plot-gem that it doesn't want you to see. There is way too much exposition and filler. The plot hangs together pretty well, but not much really happens. Case in point, it should not have taken two whole episodes to find out Main Character is a werewolf. Especially since everyone seems clued into this fact and accepts it as truth -- except the viewers. Then suddenly Rich Boy is asking if he can watch the transformation like it's understood that Poor Kid Main Character is a werewolf. No warning, no lead-up, nothing.

Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faïza Guène, a YA Book By A Young Author

Review time! Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow is a young adult novel by a young adult, so I was very interested to read it. There's also a #MuslimShelfSpace tag going around, and this review is a nod to that. The idea is that there's been a lot of stereotypes and anti-Muslim sentiment spread around, so buying and boosting books about and by Muslims can help educate people and break down harmful stereotypes.  The author is French with an Algerian background, and  Guène  wrote Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow when she was in her late teens. Although the novel is not autobiographical, she shares many things with its main character. Doria, like her creator, is the child of immigrants and lives in poor suburban housing projects.   Guène   wrote that she realized girls like herself weren't really represented in books, and felt that Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow was a way to tell the stories of people in the suburbs who are ignored by the elites of French literature. Plot: Life Sucks, Until It Doesn

King Arthur Sucks.

I wrote a review of The Greenstone Grail by Amanda Hemingway , in which I applauded the book for being the first Arthurian adaptation I had read that I didn't despise. I mean, how could I? Despite the book's other problems, it had aliens riding motherfucking dragons!!! Aliens! Dragons! Parallel universes!  After reading my review, one of my friends asked me why I hate Arthurian legend so much.  Well.  Perhaps one of the reasons I liked The Greenstone Grail 's take on the Holy Grail myth was because it was so different.  Most Arthurian adaptations fall along the same lines. It's the same damn story told almost the same damn way all the time. But  The Greenstone Grail took place in modern times, borrowing from the Holy Grail and Arthurian myths without making it so central to the plot that there was no room for other stuff like imagination.  Say whatever else you want about this book ( and believe me, I did ), it had imagination. Its main character can dimension-