Creative Criticism

The Magician - Michael Scott

2011-03-09T22:22:00.001-05:00

This second installment of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel picks up right where the first one ended; the twins, Nicholas Flamel, and Scathach are in Paris, where the famous Niccolo Machiavelli is yet another agent of the Dark Elders.
There's plenty of nonstop action, magic, mythological references, you know the drill.
Also, LOOK, IT'S AN AMAZING COVER! With great symbolism, and foreshadowing of the story-arc and stuff!
Now, about the story itself: to be fair, it's a perfectly adequate novel - but I can't help but get annoyed at the obviousness of the identities of the "good"/"bad" guys. Seriously, in this book series every character's use of magic projects their smelly auras everywhere - and by "smelly" I mean that characters can literally smell which characters are supposed to be evil (yum, sulfur! Snakes! Delicious smells, I'm told.), and which are on the "good" side (peppermint, vanilla, oranges, and lavender? Seriously, it's like a fancy organic soap shop, in there!). Although this technique is convenient if you want to expose the content of the character of these characters, it does rob the novel of possible nuances about morality and things; it just pushes them all into definite and sharply defined moral categories, with very little room for subtlety.
Oh well, it's just a YA novel, I'm told; and this review-type of thing is just a half-assed string of words.

Zombies vs Unicorns - edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier

2011-02-24T14:47:00.000-05:00

This anthology is composed of short stories that are either about zombies (braaaaaiiins!), or unicorns (aka horses with horns that, in one story in particular, have farts that smell like flowers), and sometimes even both (these stories are usually filed under the "unicorn" stories, though, because let's face it, zombies are already awesome on their own - they don't need extra supernatural help). All written by a bunch of great writers, including Cassandra Clare and Scott Westerfeld, whose novels I enjoy very much and who were both members of Team Zombie. Yeah, zombie stories in general are just better than unicorn stories, with their dystopian elements and whatnot.

I must admit, though, that some unicorn stories were better than I expected - The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn by Diana Peterfreund was probably my favorite unicorn story, probably because its unicorns were deadly predators rather than fawning pictures of perfection. An honourable mention goes out to Kathleen Duey, whose story was a first-person narration by a very creepy unicorn. It really creeped me out.

My all-around favorite story of the bunch (and favorite zombie story to boot) was definitely Love Will Tear Us Apart by Alaya Dawn Johnson, though; it featured a partial zombification caused by a prion (yay, science!), characters that don't necessarily fit typical, expected paradigms (yay, non-heteronormativity!), and tons of references to some of my favorite music (yay, Arctic Monkeys!).

So yeah, I enjoyed this anthology. And for future reference, here are all the authors included in the anthology (why should I write their names down when I can just type them up, leave them here and check back later when I'll want to read new stuff/when I won't be swamped in projects and lab reports?):

Team Zombie (aka TEAM AWESOME):

Alaya Dawn Johnson
Carrie Ryan
Maureen Johnson
Scott Westerfeld
Cassandra Clare
Libba Bray

Team Unicorn:

Garth Nix
Naomi Novik
Margo Lanagan
Diana Peterfreund
Meg Cabot
Kathleen Duey

Hey, look, there's a short promo film here! It features the - pretty epic, I must admit - cover art that's under the black cover for the cover (I'm thinking about the hardcover version, here. Wait, did I even make sense?). Anyways, the cover art's great!

City of Glass - Cassandra Clare

2011-02-16T19:25:00.000-05:00

In this third installment of The Mortal Instruments trilogy-thing-that's-over-three-books-now-and-will-probably-be-six-books-I-think?, we get the Epic Battle that we'd all been waiting for ever since we learned that Valentine (Clary's and Jace's father, who is plotting against the good guys) was still alive, back in the first book. In this novel, however, our protagonists spend very little time in New York City; rather, the bulk of the action takes place in Alicante, the (magical?) capital of Idris, the Shadowhunter country.
Also, we learn new things about Clary's past and relatives (some of which were hinted at in the previous books, and some of which WOAH THAT WAS UNEXPECTED. Not unwelcome, but very unexpected.), and we finally learn about the third Mortal Instrument (remember, the first book was about the Mortal Cup? And the second one involved the Mortal Sword? Well, astute readers will finally have their suspicions confirmed/blasted to pieces about the mirror. Wait, that should have been the Mirror - you can't forget the capitalization.).
As for who is gracing the cover art - I'll let you figure it out. And no, it's neither Simon nor Alec (yep, it's a new character - and I won't say anything more because SPOILERS!)
So yeah, I really liked this book, as well as the overall series; it's a fun, easy, action-packed and emotionally rollercoaster-ish read.

Intrigues - Mercedes Lackey

2011-02-09T21:26:00.000-05:00

In this second installment of The Collegium Chronicles (which I believe will be a trilogy? I'm not sure.), our protagonist (Mags) is angsty, feels out-of-place, and learns more about his tragic past (by which I mean he finally finds out something about who his parents were. Did I mention he's an orphan who grew up in horrific conditions in a child-labour mine?).
Yeah, parts of it reminded me very much of the DRAMA! of being a young teenager (I'm talking about bieng a 13-15 year old, when having a fight with your best friends meant that everyone got really harsh with each other, and you wanted to run away/die afterwards).
Honestly, I thought this book was just okay; although I guess that if I were still in my I-love-every-novel-and-anthology-there-exists-about-Valdemar! phase, I'd have enjoyed it a lot more.
So yeah, even though it isn't marketed as a YA novel, in my opinion it definitely should be.

Continuity Errors - Steven Moffat

2011-02-08T22:02:00.000-05:00

Do you know about Doctor Who?
Or do you just generally like stories about time travel and stuff?
Well, in either case I think you'll like this.
I know I did.

Easy A - That 2010 movie

2011-01-30T11:46:00.000-05:00

It's a comedy involving high schoolers and classic literature. The literary references aren't Shakespearian (it's actually American literature, mostly The Scarlet Letter and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - incidentally, two books that I have not read), though, so I can't say it's a Shakespearian teen comedy, but it's pretty close.
Now, there are many things that were very fun about this movie:

our main protagonist is witty and hilarious
seriously, her parents are also hilarious
yes, I actually giggled out loud at many points in the movie - which is actually a pretty rare thing to happen, especially if I'm watching an intentional comedy. So props to that

There were, however, things that I really didn't like about it:

firstly, the plot is rather ludicrous - although if you keep in mind that it is entirely from our protagonist's perspective, it makes more sense
I mean, seriously, do high schoolers really care about who is allegedly having sex with who? Oh, right - of course they do, it's just one of those thing that I never really got. Yaaay.
Most characters aren't very dimensional? They usually have mostly one or two dimensions. But that could be chalked up to the fact that it's all from the protagonist's perspective.
And the "best friend"'s attitude towards our protagonist (after the whole scandal thing took off) was infuriating.

So yeah, I enjoyed this movie, even if I found it a bit problematic at times.

The Red Pyramid - Rick Riordan

2011-01-22T16:07:00.000-05:00

This Rick Riordan novel isn't about Percy Jackson or Greek mythology - surprising, right? And it's also a pretty hefty book, with a 514-page long hardcover version - shocking!
It's very good, though; it's all about Carter and Sadie, two first-person narrators and young teenaged siblings whose parents were excellent magicians who followed the Egyptian mythological traditions. And yes, Egyptian mythology and deities are involved - fun!
Everything takes place in the same world as the Percy Jackson series (you can tell by the passing references to the Greek gods), but in different locations. For example, a big chunk of the action takes place in New York City, but in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan, since Manhattan's under the control (or is it jurisdiction? I'm not sure) of gods other than the Egyptian ones. And if that wasn't a reference to Mount Olympus over the Empire State Building, I'm a lemur.
Oh, and I'm thinking that that world is in grave peril a lot of the time. Seriously, it's endangered by Hellenic pandemonium one week, and by Egyptian chaos the next - should I expect some Norse trouble in the near future? (I'd read that.)
In any case, I'll keep an eye out for the next installment of The Kane Chronicles.

The Last Olympian - Rick Riordan

2011-01-22T16:06:00.000-05:00

In this fifth and final book of the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series, the war pitting the Olympian gods against Kronos and his allies is in full swing. The legendary (and legendarily powerful) monster Typhon has escaped and is wrecking havoc all across America; Percy finally reads the full Great Prophecy that's been hanging over his head since the first book; and eventually everyone - allies and enemies and everyone in between - converges to Manhattan for the Epic Final Battle.
Of course, since this is a final installment and there's an Epic Final Battle, deaths are a-plenty (which is only to be expected, really).
It was very good; as with the previous installments of this series, I found it hard to put down the book once I'd started it. So yes, I do recommend it; in fact, I'd even recommend reading the entire series. Come on, there's Greek mythology involved!

Delusions of Gender - Cordelia Fine

2011-01-18T20:23:00.001-05:00

How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

As might be inferred from the second title-thing of this book, the entire premise of this very interesting 239-page-long read is that

seriously peeps, gender essentialism is sexism; menfolk and womenfolk are not monoliths;
the differences between "male" and "female" brains are really pretty tiny, and mostly exaggerated by people who report them (which, btw, includes not only The Media but also the scientists who publish the results in the first place),
and in any case, most of these differences (such as different neurotransmitter secretion levels) can be explained due to brain overall size, which makes neurons act slightly differently so that the end result'll be the same;
the slight differences between female and male cognitive performance (which are, let me stress this, SLIGHT) can mostly be explained by psychological phenomena and "subject priming", and NOT by any innate biological eternal truth;
wow, as a society we put SO MUCH emphasis on gender and sex (as in genital organs, not activities), it's a bit impressive, honestly. But not in a good way.
Also, we do not live and grow in a vacuum; we're exposed to messages from the media, explicitly from what people say, and implicitly from how people act and react all the time - it's bound to have an effect on our self-perception and on our own (and children's own growing) psyches.

Or, in my own words:

Men aren't from Mars, women aren't from Venus, all of humanity is from Earth (you buffoons). And people who persist in trying to justify their sexist beliefs with pseudoscientific, neurosexist crap are total assfaces.

Seriously, this book combines neuroscience, psychology and anti-sexism (it is both anti-misogyny and anti-misandry) in a way that's interesting, thought-provoking and funny all at the same time. You really should read it.

Oh, and it's decimal classification number is 612.82, so it's about Applied Science - Medical Science - Human physiology? Or at least, so it is according to my public library.

Out of Our Heads - Alva Noë

2011-01-10T16:07:00.000-05:00

Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

In this slim book, philosophy meets neuroscience and it is argued that the mind does not reside in the brain, but rather in the interactions between brain, body and world.
It was interesting.
And the cover art's pretty awesome.

The Alchemyst - Michael Scott

2011-01-09T13:18:00.000-05:00

This first book of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series is pretty good.
It depicts an interesting world that takes place right now, in the beginning of the twenty-first century (cell phones! Laptop computers! iPods!), and that mixes mythologies of various traditions (Egyptian goddesses, Celtic legends, the ever-popular Atlantis trope and the Norse world-tree of Yggdrasill all make an appearance) with the usual YA fantasy novel landmarks: our protagonists, Josh and Sophie, are two fifteen-year-olds twins, they are the Chosen Ones (okay, the prophesied ones), and they have out-of-this-world amazing magical potential. Also, their mentor is Nicholas Flamel, you know, that super-famous French alchemist who also had a mention in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, if you're American.
I liked it; I think this series has a lot of potential for character growth and complexity, and come on, there's mythology involved! Plus, the cover art's pretty cool. It even looks good on my battered softcover public library's copy!

Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins

2011-01-02T18:48:00.000-05:00

Again, this final installment of the Hunger Games trilogy was a true rollercoaster of emotions; I feel drained out. Which is great praise indeed for a novel!
It's only while reading this book that I truly understood that everything takes place in the future, and I thought that Panem's society was very television-centric indeed (seriously, someone could probably build a Master's thesis on the role of media in science-fiction aimed at teenagers, and this series would be a big chunk of that thesis. Along with Westerfeld's Uglies/Pretties/Specials/Extras series. Hey, maybe I should write that thesis? Nah, I like science too much to change fields.).
Anyways, the war that pits the rebelling districts against the Capitol (and more to the point, its creepy president Snow) is well under way, and I think I'll leave at that because I could be so SPOILER-RIFFIC right now it's not even funny.
Oh, and I also love how Katniss (our ass-kicking protagonist) is a more than excellent lead character: she is strong, she is three-dimensional, she undertakes character growth, she has her flaws and weaknesses, and still in the end you can't help but root for her. Even when she makes what you just KNOW is the wrong decision.
Ok, enough rambling: this book is excellent, a great cap to an amazing series, and I absolutely will re-read this trilogy several times in the future. It's just that awesome.

Skinny Bitch - Rory Freedman & Kim Barnouin

2011-01-01T18:33:00.002-05:00

A shiteous book.

What, do you want my reasoning behind my three-word verdict? Ok, here goes:

It's based on a flawed premise, right on the first page of the first chapter: "Healthy = skinny. Unhealthy = fat." No, these things aren't equal; if this were an equation, I'd say they've tried to divide by zero somewhere, and only Chuck Norris can divide by zero.
"There is nothing in soda that should be put into your body." FALSE. Water's good, and you need sugars because hey, that's your body's energy source. Sure, it doesn't make you skinny, but who - oh, right, the whole point of this book is that skinnyness is what you're reaching for.

Also, just BY THE WAY: you don't need to drink eight actual glasses of water a day, you get a huge part of your water through your food anyway. So yes, water drunk in carbonated sugared beverages still counts as water. Proof.

Tons of paragraphs are lifted from PeTA propaganda. No kidding here.
I don't take issue with profanity (I love it!), but I do take issue with how this text keeps insulting, degrading and verbally bullying its readers. I did not appreciate being called a "lazy shit", a "fat pig", being told that "[I]'ll be fat forever" if I didn't stop drinking coffee or eating acid foods (Dude, I love pickles, sod off), being told to "suck it up" and not take painkillers for my menstrual cramps, or even being told to "drag [my] cankles" to a health food store. All in the first chapter.

I really hate the world "cankles". It's like "moist"; it's very creepy.

On a sidenote, Blogger's spellcheck doesn't recognize "cankles" as a real word. Hah!

Out of the ten chapters that I read (seriously, I just couldn't take any more of it), I got a distinct pro-eating disorder feel from this book, especially pro-anorexia attitudes.

They recommend "periodic repeated fasts", and "the longer the better" (see p. 132)
I was especially creeped out when they describe the point where you're so hungry you don't feel your hunger anymore, and they call it feeling "light, clean, pure, and divine." (p. 133)
On top of that, they give the reader some bullshit about how during fasting "the aging process is actually being reversed" (p.135). Last time I checked, you didn't turn into Benjamin Button by depriving yourself of sustenance, so FAIL.

It's a loathsome pile of fetidness indeed.

Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins

2011-01-01T16:06:00.001-05:00

I started this second installment of the Hunger Games trilogy five hours ago - and I've been (figuratively) glued to its pages ever since.
IT IS SO FREAKING AWESOME
YOU HAVE NO IDEA
UNLESS YOU'VE READ IT, in which case you would have an idea. It's amazing, isn't it?
Intrigue, action, violence, a rebellion against the Capitol, personal drama, character growth, present-tense narration, and ALL-AROUND AWESOMENESS; this book has it all. And sprinkles of more.
asdkljfaksofkf; I'm incoherent in my excitement.

I really wish I could be more articulate about every single detail that made me love this book SO FREAKING MUCH, but that would be rather spoilery. And really, you should read the book yourself; you really, really should.

The Ring of Solomon - Jonathan Stroud

2010-12-31T18:40:00.000-05:00

This Bartimaeus Novel (as is clearly written on the top of the cover - come on people, open your eyes! And seeeeee!) has two main protagonists. One is Asmira, one of the best guards of the Queen of Sheba (and by the way, did you know that all of her personal guards are (1) born into the role and (2) women? But hey, that's slavery and a matrilineal society for you!); she has a two-week deadline to travel all across the Arabian peninsula to Jerusalem, where she must kill the king Solomon and take his ring of legendary magical power. All under the orders of her queen, and kicking ass and taking names all quest long.

I'll let you guess who our second protagonist is. Come on, don't be shy, I'll give you some hints: he's just the most conceited, cheekiest and wittiest djinn whose first-person narration I've had the pleasure of reading this past year.

In any case, this novel takes place far to the southeast and far before the events of Bartimaeus's Trilogy; in fact, it takes place before Bartimaeus even met Ptolemy. So that was a long time ago indeed.

As far as the prose goes, it's a bit more stately paced and not quite as crackling as the narration of the Trilogy went; but that actually really helps to remind the reader that the events took place a LONG time ago. Because old literature is always at a glacial pace and full of descriptions, you know? This novel at least doesn't take it to the same level as that, though, and it's a very fun read indeed.

Oh, and guys? I lifted the cover picture from this, which is a much better review of this book. It even uses a "something on/out of something else" rating system, which is slightly more straightforward than my system of "enjoyable, boring, annoying, okay, twist, unfinished and wtf", no?

Annabel - Kathleen Winter

2010-12-30T02:05:00.000-05:00

This novel is truly a thing of beauty.
It follows the birth and life of Wayne/Annabel, who was born a true hermaphrodite; he was however raised as a boy (because that's what his father wanted, mostly), thanks to surgeries and hormone treatments. Wayne was never entirely comfortable as a boy, though, and when he finally learned that he was born both a boy and a girl, character development and personal drama/evolution (dravolution?) ensues.
The prose to describe it all is downright beautiful, with its vivid depictions of the Labrador backdrop of Wayne/Annabel's youth; it also gives some crystalline insights into several characters' thoughts and motivations in frozen droplets of time. It also makes me write somewhat poetically, but my writing's far more mediocre.
Anyways, I enjoyed this novel very much.

City of Ashes - Cassandra Clare

2010-12-23T19:06:00.000-05:00

This second installment of the Mortal Instruments series (there's going to be six books, apparently? Yay!) picks up right where City of Bones left off.
(And now, spoilers for CoB:)
Clary (the red-headed girl on the cover) is still very much attracted to Jace, and Jace to her - but now that they've found out that they're siblings (and that their father's the evil antagonist Valentine), things get awkward. Personally, I like that the author's dealing with that can of worms, instead of making her characters magically not attracted to each other anymore once they learn that they're related (I'm looking at you, Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory.).
Also, Clary and Simon's relationship goes to the next level (Level 1 was "they're friends", level 2 was "they're the best friends" (see City of Bones), and Level 3 is "kissing time!"). Also, Simon gets an upgrade - I won't spoil it for you, but let's just say that there's plenty of foreshadowing.
Plus, Clary's mother is in the same condition as she was when City of Bones ended.
Oh, and the war that pits our antagonist Valentine against, well, everyone is going swimmingly. It looms ever closer, and to be honest I'm really looking forward to reading the third installment of this series - if the next book's climax/final battle/chaosfest is to top this one, it should be pretty epic.

Kraken - China Miéville

2010-12-13T22:00:00.001-05:00

This is a

horror
fantasy
mystery
science-fiction
dystopian
"let's mess with time!"
cult (about)
apocalyptic
London
quirky
very well written
weird
full of Lovecraftian allusions
and also of more mainstream references

novel.

Seriously, I liked it.

Legacies - Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill

2010-12-12T15:05:00.000-05:00

Look, a new teen series by Mercedes Lackey! And Rosemary Edghill, too.
With a kind of weird cover that I'm not a fan of, but I didn't really contemplate the cover, I just read the book.
Essentially, this novel is what you get if you combine Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar series, minus the Companions, plus some Harry Potter-esque elements and make everything happen to Tragic Orphans.
I enjoyed it, honestly - it's a fun plunge into fantasy teen fiction, filled with angst and magic and mysteries that will presumably be solved in the next installments of this Shadow Grail series. So yeah, I'll keep an eye out for the next installments but I probably won't buy them all.

The Battle of the Labyrinth - Rick Riordan

2010-12-07T11:43:00.000-05:00

Book four of the Percy Jackson series!
In this novel, Percy and his friends must continue their quest against the evil Titan Kronos - whose army is ready for the war against Olympus, and whose earthly form is practically fully formed. Also, the Titan's forces are ready to march on Camp Half-Blood and destroy it, but all they're missing is one little thing, a way to navigate the Labyrinth. Yes, Daedalus's Labyrinth still exists (or rather, lives), and like everything else associated with Hellenic gods it has moved to the U.S., where it's become a handy (if confusing and often lethally dangerous) way of moving about quickly.
Daedalus, his son Icarus, the (somewhat evil) king Minos, and their story are all involved in this story; and as the next war between the gods and the Titans approaches, our main characters (Percy, Annabeth, Grover, Tyson, etc.) keep growing, gain allies, and lose friends. Plus, is that the lost god of the wild, Pan, that the satyrs (including Grover) have been searching for for two thousand years? (Warning: this particular quest will feature a famous Thus Spake Zarathustra line.)
As with all the other novels in this excellent series, the tone and pace of this story makes it a joy to read, and the way the author plays with themes and elements of Greek mythology makes my inner mythology geek very happy indeed. Seriously, I'll start gushing about the sheer awesomeness of this series if I don't end this post now.

The World in Six Songs - Daniel J. Levitin

2010-12-05T13:56:00.001-05:00

This book was written by Daniel J. Levitin, the author of This is Your Brain on Music and the dude who runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University (that's in Canada!). Impressed yet?
Anyways, this book is all about the whys of songs. It explores the six major "types" of songs that exist (Friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love songs), with plenty of examples and explanations of their significance.

There's a bit of a name-dropping feel at times - Sting's name pops up everywhere, and at one point the phrase "While I was dining with Joni Mitchell at an outdoor restaurant once," shows up, I shit you not (see page 132) (There's also a very handy index at the back, to track all the famous names peppered through the 289 pages of this book). Also, there's plenty of anecdotes about the author's life experiences that relate to the content of the book, which made for an even more interesting read.

I also spotted quite a few references to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, most notably in the Religion Songs chapter, where Levitin writes "that religion is more than a meme [...] and may have an evolutionary basis."

All and all, a good book, a 781 on the Dewey system, which means that it's a book about Arts, more specifically Music's General Principles and musical forms. Um, I'm not sure it's been labeled quite right?

Pourquoi rêvons-nous? Pourquoi dormons-nous? - Michel Jouvet

2010-11-25T22:59:00.000-05:00

This slim (only 120 pages long!) book answers all the basic questions of sleep, the Where? When? and How? of all the kinds of sleep that exist (deep sleep! Rapid Eye Movement sleep - or "sommeil paradoxal", as they say in French!) and related phenomena (circadian cycles!). It also points out some interesting hypotheses about the Why? of sleep - but, as it states repeatedly, nothing's proven yet.
Honestly, it was an interesting book about the physiology of sleep (physiology! neuroscience!), and it was a very accessible read; it follows a kind of question-and-answer format, where the questions were asked by a teenager and the answers were tailored in accordance.
Also, it's pretty obvious that it was written by a physiologist: there's numerous references to physiology as "the queen of all sciences", and the author doesn't shy away from being highly skeptical about the importance of genetic research. Intra-biological sciences rivalries: love it!
Yay, sleep!
Oh, and for those who care about such things: the Dewey numbah is 612, so it's a book about Technology, more specifically the Medical Sciences, or to be even more precise, about Human physiology. Yay, physiology!

Heroes of the Valley - Jonathan Stroud

2010-11-08T18:37:00.000-05:00

This book was pretty good! Even if the cover art is a bit meh.
Legends of the past heroes of the valley and their grand deeds, tradition, superstition, humour, revenge and a definite sense of adventure all come together in this novel by Jonathan Stroud.
It has pretty much everything you'd want in a novel: some strong characters, a lot of action scenes, even some slapstick, a lot of humour (and irony) and some genuinely scary parts. Also, it explores how a society's tales and legends can have a great impact on the lives of its inhabitants.
I liked it.

10 Things I Hate About You - That 1999 movie

2010-11-07T19:09:00.000-05:00

Heath Ledger (as the male lead/love interest).
Julia Stiles (as the awesome lead female character, the "shrew" if you will).
A young Joseph Gordon-Levitt (!).
A Shakespearean teen romantic comedy - an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew.
Also, some 90's fashion and music and cultural references.
I liked it.

Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace

2010-11-07T19:00:00.001-05:00

And Other Essays.
This compilation of essays was very good, but that's probably because it shows how David Foster Wallace was an excellent writer. The essays covered quite a range of subjects: from the 1998 Adult Video News Awards to Kaftka's funniness to that campaign where John McCain ran against George W. Bush to become the presidential candidate (as seen from the McCain campaign's perspective) to the Maine Lobster festival (hence the book's title).
I enjoyed the sometimes excessive use of footnotes.
So, according to the numbers on the spine this is a 814 on the Dewey scale; a book on literature, more specifically of American literature, or rather American essays.

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

2010-11-04T23:47:00.001-04:00

This book was pretty good, actually.
Now, it's true that I might be biased about this - I'm in a biology- and biochemistry-related program, but still, even if you have no idea what DNA is made of (or if you don't know anything about genes and how they work), you'll be able to easily follow and understand this book. The style is concise, precise, easily readable and sometimes rather amusing: in the last chapter of the original edition, Dawkins coined the term "meme" (I liked his idea that religions are memes), and in this 30th anniversary edition an endnote for this chapter has been added that can essentially be summarized as "look, hackers, my computer's been infected with some viruses and it's not funny. Stop it." I was amused, at any rate.
So yeah. An enjoyable, interesting and informative read. With a Dewey classification number of 576.5, this book is about Science; more specifically, about the life sciences; and even more specifically, about genetics and evolution.

The Titan's Curse - Rick Riordan

2010-10-31T12:36:00.000-04:00

In this third installment of the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series, the plot thickens. New demigods are introduced, and some of them leave; the war against Olympus gains momentum, and our heroes must cross the continent once again.
Also, part of Hercules' mythology and some key elements of the Titan war take center stage, as our heroes meet and need to work with Artemis and her Hunters. Oh, and did I mention we finally get to meet Artemis and Apollo?
As always, a fun read full of action, adventure and almost deadly hijinks.

How To Train Your Dragon - That 2010 Movie

2010-10-25T15:49:00.000-04:00

Excellent!
There's dragons! And Vikings! And passing references to viking mythology! And a super cute dragon named Toothless! And also, an epic final battle.
I want to watch it again!

The Affinity Bridge - George Mann

2010-10-23T20:07:00.000-04:00

This novel combines all the usual trappings of the steampunk genre (Victorian-era setting, in London; things with gears and electricity; dirigibles; technology far more advanced than it was; tea) with a zombie invasion. Or at least, the beginning stages of a zombie infection.

It was an okay read; the dynamic between the hero of the story (he's a bit of a proto-Indiana Jones, and frankly he's just unkillable) and his lady assistant (slash love interest, I know, CLICHÉ) was really annoying, and the descriptions tended to be a bit overlong. However, I really liked the whole (BIG SPOILER HERE, although I figured it out about halfway through the novel) zombie robot idea. (/END SPOILER HERE, but seriously who cares.)

It's 330 pages long; read it if you want, but I don't think you really have to. If you don't like the steampunk genre, and have a low tolerance level for the Victorian era's patronizing attitude towards people with uteruses, you should really avoid it. Otherwise, shmeh.

Fire - Kristin Cashore

2010-10-18T08:52:00.000-04:00

This book is considered to be a "companion" to Kristin Cashore's debut novel, Graceling. It takes place years before Graceling's events, and we learn about the childhood (and childhood sociopathic tendencies) of Graceling's main antagonist, Leck.
However, for the most part it doesn't concern Leck; it concerns Fire, a girl with psychic powers and RED! hair. By "RED!", I mean unnaturally red; her hair would come out of several bottles of dye in this world, while it that world it marks her as a "monster". Monsters are creatures with unnatural colouring and psychic powers, who live in a place east of Graceling's seven kingdoms called the Dells (the Dells and the seven kingdoms are separated by a range of mountains), which is the setting of this story. Now, from what this novel tells us the monster phenotype is dominant, and also contains an aggression component: all monsters want to eat other monsters of other species.
Ok, I'm not going to explain the entire novel here (that's what Wikipedia is for), but essentially I found that it dealt with typical fantasy tropes (almost nobody has a living mother, there's eeevil fathers and good fathers and good children and eeevil children and the distinctions are pretty clear, psychic powers, again with the theme of prejudice), while keeping elements that typical fantasy novels usually forget (contraception exists! And so does menstruation; when Fire's bleeding, monsters smell her monster blood and want to attack, and the particular type of blood involved doesn't matter. Also, PMS (as in cramps, mostly), exists and is acknowledged.).
I liked it better than Graceling, to be honest.
I think I'll keep an eye out for this author's next novels.

The Sleeping Beauty - Mercedes Lackey

2010-10-15T19:49:00.001-04:00

EAUGH, THE PINKNESS! IT BURNS! Not really, but still, who's the over-'shopped girl on the cover?? The main character (a princess called Rosamund) is actually blonde. Cover art FAIL.
Anyways.
This is a novel from the 500 Kingdoms series - in which the magical Tradition makes fairy tales happen for real to various characters, by pushing their lives more or less along the paths that are pre-ordained by folk tales and traditions.
As the cover might lure you into thinking (rightly), this is complete and utter fluff reading. Which is good, sometimes! (Hey, even I need a break from orgo chem once in a while; electrophilic aromatic reactions aren't endlessly fascinating)
This fluffy fantasy novel combines elements from the Sleeping Beauty tale, the Snow White storyline, some Viking legends or sagas or mythology (yaaay, mytholgy!), as well as the classic "hundreds of princes must successfully complete these weird trials to marry the princess" story going on, and some other stuff. It's entertaining, if predictable.

Ancestor - Scott Sigler

2010-10-11T21:22:00.000-04:00

This novel is great!

Now, let's cut the whole mini synopsis thing and go to what really interests me: how this novel compares to Jurassic Park. Because let's face it, everything that has to do with genetic engineering gone lethally out of control will be compared to Jurassic Park.

Let's see:

Setting: an isolated island. Check.
Limited number of people on the island. Check. Most of them die; double check. All the designated bad guys die; triple check.
There's a hurricane-level (or rather, blizzard-level) storm at some point. Check.
There's genetic engineering going on. Check.

HOWEVER, while JP's geneticists made dinosaurs from preserved DNA, the ancestors were actually made from scratch and from genetic projections... the book explains it better
Also: the genetic engineering going on is financed by a company, and there's some trouble on the company's financial horizon. While industrial espionage and running from the international hand of the law aren't quite in the same league, CHECK.

Everything would have gone well if someone hadn't fucked up repeatedly. Check.

Mind you, in JP Nedry's the sole responsible person for the disaster (in my opinion), whereas in Ancestor... Person A messed up with the design, person B messed up by enabling the monsters to live, person C is sociopathic, person D is an all-around asshole - the list goes on.

KILLER MONSTERS!!!!!! BIG CHECK.
Sex! Actually, JP didn't have any sexing up going on (except for the dinos, but that was behind the... foliage). Nevermind.
Sort of ominous and open-ended story: check.

Final verdict: Ancestor is better than Jurassic Park. The science is better, there's a bunch of current references that amused me (including a jab at H1N1 and a recurring gag involving porn-y vampire romance novels), it's very fast-paced and gory, and quoth the Advance Praise on the back of the book:

"Michael Crichton has a worthy successor in Scott Sigler.... Ancestor takes thriller and science fiction conventions and slams them together to make something new and fascinating [...]" - Simon R. Green

Agreed!

Ptolemy's Gate - Jonathan Stroud

2010-10-03T00:20:00.001-04:00

This third and final installment of The Bartimaeus Trilogy is epic.
It takes place three years after the events of The Golem's Eye - Nathaniel is the seventeen-year-old Minister of Information (or some such thing) now, and in the past years he's grown even colder and imperious and paranoid. In other words, he's become a typical (if brilliant and talented) magician. His career is precariously perched on the barely not-collapsing shoulders of the British Empire, and for the first part of the novel he thinks of himself as John Mandrake. You'll see what I mean when you read the book.
Our other human protagonist, Kitty Jones, is living the underground and illegal life; she had been officially declared dead at the end of The Golem's Eye, and she is now living two lives under false identities; by night she works in a bar where commoners often gather to talk about what they can do to change their situation and overthrow the government, and by day she's a magician's assistant (to an old magician who doesn't see eye-to-eye with the government), with the hopes of summoning and asking the assistance of one particular djinni.
Yes, she wants to summon Bartimaeus. They had an interesting conversation three years prior, but little does Kitty know that Bartimaeus isn't in good shape. At all. Everyone's favorite djinni and first-person character had been continuously summoned to Earth for about two years, and as a result, he's crankier and weaker and cheekier than ever. In this book, though, we finally start to learn about his past with Ptolemy (yes, the same one whose Gate is in the title), so that's fun.
Anyways, this is a very very good end to the trilogy; I swear, half the book is about the epic! showdown! at the end (also known as the "climax" of the trilogy). It's fun!
Oh, and I took the cover art from this blogpost. Yes, this ten-year-old can write reviews of comparable caliber to mine. (I kid! But it's cute.)

Putain - Nelly Arcan

2010-10-02T11:50:00.001-04:00

This short (186 pages long) debut novel is a first-person narrative told by an escort (yes, a prostitute) in Montreal who studies literature and jots down her thoughts in between clients.
Seriously, the narrator has a shitload of issues - she's had to deal with anorexia, she's rather misogynistic (and is aware of it), she despises and is disgusted by her mother (while being aware that she's turning into her mother), she's suicidal, and has a very weird unconsummated incestuous thing with her father. It was a bit of a disturbing read, but a well-written one at least, with a very distinctive writing style; the sentences were long and ran on for pages, very much as if we were in the narrator's head.
Did I like it? I don't know. Would I recommend reading it? Hell yes.

The Princess and the frog - That 2009 Disney movie

2010-10-02T00:21:00.000-04:00

I am such a kid.
It's a good movie, although I did find parts of dialogue hard to understand because of the characters' accents and because I am REALLY TIRED and I have trouble with accents (and run-on sentences) when I am tired.
The character design was very Disney princess style, and the animation mostly hearkened back to the days of The Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Mulan and such. With the notable exception of the main antagonist, the evil Voodoo Doctor Facilier - by the way, I think he's my favorite Disney villain so far, and I'm quite disappointed that he didn't have more scenes. Anyways, the overall look of the movie should be familiar to anyone who's grown up with Disney movies, with some interesting (but brief) forays into different (and sometimes REALLY TRIPPY) styles. I liked it!
And like any self-respecting Disney movie, there are songs! My favorite being Doctor Facilier's Friends On The Other Side. And my second favorite being Tiana's Almost There (the change in animation style is fun!). Fun stuff!

Dinosaur in a Haystack - Stephen Jay Gould

2010-09-30T18:48:00.001-04:00

Reflections in natural history!
The dinosaur on the cover makes me laugh every time; its arms are so puny that it must try to scratch its hanging neck-skin with its toes! And its face - oh MAN have you seen its face?!
So this book is a compilation of 34 essays, divided into 8 sections. Now, I only got up to essay #26, but I think I can safely assert that it's just an okay book.
Honestly, I'm not convinced that Stephen Jay Gould is the best essayist ever - or even the best science essayist ever. I found his style to be acceptably flowy, but a bit too clunky; he inserts a lot of literary references in the opening and closing paragraphs of his essays, and since I wasn't very familiar with the quotations in question (or their context), I didn't really appreciate them and found that they slowed down the essays too much.
I'm not all complaints and no compliments, though: there's an essay on Jurassic Park, which I found very interesting indeed. But that was probably because Jurassic Park is one of my favorite books/movies ever. So that was nice.
Eh, that's it really... Except for one funny little fact: according to the Dewey decimal system, this book (at code 575) is a book about science! - more specifically, about the life sciences. And to be really precise, it's about... the physiological systems of plants? Random, but that's the decimal classification for you.

City of Bones - Cassandra Clare

2010-09-20T19:46:00.001-04:00

In this first installment of the Mortal Instruments trilogy, we meet Clary, a fifteen-year-old girl from New York whose life completely changes when she sees three other teenagers kill a demon inside an "all-ages" club.
Afterwards, her mother gets kidnapped, she learns about her own powers, she also learns about her own people and the conspiracy that almost got them destroyed, and she of courses kisses Jace, the hot blond-haired boy whose shirtless torso is - I presume - on the cover.
There's some witty, sarcastic dialogue, some fairly obvious drama! and family drama!, a bunch of fights against the forces of darkness, and the writing is good. Which shouldn't surprise me, since it was written by the author of the hilarious Very Secret Diaries of LoTR characters (click here if you've missed the phenomenon when it first came out. I love these things!).
A good debut; I'm intrigued about what will follow!

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

2010-09-17T22:34:00.001-04:00

This book is really awesome - I read it in a single day (two sittings). Loved it!
It takes place in a dystopian future (yay, dystopia!), in Panem, which was built on the ruins of North America. One city, the Capitol (set in the Rockies) rules over the twelve remaining Districts - and every year, to remind them of its dominance, it requires two tributes, a boy and a girl between the ages of 12 and 18, who will compete in the Hunger Games.
These games are televised, and it is mandatory for everyone to watch them - to watch as the tributes fight the environment of the arena, as they fight the traps that the game masters have put to make everything more exciting, and as they fight each other. Of the 24 tributes, only one will survive, and they'll have a life of luxury and fame afterwards.
Now, our protagonist, Katniss, is a sixteen-year-old from the poorer part of District 12; and when her twelve-year-old sister (who she loves very much) is picked as the district's tribune, she takes her (the sister's) place and must compete in the very lethal Hunger Games. There's also a love interest somewhere; it's not very subtle, but it's there. You'll see.
The writing was excellent, really; some scenes felt as though I was seeing an action movie rather than reading a book, and now I just can't wait to read the sequel.

The Book Thief - Marcus Zusak

2010-09-15T22:05:00.001-04:00

This book is set in Nazi Germany, is narrated by Death himself, and follows the story of Liesel, a girl whose father is a communist (and thus is persecuted), whose mother just can't take care of her (due to poverty and the persecution), and whose little brother just died.
Liesel grows up with her foster parents, with the other children on the street, and with other very interesting characters (a Jewish man hides in her basement for almost two years, anyone?). However, war happens. More specifically, war of the worldwide-for-the-second-time kind. It gets sad.
It was good, honestly, and for once I find that this book is worthy of the prestige a "New York Times #1 Bestseller" thing shows. It's good, people!

The Golem's Eye - Jonathan Stroud

2010-09-12T19:28:00.002-04:00

In this second installment of The Bartimaeus Trilogy, we return to magician-controlled London, two years after the events of the first novel. There, we once again follow Nathaniel (officially called John Mandrake), who now works for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and is in charge of tracking down and ultimately stopping a group of homegrown commoner terrorists, the Resistance.
At the heart of this Resistance is our new protagonist, Kitty Jones. She's a year older than Nat, and far more streetwise and mature than he. She has an innate resilience to magic and, along with ten similarly (and sometimes more) gifted individuals led by the elderly Mr Pennyfeather, she strives to end the magicians' rule of the Empire. Also, we finally get to learn her backstory.
Of course, no book in this trilogy would be complete without Bartimaeus - and after 110 pages, his distinctive narration finally joins us again. True, he also narrated the prologue (set in Prague during Gladstone's conquest, which marked the end of the Czech dominion over the world and the beginning of the British Empire's), but still. I had missed him. Thankfully, this is a 562 pages long novel, and before it ends we have plenty of time to enjoy his ever clever voice.
Once again, this novel's themes range from oppression to class issues, passing by explorations of what is free will. Also, the different interpretations of historical events (such as the fall of the Roman Empire), as would happen in this novel's world of demons and magicians, would be of particular interest to history nerds.

The Sea of Monsters - Rick Riordan

2010-08-30T23:25:00.001-04:00

The second novel in the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series is, like the first, very very good.
This time, the thirteen year-old Percy Jackson is accompanied by Annabeth (again) and Tyson - a very tall and ugly and socially rejected kid that attended school with Percy this year - and once again a quest! appears. Yes, it involves Grover. This new quest more or less follows Odysseus' odyssey, and by the end of the book the plot surrounding the eeeeevil titan Kronos thickens.
Now, I have to draw the inevitable parallels between Percy Jackson's series and Harry Potter's: in both cases we have a heroic but not perfect hero (Percy), who has an extremely smart female friend (Annabeth), a bit of a comic relief of a best friend (Grover), whose adventures take place at a specific time of year (during the summer), feature a magical location away from his parent(s) (Half-Blood camp), and... It doesn't matter. Because these resemblances in no way detract from the story's enjoyability.

Much Fall of Blood - Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint & Dave Freer

2010-08-29T00:04:00.000-04:00

Once again, this story concerns a certain Prince Manfred of Brittany and a certain Erik something-or-other from Iceland. This time, though, their story takes place in lands held by the Golden Horde, the Mongols. And we have a very strong female protagonist, the princess of the Hawk clan, Bortai, who is actually likable.
So first things first: the cover. It pretty much screams "FANTASY FICTION!" with its typeface and colour of typeface, and with its shiny cover art. That's all I have to say about it, really.
One thing that I appreciated very much about this novel was that the chapters were short, to the point, and they switched between the different characters' points of view. Also, since this 594-page book is divided into nine parts and 85 chapters (a lot, I KNOW), you get an average chapter-length of 6.98 pages. So if you read so much of this novel in one sitting that you get sick of it, it's your own damn fault.
Now, to be honest, the beginning of the story was slow. A bit boring, too - I'm not a huge fan of fictional political intrigue, and it's been a while since I read This Rough Magic, the immediate prequel. Thankfully, the pace picked up once elements of fantasy fiction (werewolf-ish gypsy-ish people! A dude who is almost a reincarnation of his legendary mad grandfather!) and ass-kickery were introduced, to make for an overall okay read. I don't regret reading it, but I won't re-read it either.

(500) Days of Summer - That 2009 movie

2010-08-28T07:26:00.000-04:00

Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Zooey Deschanel. What's not to love?
I liked it - except maybe for the you've-got-to-be-kidding-me ending and the fact that Summer's storyline is a bit um... Nonsensical. Out of character.
But apart from that, I really liked this movie; it's a non-linear story with little bouts of interesting cinematography in-between the major plot points. It's enjoyable, even when you want to tell some characters that they're being real douchefaces.

Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi

2010-08-26T19:59:00.001-04:00

This is just so good!
You've probably heard about the film, but this is about the novel. The graphic novel, to be precise. And it is just SO good!
It's a bit of a memoir of Marjane Satrapi's life growing up in Iran between 1979 and 1984 - from when she was nine to when she was fourteen. It spans from the Iranian revolution to the institution of the Islamic theocracy, up until when her parents sent her to Austria to continue her education in a social environment where she'd be happier.
It's touching, heartwarming, heartbreaking and even funny at times - it puts the universal experience of growing up in a setting which I really was not familiar at all. Plus, it does all that in a sequential art format. It's great, really!

The Winter Oak - James A. Hetley

2010-08-26T19:57:00.000-04:00

Apparently this is a sequel to The Summer Country (by the same author), but oh well.
To be absolutely honest, the only reason I picked up this book was because, as the blurb on the back tells us, there's a dragon called Khe'sha. I giggled a little bit (I mean, who wouldn't?), and decided that what the heck, this 295-page-long fantasy novel (magic! People with the Old Blood can wield Power! And Important Words are always Capitalized!), with a partial setting in the real world and a partial setting in a Celtic fantasy world, and several nods to Arthurian legend.
It was okay - at times I felt like I missed something that would explain some of the characters' motives (as in, why does Jo suddenly decide to, um, try to convince policepeople that she had killed her father? What? I don't get it!), and I got a few "um, what? Why?" moments, but it's all right. I was still reasonably entertained.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

2010-08-26T12:58:00.000-04:00

This book is HUGE, and challenging, and I'll have to pay some overdue-book library fines for it. Oh well.
Let me put it into hard data for you: the story is 981 pages long, and we're talking about some standard-size, 43-lines long, size 12 text here. And then you have 98 pages' worth of endnotes (388 endnotes total). Which makes for a 23.5 cm (9.5") long, 15 cm (6") wide, and 5 cm (2") thick brick - and that's with a soft cover.
Now, about the story itself: it's a nonlinear narration that follows a bunch of characters. These include a competitive-junior-tennis player and total pothead who attends this tennis academy his parents have founded, his older brother, his older brother's super pretty ex-girlfriend, an ex-Demerol addict dude with a huge head who now works at a halfway house down the hill from the tennis academy, and a superviolent Québec separatist terrorist cell descriptively named Les Assassins en Fauteuils Roulants (The Wheelchaired Assassins). Plus a bunch of other characters. Who are all, in twisted and non-obvious and often surprising ways, interconnected.
This novel (published in 1996, hey look at that right after the last Québec Referendum; this might explain why Québec Separatism is such a huge thing in this book) takes place in the future - that is, at about this point in time. However, I don't know that for sure since a new time-naming system has been conceived to help keep the North American economy strong; years are sponsored by different products. So you get the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. Or the Year of the Whopper. Or the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (which is the year of the story). Which is rather confusing until, after a few hundred pages or so, a convenient list of the years' chronological order just appears.
Ok, so what else... A huge northeastern chunk of the United States and of eastern Canada (bye-bye New Brunswick and southeastern Québec!) is called the great Concavity. You see, instead of filling up landfills everywhere in north america, the O.N.A.N. just launches its garbage (on prime numbered days only!) into that region, the Concavity. Which is the site of so-called "annular fission", a weird thing that removes toxic waste from the environment to provide literally clean energy to the ONANite countries. So essentially what happens is that in the early part of the month the Concavity is this teratogenic, carcinogenic, toxic wasteland, and in the late part of the month it becomes this super lush and overgrown jungle full of feral hamsters and "insects of Volkswagen size". You know what? I think this means it's a dystopian novel. Because seriously, wtf?
The thing about this novel, though, is that the entire story feels like a giant foreshadowing of this dark, looming and terribly awful thing that's going to happen - and after the first chapter you know something really messed up happened - and yet it never tells you what happened. Or really, what will happen; the novel ends on a completely unresolved note (um, spoiler alert I guess?). It's a great read, though; a challenging one, but even without resolution I think it's worth it.
On a final note: although it didn't take me 100 years to read Infinite Jest (yes, I'm bragging right now), it did take me almost two weeks. I wasn't reading anything else. IT'S JUST SO HUGE!

The Lightning Thief - Rick Riordan

2010-08-13T23:25:00.001-04:00

The first novel of the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series is very very good. No, really - I read it in two sittings, it's that good. (Yes, I enjoyed it very much)
If you've seen the movie, you'll easily recognize the first chapters of the book - except that you should visualize Percy as a twelve-year-old sixth-grader, and not the seventeen-year-old high schooler who took the lead role in the movie. Be warned, though: starting from Percy's arrival at Camp Half-Blood, all the details change, and a slightly different (but essentially the same) story is told from then on.
Apart from that, what is there to say? The story is a lot of fun to read, full of action and adventure and Greek mythology (wooot!). I can't wait to get my hands on the sequel!

Shambling Towards Hiroshima - James Morrow

2010-08-12T14:09:00.000-04:00

This novel takes place in 1945, before the end of WWII on the Japanese front, and the US has two options to end the war: 1. they could use the result of Project Manhattan and drop an A-bomb on the Japanese, or 2. they could use the results of the top secret Knickerbocker project and release a behemoth of unsurpassed deadliness, a gigantic biological weapon that's essentially a ginormous fire-breathing super-aggressive iguana, who would wreck havoc and destruction upon any Japanese city. The thing is, they don't want to release any Godzilla if they can avoid it, so they want to make a mini-demonstration of its destructive powers to a handful of Japanese emissaries. And that's where our first-person narrator comes in.

Syms Thorley is a B-list horror movie actor, who specializes in playing The Monster in various 1930s and 1940s horror movies. Mummies, Frankensteinian monsters, and other prosthetics-and-makeup-heavy characters are his specialty - and he has the shamble, the limping walk down pat for every character. If you haven't guessed his role in the story yet, look closely at the cover art. That's it.

This was a somewhat short, very witty, and quite entertaining read. It reminded me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut's writing style, except less ADHD-like, a more focused narrative that skipped from flashback (in 1945) to present-tense and -time narration (pretty much every chapter begins with our narrator telling us what distraction occurred when he wrote the previous chapter).

(And by the way, I lifted the picture from this thing, which is a far more detailed review-like-thing with a much better exploration of this book's themes. Click on the link!)

À Ciel Ouvert - Nelly Arcan

2010-08-11T13:25:00.002-04:00

In this 270-page-long novel, Nelly Arcan explored themes ranging from the obsession with beauty to the obsession with love, while touching on mental, physical, sexual and emotional health issues.
Because let's face it, all of the main characters have issues. First you have Rose, a stylist who is addicted to plastic surgery (or so I saw it), and is obsessively in love with her boyfriend-then-ex, Charles, with whom she incidentally works with. She's also pretty misogynistic and has some issues about women being her competition in love, which stems from her childhood.
Then you have Julie, a documentary writer who has to deal with her own alcoholism and her drug issues, as well as her zombie-like state of existence following her last breakup, years ago, which only gets broken once she "steals" Charles from Rose. She's also very driven when it comes to maintaining her appearance, with frequent harmful effects (burning in the sunlight, badly injuring her shoulder while working out, scarring, that kind of thing).
And then you have Charles, the photographer with the traumatic childhood, the sexuality issues, and the mental health issues which pop up later in the novel and swell from there on.
The content was depressing, but this novel was also very well presented; Arcan's prose is fluid, and while some of her sentences might seem a little run-on and superfluous, they do manage to successfully dictate the pace and ambiance of the story. An okay read.

Inception - That 2010 movie

2010-08-08T00:23:00.001-04:00

Oh where to begin?
I liked this movie. It wasn't really confusing (or at least, a lot more simple than the reviews I'd read made it seem), and it was a very interesting concept to begin with: how do you plant an idea into someone? People can trace back the genesis of their ideas, so you want to make them think that they thought of it first. And since there's some convenient dream-invasion technology available, guess how our protagonists do what they have to do?
Anyways. You have Leonardo Dicaprio, Ellen Page, and a guy named Joseph Gordon-Levitt whom I had never heard of before this movie, and who looks a lot like a skinnier (and more alive) Heath Ledger. The whole concept of layers of dreams reminded me of the layers of the Twilight in the Night Watch series of novels. (Yes, I had to bring a book in somewhere!) And... well, it's a very entertaining movie, that I might even watch again someday. Maybe.

The Amulet of Samarkand - Jonathan Stroud

2010-08-07T01:48:00.001-04:00

This first installment of the Bartimaeus Trilogy has two protagonists. There's Nathaniel (shh, that's his birth name! And names have power!), later called John Mandrake (his official magician's name), an eleven-year-old magician's apprentice. He's apprenticed to a weak, abusive magician who takes out his frustration about his stagnant political career on Nat. In this world (set in contemporary time), magic is real and magicians are the (educated) ruling class; they control the British government, and by extension the rest of the Empire. Whose entire power comes from their mastery of demons, from the weak imps and foliots to the common djinns to the powerful afrits to the so-powerful-at-least-two-magicians-are-needed-to-summon-and-control madrits, to even more powerful (but fortunately uncommon) beings.
Speaking of the supernatural, our second protagonist is Bartimaeus. He's a medium-power djinn who shapeshifts a lot, and has a quick wit, plenty of sass, snark and sarcasm, an over 5000-year-long backstory (barely hinted at in this book), and an oversized ego. The chapters told from his (first-person) perspective are also a much more fun read than those from Nathaniel's (third person narration), not only because of Bartimaeus' wit but also because of his liberal use of footnotes. This makes sense if you've read the book.
I particularly liked how the vocabulary and themes were beyond what is expected of a YA novel: Bartimaeus is a very articulate djinn indeed, and this novel doesn't shy from tackling prejudice, social injustice, oppression, and other interesting stuff. It's a really good novel! Read it now!

Graceling - Kristin Cashore

2010-08-06T00:17:00.001-04:00

It's a fantasy novel. Some people have extraordinary skills - called Graces - and you can spot them by looking at their eyes: they will have different colours. Like one blue eye and one green eye. Or one grey eye and one blue eye. Or one silver eye and one gold eye (why limit yourself to the range of natural human eye colours?!). In most of the world (in six of the seven kingdoms, basically), though, Gracelings are feared and shunned. So unless if you have an awesome or useful (for your king) Grace, your life will suck.
Anyways, this story is Katsa's. She is the niece to a bullying king, who has used her Grace to his gain by making her his right-hand woman as it is, the lady he can send to kill anyone, who'll do it effortlessly and that thus terrifies all of his underlords. But Katsa's obviously unhappy with this life, and then A WILD PLOT APPEARS.
KATSA USES RAGE (for all of the first part)
IT'S NOT VERY EFFECTIVE.
A WILD PLOT USES TWIST!
IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE!
KATSA UNDERGOES CHARACTER GROWTH!
KATSA USES ANGST!
IT'S REALLY NOT EFFECTIVE.
A WILD PLOT USES NOT-QUITE-MELO-DRAMA!
IT'S SEMI-EFFECTIVE.
...
471 pages, 39 chapters, three distinctive sections later: I still think Katsa's Grace is very... convenient.
It was an okay read - not extraordinary, but not bad either - which is pretty normal considering it's Kristin Cashore's first novel. It dealt with issues ranging from dealing with prejudice, what it means to be independant, and understanding your limitations (even if you're a seemingly invincible character like the protagonist, Katsa). I would definitely reccomend it to any teen who likes fantasy fiction.

Tigana - Guy Gavriel Kay

2010-08-04T13:51:00.000-04:00

This is a novel of epic proportions.
I am not only referring to Kay's usual wordy and never-ending prose (or so it seems at times when you read it); I am also not simply alluding to the fact that the story is, as usual for Kay, epic (seriously, it's about how an entire peninsula and even two faraway kingdoms/empires are affected by the twenty-year toils of a few dedicated, passionate men who seek revenge over the tyrant who not only conquered their kingdom, but also bespelled it so that its true name, Tigana, could not be heard, written or in any way imparted to anyone who was not born there, so that its entire culture would be erased by the passage of time - ok I'll stop now.). I am also not just making a little joke about its 688-page (hardcover) length, or about the fact that the summary at the back literally refers to it as an "epic narrative that will change forever the boundaries of fantasy fiction."
I mean it literally: its proportions are impressive. This book is 13.5 cm (5.25 inches) wide, 22 cm (8.75") long, and an impressive 6 cm (2.25") thick. It is a real brick.
It was also a bit sluggish. And although I appreciated that there was a reference to Fionavar (the "original world" in Kay's mythology) in the legend of Finavir, it was just another detail amongst many others that could have been left out without losing anything of importance in the story.
A very long novel, great for when you have several months of vacation-time. Although I guess that if you only read one book at a time, this once could last for only two, maybe three weeks... An okay read.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 - That Wii Game

2010-08-03T22:11:00.000-04:00

The wonky gravity, the dubious physics, the space that's seemingly full of air (and thus pressure, which eliminates the need for a spacesuit in this Mario-world), the diminutive plumber, his abducted princess and the almighty Bowser (who nevertheless gets pwned by a diminutive plumber, once again) all come back in this second Super Mario game in space.
Now this game is great, and not-so-great all at the same time. Let me explain:
It is an AWESOME game because

The platform levels are all the more fun with weird gravity pits that twist your mind
The music! It's great!
If you've played the first Mario Galaxy, you can pick up the controller and understand this game immediately
Yoshi is there, and everybody loves Yoshi!
There is a LOT stuff to do; I haven't completed this game yet, but it takes you about 60 stars to get to the Final Bowser Fight, 120 stars to "finish all the levels", and then 240 stars to get to the last world. I shit you not.
It gives several shout-outs to the first Mario Galaxy (right after the Final Bowser Fight, you'll see what I mean, plus there's a world where all you do is fight Galaxy 1's first bosses), which is fun for those who've played it.
It also gives some shout-outs to Super Mario Sunshine (another of my favorite Mario games): one level in particular is lifted straight from Sunshine (from one of the "Hotel Something Secret" levels. You know what I mean)

It is a not-so-great game, though, for a few reasons:

Most levels are too easy. Especially if you've played Galaxy 1 and are already familiar with the controls; the first four worlds (they include 6 galaxies each) especially.
Just like in Galaxy 1, the Bowser fights are repetitive. It's essentially the same fight each time, which is, frankly, boring.
Personal pet peeve: you can't keep all the extra lives you earn, you have to start every game-play with a set number of Marios. Which is annoying when you get a BUNCH of them, stop the game and lose them all, and then get one of the really challenging levels the next time you play.

I had fun, though.

Mean Girls - That 2004 movie.

2010-07-31T01:34:00.000-04:00

The first time I saw this movie (sometime in 2004/2005, probably), I didn't appreciate it very much. This time around, though, I think I fell in love. It's just so amazinglygoodandentertaining-andenjoyableandOHMYthisisthe-bestteenmovieI'veeverseeninmylife!
Seriously, the screenplay writers have done a great job - the many gags and jokes and snide side comments are what makes this movie great (apart from the excellent acting and the, you know, actual character growth that goes on). And look at that - Tina Fey wrote the screenplay. AND she was great as the math teacher (look, a secondary character that shows... well, character!). It's decided - I like Tina Fey! Not the least because of this gem:

You've got to stop calling each other sluts and whores - it just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores.

I must admit, Lindsay Lohan did a very good job of her role, too. There was one scene, though, that I found very funny of unintended reasons: the "drunk at the party and pukes on love interest's lap" scene. That was not "drunk". "Drunk" involves slurred words. (This particular kind of not-good acting amuses me) In any case, props to the people in charge of the visual aspects of her character for the correlation between the level of styling of her hair/her attire and her inner emotional turmoil/shallowness/peace with herself.
Well, I could go on and on about Rachel McAdams' amazingness in this movie, but this thing is getting pretty long already. Let me just say that

gotta love how the "BURN BOOK" looks about twenty pages long, and yet "every girl in school except for 3" are in it.
the fact that "sexually active band geeks" counts as a clique amuses me to no end.

Oh, and on a last, math-related note: did I spot a mistake in the Mathletes' Sudden Death Round? They have to find the limit where x -> 0, for ln(1-x)*sin(x)/(1-cos^2(x)). Now, the movie said that "the limit does not exist", BUT if I remember my calculus correctly, it should be

lim[x->0] for ln(1-x)*sin(x)/(1-cos^2(x))
lim[x->0] for ln(1-x)*sin(x)/sin^2(x)
lim[x->0] for ln(1-x)/sin(x)

Using l'Hôpital's rule, we then get

lim[x->0] for (1/1-x)/cos(x)
lim[x->0] for 1/(1-x)*cos(x)
which equals 1/(1-0)*cos(0)
= 1/(1)*(1)
= 1

Oh well. I only learned that rule in first year of uni - if we're talking about a high school-level math competition, they might not expect the competitors to know that rule. But still.

(Longest post so far? I think so. Wheee!)

Changeless- Gail Carriger

2010-07-30T22:36:00.000-04:00

This novel picks up almost right where the first installment left off; Alexia is now Lady Maccon, she has lots of sexytimes with lycanthropic Lord Maccon (who is called a "sexy beast" at one point), and stuff happens. Namely, every supernatural being in a certain area of London suddenly cease to be supernatural. And then everything goes back to normal - but what happened exactly?

In this novel, romantic drama is mostly a thing for secondary characters - and I must admit, this novel had a lot less steamy scenes than Soulless did. However, there is far more homoerotic stuff going on. Which makes sense. After all, the Victorian era is also Oscar Wilde's era. But I digress.

Once again, the writing is very entertaining, the story is perfectly paced and obvious enough to make it a I'll-read-this-in-the-bus book, and steampunk tradition is perpetuated through the introduction of Ancient Egyptian plot elements. I found this a very enjoyable read indeed - and I can't wait for the sequel, due this September!

The Carbon Diaries 2017 - Saci Lloyd

2010-07-27T11:07:00.001-04:00

This is a sequel. And it's a good one.
This time, instead of focusing on the carbon rationing system (hey, it's been there for two years, people take it for granted now), the story focuses on the civil unrest that occurs pretty much everywhere. From the rise of the rightists in London, to the neo-Nazis and the ultra-rightwing party that wins an election in France, to the people smuggling situation in Sicily and Italy, to the detainment of protestors all across Europe, to the total shitstorm in London, the protagonist (Laura Brown, remember?) goes through a lot of stuff.
All this, plus the usual DRAMA! that you'd expect when you have a bunch of strong-willed 18-year-olds stuck together for a year. It's an enjoyable read indeed.

Gwenhwyfar - Mercedes Lackey

2010-07-25T15:26:00.000-04:00

Gwenhwyfar: The White Spirit. An Arthurian Novel.
And the cover art shows a sword and a shield.
A few more hints: Gwenhwyfar is more commonly called "Guinevere".
That's right: this story follows Gwen, a warrior-princess who later becomes the High King's third wife (somewhat unwillingly). In this novel, there are plenty of swordfights, plenty of magic, a shitload of horses, elements of typical Arthurian legend, and a strong (female) lead character.
A fun read indeed.
(The picture on the left was totally lifted from this, because the other images of the cover Google showed me weren't identical to the cover of my library's copy. And I suddenly decided to care.)

Leviathan - Scott Westerfeld

2010-07-25T15:14:00.001-04:00

This alternate history novel takes place during the first world war. You know, the one that started when an Austrian archduke called Franz Ferdinand was killed, followed by the biggest freak-out over an assassination that the world had ever known.
In this particular alternate history novel, the archduke has a son, Alek, who escapes after his parents' assassination with a few loyal people in a Stormwalker. A Stormwalker is a specific model of machine, fitted with cannons and guns, that walks. I imagine it as a non-intelligent robot, and it is one of the many constructs the Clanker alliance uses. Because, by the way, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman empire are all allied, and they are very partial to mechanical technology.
The other side in the war, the Darwinists (Includes Britain, France, Serbia, Russia, etc), are more partial to genetically modified technology. Yes, Darwin managed to discover DNA, and to find ways to design creatures by genetically modifying them. One such creature is a HUGE modified whale called Leviathan with hydrogen bladders, symbiotic hydrogen-emitting bees, and a plethora of other species on which its survival depends. This modified whale is the biological response to the Clanker zeppelins, and it is used for essentially the same functions.
Okay, I'll stop now or else I'd be summarizing the whole story. Let's just say that it was a fun, easy read, with nice illustrations, kickass cover art, and that I'm looking forward to the sequel. It's steampunk that doesn't fall into the tired clichés of the genre.

Under Heaven - Guy Gavriel Kay

2010-07-24T01:43:00.000-04:00

This very well cover-arted (IT'S A VERB NOW) novel, which is about 567 pages long, is slightly epic. And, since it is a Guy Gavriel Kay novel, it doesn't limit itself to one character's perspective and journey; it weaves a story through the points of view of several of them, which range from the principal protagonist to his exiled sister to the concubine he used to be in love with to random characters who barely make an appearance but whose thoughts and actions still take the stage, if only for a few pages.
Well, look at that: the author's wordy prose is contagious. And I'm infected.
All kidding aside, I liked this novel. I know woefully too little about non-European-centric history, and although this is no substitute for a real history book, historical fiction is still good to give a very sketchy general idea of what the world was. ish.
(I took the cover picture from this site, whose "well, here's what I think of this cover art" I happen to agree with. Go. Read.)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - That French movie

2010-07-23T13:27:00.001-04:00

This was a really good movie. The story - based on the novel of the same name - was heartbreaking, the acting was very very good (so good that you forgot it was acting), but the best part was that it was cinematographically innovating. The camera angles were interesting, and the first-person perspective it offered (except in moments of flashbacks) was very interesting indeed.
So yes, I liked this movie. And I can see why the director won a Palme d'or at the Cannes movie festival; he has an excellent, innovative vision.
A little warning, though: at one point, the guy's eyelids have to be sown shut, and since it happens during a first-person perspective moment, people who are squeamish about such things will definitely be uncomfortable.

The Second Sex: Part 1 - Simone de Beauvoir

2010-07-19T14:29:00.000-04:00

274 pages. That's the length of the first volume of Simone de Beauvoir's massive most famous work.
It begins with a chapter on biology (whee, science!), followed by one on psychoanalysis (which is very confusing), followed by stuff about economics and history (which were sort of interesting, but not that fascinating to me personally), and ending with a section on myths (which includes a very good semi-lengthy takedown of Montherlant's hypocrisy. And I had no idea who the dude was!). All of which were concerned with one particular subject: Woman. Why is she perceived as she is? Why does she hold the role in society that she holds? Why is male considered the default and female, the deviation from the default?
All of this told in a very particular style, using plenty of semi-colons, a lot of page-long paragraphs, and a plethora of literary and cultural references that flew right over my head.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to read the second volume (included in the same hardcover book as the first one) YET, so that'll have to wait for another half-assed post.

Bogus to Bubbly - Scott Westerfeld

2010-07-13T23:22:00.002-04:00

An Insider's Guide to the World of Uglies.
Or, in other words, THIS IS A RATHER SPOILERIFFIC BOOK; DON'T READ IT IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE Uglies-Pretties-Specials-Extras SERIES YET. If you have no intention of EVER reading the series, though, you can go ahead and read this book; it's interesting even if you don't know the literary context.
It provides background information on the technology, the science, the history and the societal structure of the world of the Uglies/Pretties/Specials/Extras. AND includes maps. Which is nice, since it helps clarify and explain the (future) world in which the series took place, which wasn't clearly done in the series.
It is written for a teenaged reader's reading level, which makes sense considering the Uglies series is YA fiction; I found it rather vague on details in the chapters dealing with science, but that's okay.
According to my library, this book is a 813.6 on the Dewey Decimal Classification; it is a non-fiction book on American literature in English, about fiction. Well look at that.

Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut

2010-07-13T00:01:00.001-04:00

So this is American Literature, eh?
I must admit, I rather enjoyed it. Its many-chaptered 302 pages long flew by acceptably fast.
The plot is secondary to the effects in this story. Which is fine, because the effects (the felt-pen simple drawings, the random explanations of basic concepts, the penile sizes of all the male characters/the hip-waist-bust sizes of the female characters, and the frequent forays into reminiscence and flashbacks) are rather entertaining.
All and all, I partially agree with what the blurb on the back cover says about this book:

[...] aging writer Kilgore Trout finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America [...]

I didn't find it "murderously funny", but rather simply entertaining. But I have to agree: oh MAN is there a lot of racism in this book!

Notes de chevet - Sei Shônagon

2010-07-12T00:04:00.002-04:00

I think the English translation of this Japanese book is called The Pillow Book - or at least, so says this blog entry that really made me want to read this book.
Which I did, obviously.
It was interesting; I found it very poetic, snarky at times, definitely classist, and a wonderful plunge into 10th/11th century Japanese aristocracy (without having to personally suffer the consequences of time travel). Furthermore, I enjoyed the random lists that are peppered through the book. I don't know why exactly, but I did.
So this is a book in the UNESCO collection of representative works (Japanese series). Well, if the UNESCO approves, it must be good!
I kid, but really, it was an enjoyable read indeed. There are also 162 sections that divide this 281-pages long book, so if you overdose on this book, it's your own damn fault. Take it easy, take your time, and renew your library checkout so that you don't get slapped a fine.

Okami - That Wii Game

2010-07-08T02:03:00.000-04:00

You are Amaterasu, the sun goddess and mother to all the other gods of the land. Your earthly form is that of a white wolf, and you must travel across the land to expand your magical skills in order to defeat your 200-year-old enemy, Orochi, that you defeated 100 years ago but who has managed to survive and reappear.
And then some.
And then some more.
And then EVEN MORE THINGS HAPPEN.
All set to excellent - nay, beyond-excel l ent - m u s i c!

[Spoiler alert, for those who care about such non-plot revelatory gameplay details:]
This game is just so massive, so huge, that at one point I started to doubt that it would have an ending (this is a good thing!). But after more than a dozen boss fights, you get the Final Boss Fight, and after that your story's over, you get some nifty statistics about your journey (I only got one death! And collected 156 demon fangs! And defeated 485 monsters! All on my first play-through!), and... you can start all over again. But you get to keep (almost) all the items (yes, even the weaponry), all the fangs and all the money that you had when you finally defeated the Final Boss. AND you can change your appearance, which does nothing as far as your abilities are concerned, but I personally find the fatty one to be adorable, and so on my second play-though Amaterasu is one fatty fluffy adorable wolfie.
[/Spoiler alert over. You can start reading again now.]

So yes, this game is massive, and can most definitely be a source of several dozens of hours of enjoyment. There are plenty of sidequests you can do:

Defeat these monsters on this hit list! And get a reward.
Find all the Hidden Beads! And get a reward (supposedly).
Feed all of the animals of all the species you can feed! And sometimes get a reward.
Restore all of nature/make all the trees bloom! And sometimes get a reward.
Find out all the extra stuff you can do with your magical Celestial Brush techniques. And gain skills! (Skills can include battle techniques such as Whirlwind or Double Cherry Bombs)

This game IS rated T for Teen though, due to its reliance on alcoholic drinks (sake! It can help you defeat monsters, it can increase your attack/defense, it can give you magical powers to make the Sacred Tree bloom, apparently). Also, your sidekick Issun can be misogynistic at times, so critical thinking and player discretion is advised. Oh, and boobs and butts are very present in the game (play it, and you'll see what I mean - especially when you'll first meet Rao (jiggles abound), and when you'll first see Sakuya's dress. It has butt cleavage).

There was one rather funny bug in the game, though: during my fight against the last Canine Warrior, Amaterasu's head decided to stick to one point that was pretty far away in the environment. The rest of my character's body moved normally, though, so it essentially became a fight between my canine enemy VS my headless wolf-self. It was pretty funny. Right after the fight I went to a save-point, saved, exited the game and went back in, and everything was back to normal.

Still, I enjoyed this game very much, I think it gives a much better cost-to-hours of entertainment than, say, Zelda did, and I most certainly recommend it. Play this game!

Soulless - Gail Carriger

2010-07-04T00:30:00.001-04:00

Vampires (whose social structure resembles that of bees), werewolves, Victorian fashion and mores, mad scientist conspiracies, a dash of steampunk and some really steamy makeout scenes mixed together with a touch of the Mister Darcy Syndrome makes for an interesting and very entertaining novel by Gail Carriger.
This is a great book to read one chapter at a time, since the story is easy to slip in and out of. Plus, since Alexia Tarabotti - the awesome, intelligent, scientifically curious and strong-willed main character - seems to be mildly amnesiac about pretty important plot elements, there are some reminders about the relevant plot points during each chapter. It is, however, pretty hard to put down the book since all the chapter separations seem to occur right in the middle of fascinating, important, or downright steamy scenes.
After the epilogue is over and the story proper is done with, there's this interview of the author in which one answer pretty much sums up everything that's great about this genre-rich novel:

Soulless has such a clever melding of alternate history, romance, and the supernatural. How did you derive the idea for this novel? I knew I wanted to write urban fantasy, and there's one thing I've never been able to understand in the genre: if immortals were mucking about, wouldn't they have been mucking about for a very long time? A speculation arose: what if all those strange and unexplainable bends in history were the result of supernatural interference? At which point I asked myself, what's the weirdest most eccentric historical phenomenon of them all? Answer: the Great British Empire. Clearly, one tiny little island could only conquer half the known world with supernatural aid. Those absurd Victorian manners and ridiculous fashions were obviously dictated by vampires. And, without a doubt, the British army regimental system functioned on werewolf pack dynamics. Of course, as soon as I started scribbling away about a land of bustles and top hats, romance and comedy had to enter the fray. I mean to say, bustles! Then I tossed nineteenth-century science into the mix and realized that if the Victorians were studying vampires and werewolves (which they would do, if they knew about them), not to mention developing weapons against them, technology would have evolved differently. Enter a sprinkling of steampunk, and suddenly, I was juggling more subgenres than Ivy has ugly hats! But then again, you can never have too many hats.

Who is Ivy, you ask - well just read the book, would you?

Children of the Night - Mercedes Lackey

2010-07-01T20:30:00.003-04:00

Sociopathic psychic vampires that feed off of people's emotions! A 24-year-old witch (who writes romance novels because even witches have rent and bills to pay)! A sexy vampire with a sexy French accent who does sexy things sexily! All in New York City during the rather rough 80s. That's right; it's another urban fantasy novel.
This Diana Tregarde novel is set some years before Burning Water, and it explains some of the subplots present in that other novel. Apart from that, the subplot involving the composition of a clichéd romance novel was pretty enjoyable, if you enjoy poking fun at the stereotypes of that genre of novel.
This book somewhat reminded me of Scott Westerfeld's The Last Days in a "not-quite-vampires are playing music in New York!" kind of way; I was also reminded of Burning Water due to its surplus of dramatic irony.
All and all, I found it to be a very enjoyable read. Incidentally, I do agree with the Stephen King quote that is printed on the back cover of this novel:

Mercedes Lackey's work is as sharp - and as scary - as the suddenly revealed fang of a vampire. She'll keep you up long past your bedtime.

Sati - Christopher Pike

2010-06-30T14:10:00.001-04:00

Once upon a time, when I was eleven years old, I read The Midnight Club. And Chain Letter, and its sequel. All of which were written by an author whose pseudonym is the name of that guy from Star Trek. But I digress.
Sati, by the same author, is a novel marketed towards adults, but to be honest I could have read it at the same time as the above-mentioned YA novels without too much difficulty. The premise is rather simple: God decides to play on Earth, in L.A. of all places, and took the form of a blonde, blue-eyed girl who calls herself Sati. She talks to some people, makes delicious cookies, borrows elements from Hinduism, reminds everyone that the whole point of life is to enjoy yourself and find your "inner silence", and then leaves. All of this is narrated by the guy who found her in the desert, brought her back to his apartment and skeptically watched while she proceeded to enlighten pretty much everyone around him.
That's it, really. I've left out the predictable twist! at the end of the novel, and the many and various subplots, but really, that's it. 217 pages of calm and spirituality and cherry cookies. It was okay.

Sex Drugs Rock & Roll - Eric Bogosian

2010-06-30T09:28:00.001-04:00

One day, as I wandered in the rows of the North American literature section of my university's library, I saw a thin volume wedged in between the usual musty, academic bricks. This thin volume (only 98 pages long!) was all the more attractive because it sported a bright green cover with a chunky typeface and a rather clichéd title - so I read it.
This is actually a collection of monologues by Eric Bogosian (or should I say, BOGOSIAN), which were presented on stage in the mid-90s, I think. It was a bit boring, though.
Don't take me wrong, it was a good time-killer, and the characters were pretty varied, but it was still a book full of monologues by conceited, stupid, unpleasant or downright asshole-caliber guys. And while the blurb on the back cover is partially true:

"He is a born storyteller with perfect pitch for the voices of various ethnic, racial and economic backgrounds" - Frank Rich, New York Times

...So long as the voice comes from a heterosexual male.
Verdict: time-killer. On the same level as reading inane celebrity news, in a more dated way.

The Island - Aldous Huxley

2010-06-26T11:00:00.001-04:00

Have you read Brave New World, the hugely dystopic novel by the same strangely-named author? Well, The Island (or, more specifically, its setting on the fictional island of Pala) is the complete opposite: it's a society that fosters and makes entire human beings, with all their psychological, physical, sexual, spiritual and social needs.
This depiction of an utopic society mixes Buddhist-like spirituality with a through education in the biological sciences (yay! Interdisciplinary education!), sexual liberty allied with the intrinsic right to autonomy (it's "you belong to yourself, do what you really want" and not "you belong to everyone else" like in BNW), a very interesting concept for child-rearing ("Mutual Adoption Clubs" where several families kind of adopt each other; it takes a village to raise a child, and should there be conflict with the biological parents the child can go live with one of their other parents, thereby avoiding potentially toxic living arrangements), and plenty of other interesting things that I would love to see implemented - or at least tried - in society.
This is an Aldous Huxley novel, though, so of course dystopic elements have to be present and ruin everything (uh, spoiler? sorry) - which, by contrast, only makes you root for the idealized tanned shirtless people even more.
This novel was a bit preachy at times, a bit boring at times, but very interesting overall - I would definitely recommend it. It's a welcome rebuke to the prudes who only see the sexual aspects of Brave New World as being problematic (and who ignore the whole class thing) - and it contains some very interesting ideas (free contraception and Mutual Adoption Clubs, anyone?). An enjoyable read indeed.

Blogging Notes From Underground (Part 2: 5-end)

2010-06-23T00:17:00.001-04:00

For all of you who were impatiently waiting for this, here is what passes for the rising action immediately before the climax in this classic existential mess of a novel.

5
So after the other guys ditch his drunk rude self, Frodoy decides to follow them because he's sure they've gone to a particular brothel. On the way, he talks to himself and - EURGH I GIVE UP. Read the Sparknotes if you don't want to read the book yourself or if you want to make sense of it.

Essentially, Frodoy meets Liza, a prostitute; after the act, the talks to her about how she should get out of sex work as soon as she can (he even rants at her for 5 full pages!), and is generally all-around annoying. And rude. And a total twat, a cruel man even, and an unpleasant character on all counts. To quote the back of my library's copy of the book:

The underground man had always felt like an outsider. He doesn't want to be like other people, working in the 'ant-hill' of society. So he decides to withdraw from the world, scrawling a series of darkly sarcastic notes about the torments he is suffering. Angry and alienated, his only comfort is the humiliation of others.

Is he going mad?

Or is it the world around him that's insane?

He's definitely mad. And his torments, may I add, are mostly self-inflicted.
If you want to read a book written in the first person from the perspective of a character you will not feel empathy for, and that you will detest before the last of the 151 pages are done, read this book. Or don't.

The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

2010-06-19T16:36:00.002-04:00

This is a youth/YA novel that tells the tale of Nobody Owens, a boy who is raised by ghosts in a graveyard somewhere in England. It spans from his toddler years (when he was able to escape his family's murderer by crawling to the graveyard and being rescued by the local ghosts and vampire) to the time he turns fifteen years old, and follows Bod through his explorations of the graveyard and his forays into the world outside.
This novel started pretty slowly, but the momentum built up pretty quickly once the first chapter was done. I thought it was very similar to Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone, not only because of its premise (bad guy kills boy's family, boy survives despite being a toddler, bad guy comes back again to try to finish the job, bad guy connected to a very sinister organization that dabbles in BAD magic), but also because of its storytelling style; each chapter introduces a new character, concept or element central to the story's universe, and the Big Battle at the end ties up the loose strings. The Big Battle, in this novel, is much less epic than Deathly Hallows's, but this might be attributed to the fact that this is one novel, and not a seven-book series.
But yes, this was a good novel. I also noticed that it borrowed elements, leitmotifs and other things from various wide-read novels, such as:

the Harry Potter series (obviously)
George Orwell's 1984 ("Here comes a candle to light you to bed/Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!")
The Lord of the Flies (something about islands and pigs)
Freddy Krueger (somewhat; I might be stretching things here)
Anything with vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and witches.

Yes, I would recommend it to anyone in the 11-to-15 years old bracket, but adults can also enjoy this novel by Neil Gaiman.

Blogging Notes from Underground (Part 2: 4)

2010-06-16T23:56:00.002-04:00

On the bright side of things; at least for this part of his novel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was nice enough to number the chapters. This makes for an all-around easier labeling process. Especially when one is reluctantly summarizing it for some blog somewhere.
4

So Frodoy goes to the restaurant, where he gets told that the reservation was for 6, and not for 5 as he was told; he was 26 minutes early. So he just sat there, wretched, and was even thankful when the rest of the guys finally arrived.

Awkward, rude social interaction ensues.

The dialogue was pretty well-written, if a bit on the verbose side - but the entire book is verbose, so it fits wonderfully and even pops out. Then, for a while, the narrator stops paying attention to his dinner companions to mope around, be unhappy and wallow in his self-pity. He also gets quite drunk

Really, he has no social skills, and he's terribly rude. Frodoy's a 24-year-old man, acting like a spoiled brat a third of his age; he's annoying. Also, crazy.

When Darkness Falls - Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory

2010-06-16T12:43:00.001-04:00

In this final installment of The Obsidian Trilogy, things come to an end; and, like most good magical war novels, pretty much EVERYONE dies. Have you read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Yeah, the secondary character death rate is pretty similar here. And (SPOILER ALERT!) there is a similar deus ex machina-like resurrection that happens.
Also, a warning: the hundred or so pages that pertain to the Big Battle at the end are very engrossing; don't start chapter 16 if you don't have an hour or two to read.
Now that my inadequate mini-synopsis is out of the way, let's address the issue of the cover art: I really don't like it. The faces look all wrong; the figure in the foreground is supposed to be Idalia but she doesn't look quite... right. And in the background, next to Ancaladar, I assume we're supposed to see Jermayan (lucky Elf, to be on all three covers!), but his face really doesn't match with the other covers' depiction. I mean, he looks like he's wearing a brass mask here!
Alright, so now that this 496-page novel is over, I've finished the 1956-page trilogy. Crazy, right? But I must confess that as far as limiting the variables goes, I did a pretty crappy job of it; I read the first and the last novel in hardcover format, while the second one was in softcover format (hence its ridiculously high number of pages). So, depending on which format you prefer, this trilogy should be something in between 1400 and 3000 pages long. Hours and hours of entertainment!
As far as choosing favorites goes, I definitely prefer the third installment to the first; the first was a bit too slow-paced, and although the beginning of the third was a bit slow (augh, Elves in all their formality!), the pace definitely picked up and reached a peak during the Final Battle. Which makes sense, since we're talking about the climax of the story right there.
The second installment was also very good, and provided the reader with plenty of dramatic irony; and in terms of the pacing of the story, it was the most evenly fast-paced one. But still, it didn't have the Final Battle, and one character in particular was a bit annoying (augh, Cilarnen! Stop whining already!), so it takes a second place to When Darkness Falls.
All and all, I strongly recommend this highly enjoyable trilogy. This is what Tolkien could have written, if he had decided to focus on his writing skills more than on his map-making.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

2010-06-12T16:29:00.001-04:00

Oh look, there's a movie. But why watch a movie can you can read a book? For the cost:hours of entertainment ratio, movies usually offer a 5:1 ratio, whereas a 241-page book such as this one offers a 0:3 ratio. Public libraries: making books a more cost-effective source of entertainment since forever.
This random blurb having been taken care of, let's take a look at this novel: it's set in a post-apocalyptic world (Yay, dystopia!), and follows a man and his son, who travel, survive as they can, and shuffle on through the ashes of the world.
Who are they? I don't know, they never get a name.
What are they doing? Traveling, following the roads and hiding from everyone. Also, surviving, but barely; due to the ash that's everywhere, nothing grows and the only real food options are non-perishable goods (which will run out eventually) and cannibalism (ditto).
Why did the entire world burn? Who knows.
Where are they, exactly? No idea, but I suspect it might be somewhere close to the east coast of America.
When is this novel set? Again, no idea; but I suspect the world burnage might have gone on 4-6 years prior, since the son was born during that time. But nothing concrete is ever shown or explained.
I haven't read any of Cormac McCarthy's other novels (which includes No Country For Old Men, by the way), but insofar as you can figure out an author's style with only one of their novels, here is what I figured out about this author:

He doesn't like to put apostrophes in words that have a contracted "not". Or rather, he "doesnt" like to do that.
He has never found out about quotation marks. Especially not about their use for dialogue.
He thinks that you should figure everything out on your own. Explaining the basic Who/What/Where/When/Why/How is beneath him.
Clear sections in a novel? Chapters?! NEVER!

Overall, I judge this novel to be bleak, a good read albeit a somewhat repetitive and semi-descriptive one, that might lack in explanation but makes up for it in realism. It was okay; it was heartbreaking at times, but it mostly left me indifferent.

Blogging Notes From Underground (Part 2: 2&3)

2010-06-09T01:15:00.001-04:00

Reading a book where the main character (and narrator) remains unnamed is ANNOYING. So I took the author's first name (Fyodor) and re-arranged its letters so that the main character could finally have a name. That's it.

2
Our narrator, Frodoy, started to feel some remorse for his debauchery (which he apparently indulged in often), but he pushed it away, got used to feel guilty. He's great at getting used to stuff.
He would daydream endlessly - he lost himself in his dreams for three months, and was content. They were pretty grandiose dreams. Eventually they incited him to socialize with people, but he was really awkward with everyone.
Then we're treated to a bit of exposition about how a bloke called Simonov was one of Frodoy's peers in school, and one of the rare people he could stand. Also, Frodoy wasn't 100% sure if Simonov despised him or not.

3
So Frodoy went to Simonov's place and - lo and behold! - two other guys he knew from school were there, and they all ignored him. This depressed our narrator a bit, and he sat down to listen to their conversation.
They were planning a farewell dinner for Zverkov, another guy that went to their school, and that Frodoy hated and was jealous of. In his defense, Zverk sounded like a jerk once we learned about his behaviour in school.
Now, we finally learn about the other guys in the room: there's Ferfichkin, Frodoy's enemy from childhood; and Trudolyubov (I'll call him "Trudy"), a guy who only talked about army and promotions and was indifferent to Frodoy.
So the group have the supper all planned out, and Frodoy decides to invite himself. The other guys don't want him to, everyone knows he and Zverk were never friends, but Frodoy insists and pig-heads his way into inviting himself. Now, he knew he didn't give a damn about Zverk, and he didn't even have enough money for it, but because it was so inappropriate he knew he'd go.
That night, he suffered nightmares about his time in school. He had never fit in, had been isolated, and had always seen his peers as his inferiors. He was actually pretty smart; at the top of his class, he read books far more advanced than anyone else's. But he was also a cruel guy, and had driven his only friend to tears and "nervous convulsions"; he had just used him to get his submission.
The next morning, he was sure that his life would take a radical turn. He was really nervous about the dinner, that evening - he could already imagine Zverk's condescension, Trudy's contempt, Ferfich's sniggers. But still, he was determined to go, and at five sharp he left for the dinner, ignoring his servant whose wages were due but that he could not afford to pay and still go to the dinner.

The Anubis Gates - Tim Powers

2010-06-06T22:47:00.003-04:00

A time travel fantasy that begins in 1984 (the year following the novel's publication, by the way), then mostly takes place in 1810 with a brief stint in the 17th century. If you like Egyptian mythology, time travel fiction, stuff involving magic!, 19th century English literature (poetry mostly) and a read that's a seemingly unstopped stream of action scenes, you'll probably enjoy this novel.
It was probably considered to be a ground-breaking, super imaginative piece of fiction in 1983; after all, the only other piece of time traveling fun that existed at the time is Doctor Who (since 1963, people!), and maybe some science-fiction goodness. Hey, Back to the Future came out in 1985!
Personally, though, as a reader from the freaking 21st century, I found the story pretty obvious and predictable. But then again, I am also a fan of entertainment that mucks about with time (Doctor Who!), so my previous experience with the genre probably gave me an advantage over someone who has no previous experience trying to figure out time paradoxes and the like.
Also, I did not really like the fact that a particular chunk (the whole werewolf-thing-that-switches-bodies-with-his-victims-so-that-when-people-think-they-are-killing-the-werewolf-they-are-actually-killing-the-personhood-of-someone-else-while-the-werewolf-lives-on-in-his-victim's-body) of the plot relied on the mind-body dualism thing being real. Which I found a bit annoying. But I also thought that the author dealt with it in an interesting way; since the whole thing was caused by MAGIC!, you could argue that the persons' consciousnesses were switched, and that the nightmares and fragments of information that their body's new occupant received came from the memories, still intact, that were still stored in their brains. And that the reason why they couldn't recognize and know everyone their new body's occupant used to recognize and know is because the new consciousness doesn't quite know yet how to retrieve memories from their new brain.
So yeah, this was an entertaining read indeed.

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

2010-06-05T00:39:00.001-04:00

The author of the massively successful novel The Kite Runner has done it again: he has weaved a heartbreaking tale of life and sorrow and hope set in Afghanistan, Kabul mostly. This novel, too, spans decades, from the monarchy to 2003, through the Soviet invasion and the civil war (I don't care if they called it a jihad: you had various factions of the populace fighting each other. It's a civil war.), through the rise of the Taliban and the reconstruction of a country ravaged by decades of bombs and guns and death. This time, though, the story is told from two women's perspective; first from Mariam's, then from Laila's, and then from their shared experience.
Honestly, this book makes a powerful case in favor of the UN's involvement in Afghanistan. Especially when it comes to the human rights of, look at that, half the population: this novel isn't shy to point out that as soon as Afghanistan wasn't part of the USSR anymore, the rights of women were dramatically shrunk. And that abusive husbands in particular (yes, there is such a recurring character in the novel, and I guarantee that you will hate him before the end of the first part) had the leeway to do pretty much anything they wanted to their wives, no matter if they wanted to beat them, starve them, rape them, and generally abuse them.
So yes, reading this book was an emotionally turbulent experience; I wanted to cry, I wanted to rage, I wanted to scream, I wanted to read as fast as I could so that I'd know what came next, I wanted to laugh, I felt a considerable outpouring of hope, I wanted to help, I wanted to reassure the characters that everything would be all right...
It was great. Read it.

To Light A Candle - Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory

2010-06-03T23:48:00.003-04:00

The second volume in The Obsidian Trilogy is, on all counts, even better than the first one: the pace picks up considerably, the overlong adjectives-filled scenes with the Demon Queen are fewer and further between (which also helps with the pacing), the characters grow and develop and learn to adapt to their circumstances, and the story becomes the epic tale of war between Good and Really Really Evil that it is supposed to be. All in only 856 pages!
Again, don't worry that you won't be able to read it all in one setting; there's still some recaps sprinkled through the novel, but quite a few less than in the first installment of the trilogy.
Now, a few more important characters are (finally!) introduced to the reader during this novel:

Ancaladar the black dragon (the scaly thing with wings on the cover). A cool dude, from the dragon species, who shirked his obligation during the last Great War against the Demons - feeling guilty about this, he finally accepted to Bond with a mortal, which gave said mortal magic powers that would otherwise always have eluded him. Ok, he Bonded with Jermayan the elf; yes, that elf's lucky, he's on two covers!
Cilarnen the High Mage (not on the cover). Well, technically he's only an Entered Apprentice in the hierarchy of the High Mages, but anyways, he tries to start a rebellion against the Mage Council of Armetalieh, and since the Golden City is a totalitarian state, guess what happens? The plot thickens!

Apart from that, the same protagonists and antagonists come back. And for those curious about such things, Vestakia's the girl on the cover; she appears to be a Demon, but she really isn't, and read the book to get their explanation of what happened for her to look as she does.
My primary complaint about it, though, is that there's no map to show how the ocean, Armetalieh, the Elven Lands and such relate geographically to each other - and the authors are a bit inconsistent. At one point, Armetalieh is east of the Elven Lands, and then a few chapters later it's west of the Elves. It's a bit minor, but being able to visualize everyone's travels would be nice.

Anyways, this novel is just as enjoyable as its prequel, if not more, and I would definitely recommend it to everyone who liked Lord of The Rings (some plot elements are a bit reminiscent of Tolkien's mythology. Hardcore LoTR fans will see it). Be warned, though; you will likely get a craving for tea. It's discussed at length.

Or Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

2010-06-02T23:36:00.002-04:00

Companionship, loneliness; malice, ignorance; strength, helplessness; a tale of coping and heartbreak, where the narrator never enters the characters' minds but still makes their emotions your own.
Honestly, if I weren't reading this novel on the bus, I would have cried at the end. It was powerful.

Blogging Notes From Underground (Part 2: 1)

2010-05-30T11:22:00.002-04:00

Now that Part One is over, on to Part Two: a plot appears!
Narrator uses Misanthropy: it's not very effective...
Enemy plot uses Exposition!

Part 2: A Story of the Falling Sleet
1
The narrator - I'll call him "Frodoy" from now on, ok? Anyways, Frodoy was a real antisocial loner when he was 24 years old; and he was also very egocentric. He thought he was the only person paranoid about what other people thought of him, and if that word had existed in the 1840s, he would have called his coworkers "sheeple" (eurgh, that word is terrible. I'll never use it ever again, I promise!).
He was listless, restless, and inclined to what he called "debauchery", even though he never tells the reader what he specifically means by that. In any case, at one point he wanted to take part in a brawl, but didn't not because he was afraid of pain, but because he was afraid that nobody would understand why he wanted to fight, and that they'd laugh at him. He was afraid of humiliation.
So he started stalking this officer, who he would have fought with but hadn't, and Frodoy was really obsessed with him for several years. He even wrote a satire, a caricature of this policeman, and sent it to get published, but it never was. Then, he wrote the officer a letter asking him to either apologize to him for something that didn't happen 2 years before, or to agree to a duel with the narrator - but Frodoy never sent this letter.
Now, Frodoy often saw the officer when he'd take a walk on the Nevsky Prospect; they would both get out of the way of more "important" people when they'd walk there, but the narrator usually moved out of the officer's way. Frodoy saw this as an act of subservience, a symbol of the officer's victory, and hated himself for it. So he had an idea: what if he didn't step aside? He obsessed about it, went often to the Nevsky Prospect to visualize it and psych himself up. He also planned it: he would be well-dressed to make a better impression on by-standers, and even borrowed money to get his outfit (this was a source of anxiety and insomnia).
Frodoy chickened out a few times, decided to give up on his quest and went for a walk on the Nevsky Prospect for the last time. Lo and behold: the officer was there! And Frody stood his ground: their shoulders collided! He had done it!

And yes, this counts as a plot point for this novel.

The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell

2010-05-29T17:12:00.002-04:00

"How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference". This book explores what causes epidemics - may they be of syphilis, or fashion epidemics, or crime epidemics, or what causes young people to start smoking, or epidemics of ideas that make people take action (such as Paul Revere's "The British are coming!").
It's non-fiction, and according to the Dewey decimal system it's a book on social science, more specifically social interaction; and it was very well-written. Which shouldn't be a surprise, since Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker - or at least he was in 2000.
Essentially, this book talks about how concentrating resources on key people, key messages (and mediums for these messages), and key contexts can cause dramatic changes in the social landscape, and man was it interesting. It is also somewhat related to this article that I recently read (woooh, linking! Go read that!), and it raises interesting questions.
A particularly good point that stuck with me from The Tipping Point was about cigarette use and drug experimentation: teens who experiment with drugs won't be deterred by public health statements, and will actually find motivation to rebel against the authority figures in their lives by going counter to their instructions (by smoking, for example). Also, a very negligible percentage of people who have experimented with drugs will actually become addicted (ex: only 0.9% of people who have ever tried cocaine are regular users), so "what we should be doing instead of fighting experimentation is making sure that experimentation doesn't have serious consequences." Argument that could be used to support the legalization of drugs, anyone?
So yeah. This was a really interesting read; check it out!

Blogging Notes From Underground (Part 1: 8-11)

2010-05-28T14:49:00.001-04:00

To clarify for the people who are mildly interested about such things, I am reading a version of the book with this blue cover on the left. Which looks good and interesting, but not as much as this awesome-looking red cover on the right. In my opinion, the cover art is as much a part of the reading experience as the prose itself, and I just don't understand the people who don't like the new red covers (other Penguin classics have also been re-covered) - as someone who fits the "young consumer" demographic, I do find that they look very intriguing and "maybe I could buy it?"-worthy.
Enough rant, on to existentialism!

8
First, the narrator interrupts himself (rudely) in his own writing. Then, he goes no the talk about how reason is good for the intellect, while volition ("making up your mind") will include both a person's reason and their speculations.
Then, the word "rubbishy" is used!
A person's capacity for living goes beyond their reason, which is only their conscious mind; a person's will also includes their unconscious mind. The narrator then defines "man" as "a creature that has two legs and no sense of gratitude".
Finally, since people HATE the idea of being predictable according to known "laws of nature", they will also willfully do irrational, harmful things, just to convince themselves that they cannot be predicted.

9
Narrator: "I'm joking, and terrible at it!" Can't say I disagree.
Man loves to build, and roads are a particular favorite, and mankind's propensity to destruction and chaos stems from the fear of ever attaining the end of their road, of finishing what they've begun. The process is, to man, more important that the final product; this is parallel to our attitude about life and death.
What is good for man? Not just what is normal and positive; suffering is as important as prosperity. Smashing things can be pleasant. "Consciousness is infinitely greater than [...] two and two make four."

10
Some talk about the "Palace of Crystal", an idealization that is eternally perfect and inviolable. The narrator rejects it for these very reasons. He then states that to live is to want - for food when you're hungry, for example.
After skipping over a bit about desire, we get to the point where the narrator expresses his certainty that "underground people" like him, able to keep silent for 40 years, should be kept in check lest they be loosed upon the world, whence they will talk and talk and talk. What does he mean by "underground people"? People who bury themselves under their facade of respectability and clam, people who, instead of expressing themselves, opt for a more "normal" act?

11
Conscious inertia is the best! And even though he is envious of them, the narrator would never want to be a normal man. He then states that he doesn't believe a word that he's written down so far (I've just read 42 pages of lies?!), and he wants to say something, but lacks the resolution to express it. The narrator then asks himself why he writes as though he had an audience, since he has no desire to get his manuscript published.
He muses on the fact that everyone lies to themselves, and that the more respectable a man is, the more things about himself he is afraid of becoming aware of - for that reason, truthful autobiographies are an impossibility.
To conclude this part, the narrator says he writes because there's something about written words that make the concepts they express more awe-inspiring than remembered words alone. Also, writing could be good therapy for him. Plus, he's dreadfully bored and it's something to do.

The Carbon Diaries 2015 - Saci Lloyd

2010-05-26T13:14:00.002-04:00

Don't mind the weird and spoiler-riffic cover; it's a book that's well worth the read. Here's why:

The year is 2015; the place, London. The UK is the first (and so far only) country to implement carbon rationing, a system that aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 60% by giving its citizens a limited amount of "carbon points" that will "pay" for everything, from their heating to their electricity to what food they buy. It's the kind of radical action that's needed - because countries haven't really done anything about global warming/climate change/carbon consumerism, but this does cramp everyone's style. Including Laura Brown's, a punk rock 16-year-old who plays bass for her band, whose family is pretty much breaking apart, and that pretty much gives voice to the frustration, angst, wit and sassiness of her generation. (I like her!)

This book is her diary for the year, and through it we learn about the various disasters that she must endure through: the winter cold with limited heating allowed, the drama surrounding the boy she likes who also happens to live next door, the droughts, her father's unemployment and subsequent depression, her repeated exam flunkage, the drama and excitement surrounding her band, and of course the HUGE disaster that happens in December and that wipes out London and Londoners alike.

I really enjoyed this book and was (figuratively) glued to its 320 pages; the British slang was a bit weird at first, but I quickly figured out what the terms meant - and eventually saw that a glossary was provided at the end of the book. Nice. Also, the end of the book features a little explanation about the British school system (useful for non-Brits like myself), as well as a Celsius-to-Fahrenheit temperature conversion thing (useful for non-Celsius-using people), a glossary of "ecoterms" (useful for people who don't know that much about environmental jargon), and a bunch of URLs to sites for people who "Want to learn more about living green". Woooh, it's not a bibliography but close enough!

So yeah, this is a really enjoyable book, that deals with subjects such as environmentalism, and various social issues such as have/have not tensions, feminism, activism, governmental hypocrisy, the whole mafia/black market phenomenon, how people cope, how cults are started, youth rebellion and others. And it wasn't preachy about it.

Read it!

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - That Wii Game

2010-05-24T22:05:00.000-04:00

This game took me about 48 hours of game time to beat. And I haven't completed most of the side-quests (such as the "find glowing bugs!" and "destroy ghosts!" and "find all the heart pieces!" things) - I have mostly stuck to the story, and played to beat the Boss.
And man, is the Boss unkillable. You have to beat him four times before he finally decides to die; and that's after you've collected all three IMPORTANT ITEMS, and then had them stolen and had to collect three more IMPORTANT ITEMS. All of which were protected by other bosses - and that was only after you had collected all seventy+ PLOT DEVICE THINGYS, some of which were protected by pretty tough sub-bosses.
Plus, there were quite a few puzzling puzzles to puzzle over.
But still, I found this game very enjoyable, and would recommend it to anyone who can handle the enemies popping out of nowhere, the sometimes challenging swordfights (the ridiculously armored and be-weaponed guy was gooooood), the puzzles, the frustration of it all, and the weird character design for most NPCs.
Seriously, the kids' faces will crack you up or creep you out. Or both.

A Mankind Witch - Dave Freer

2010-05-23T17:14:00.001-04:00

It seems to be missing from this picture of the cover, but my copy had "A feast for sword and sorcery fans - Publishers Weekly" right where the arrow's pointing, and considering this novel's 499 pages long, I think it doesn't quite qualify as a feast, but rather a big lunch. With lots of fibre.
Since we're marginally on the subject of the cover, let me say that it has NOTHING to do with the story. At all. Who's that girl? Who knows. And that archer? I don't think he's in the story. The wolf makes no sense, and the ghoulish face could possibly have something to do with the antagonists, but I don't think it's all that likely. The only relevant element is the snow. And maybe the rocks?
Despite the cover art's irrelevance, I still managed to enjoy this book. It drew many elements from Norse mythology (woooot, mythology!), and it features Manfred and Erik, two characters who appeared in the previous Shadow of the Lion, which was co-written by Freer, Flint and Lackey. Also, a new character was introduced: Cair, a corsair who got shipwrecked off the coast of Norway, was enslaved, and is an ardent skeptic and a skilled chemist. (Wooot, skepticism! Science!)
I found that the main (female) protagonist, Signy, wasn't a very interesting character, and the whole "she's a princess and she has an EVIL half-brother and an EVEN MORE EVIL stepmother" to be pretty clichéd and predictable. Oh well.
But overall, I still found this novel to be okay. Not super-duper enjoyable, not boring, not really mediocre; just okay.

Blogging Notes From Underground (Part 1: 4-7)

2010-05-22T23:10:00.001-04:00

This is a pretty crappy analysis, but I don't want to think about this novel further than the first (or maybe sometimes the second) degree.

Part 1. The Underground (continued)
4
The groans (and the complaints?) that people do when they have a toothache is an expression of their pleasure, or else they wouldn't bother groaning about it. It's an expression of the pointlessness of a pain that nobody has inflicted on them, and of the realization that they are at the mercy of their teeth. They know the groans are useless and only serve to irritate everybody else solely for the groaner's pleasure.
(This reminds me of the people that ask for me to either (1) fornicate with their lives or (2) shove a red-hot poker up their life's arse, depending on which meaning of "fuck" you're working with)

5
So now the narrator talks about how, out of boredom, he would indulge in his fancy for the dramatic and work himself up into offense/remorse/rage, just because he was bored of the tedium of his life.
So people of action usually attack secondary causes when they take their revenge; they attack a symptom, and not its cause. Meanwhile, thinkers such as the narrator want to affect the true root of their problems, but every cause has itself a cause, and that one another, ad infinitum; since the primary cause can't be found, the thinking man can only seek revenge out of resentment, and not justice. And so, in all justice, affronts should be let go - to be, like a toothache, a pain without tangible cause.

6
Essentially, people who are defined by one of their negative traits have the boon of being identifiable.

7
Even if being virtuous is in one's self-interest, it can't be enough to guarantee that they WILL be virtuous; after all, there are countless people acting AGAINST their own best interests to follow their convictions. Also, self-interest is almost impossible to define, much less measure and give weight and compare in a rational manner.
Logically, civilization should make people milder, less bloodthirsty, and less addicted to warfare; but in reality, the civilized world is bloodier than ever. "Before, he saw justice in bloodshed and massacred, if he had to, with a quiet conscience; now, although we consider bloodshed an abomination, we engage in it more than ever."
To conclude, the idea that human behavior can someday be perfectly predicted through a complete understanding of the "laws of nature" is deemed to be bullshit, since the narrator predicts that out of the boredom of knowing all the problems that are predicted to happen, human ingenuity will get productive and start popping out new complications to life. How nice.

Blogging Notes From Underground (Part 1: 1-3)

2010-05-20T20:16:00.002-04:00

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Whose name I keep reading (thanks selective dyslexia!) into "Dostoyvesky".
Anyways, so far I have just started to read Notes From Underground, and MAN am I confused. I've even started taking notes as I read, which is pretty crazy when you consider that I'm only reading it "for fun". Oh well, I want to sort-of understand what's going on; and I'm sure I'm not alone in this confusion, so here is the spoiler-riffic (if such a thing can be said about an existentialist book) and what-the-heck-is-going-on first post in this miniseries of confusion.

Part 1. The Underground.
1
So the narrator is a 40-year-old sick man, who refuses treatment for whatever his condition is out of pigheadedness. So far so good: he talks about what he used to do with his life. He was a civil servant, and was rude to people on purpose, for no reason really, and he did this indifferently, without a real passion for anger.
He doesn't like the idea of anyone living over forty years old.
Also, he lives in St Petersburg, even though it is bad for his health and he can only live shabbily there (thanks to the 6000 rubles he inherited, which prompted him to leave the civil service. Bear in mind, this was during the late 19th century; but 6000 rubles does NOT sound like a lot of money. At all.). He feels that leaving the city won't make a difference in any way.

2
To think too much is a disease, and men of action are not men of intellectual activity. Men of education, meanwhile, have four times their level of consciousness, and to think too much is a disease (ok, we got it): the more the narrator was aware of what was right, the more he did the opposite. This he was ashamed of, but he'd take pleasure from his own "degradation" and his knowledge of the fact that even if he could, he would not want to change. Consolation is knowing how much of a scoundrel you are, and you can find pleasure in despair.
The narrator always thought of himself as cleverer than everyone else, and has felt quite ashamed of it. He's also against the whole "forgive and forget" attitude, because you can't forgive the laws of nature (they don't care), and you can't forget an affront.

3
This begins with bemusement about people who manage to stand up for themselves, for their rights. There are two kinds of people in the world: men of action, who do things and go straight for their goals and STOP when there's a "wall"; and men of thought, who think about stuff, don't do anything and see "walls" as challenges. Perhaps everyone ought to be stupid, and be doers instead of thinkers?
Doers, when slighted, will immediately and passionately seek revenge; thinkers, in the same situation, will be filled with fury but won't do anything, and their outrage at this affront will stay with them and fester. Doers consider their revenge to be justice, while thinkers can see that there is no justice in their seeking revenge. Perhaps the pleasure derived from shame begins with a desire for revenge that comes from the festering resentment of the thinking man who never takes action to ease his desire for revenge?
There is no point in arguing against facts of nature, such as "that you are descended from an ape" (DarWIN!), and "twice two is mathematics; twice two is four".

Burning Water - Mercedes Lackey

2010-05-19T13:34:00.005-04:00

A sexy witch who writes romances and a police detective who sees more than mortal man team up to battle an ancient Aztec god!

I lifted this from the back cover of this book, and it sums it up pretty nicely. The "sexy witch" is Diana Tregarde (the girl on the cover with the floating see-though Van der Graaff generator), a really kick-ass character who can not only magically pwn pretty much anyone, but is also a karate black belt and all-around awesome.
This 330-pages novel is really good, not only because of the general kickassery that takes place, but also because there's a bibliography at the back, for people who want to learn more about Aztec civilization and mythology; of course, it's not 10 pages long as a Michael Chricton bibliography would be (I kid you not: State of Fear had a longer bibliography than some reference manuals.), but it seems pretty comprehensive. Yay for authors doing research to write awesome novels!
Also, this novel raised some ethical issues regarding the murders that take place: mostly for the first ones, the murder victims were, to be honest, some pretty horrible people - I was especially pissed off at the jerkface who not only refused to help his wife raise his own spawn because it was "woman's work. He hadn't married her just so he could become a babysitter," but also bullied his employees at work and took all the credit for their work. I really did NOT like him; but did that mean that he deserved the gruesome death that he got? Surely not. Right?
Now, this novel was written and set in the late eighties, and predictably enough I got a bit of a laugh from some blasts from the past, such as:

When sushi is treated as this strange, exotic food thing. (What's up with being awed by sushi in the 80's? Was it just introduced to the US or something?)
The "tofu is weeeeeeeeird" attitude. (Really? I consider it a basic foodstuff, on the same level as peanut butter or chicken.)
Diskettes!
Modems; the newest computer invention.
A quarter = a phone call, using a public phone. In a booth.

So yes, this novel was really good. And made me want to learn more about Aztec, Mayan, Incan and Toltec civilizations (I want to see the pyramids! And not those in Egypt!).

The Emperor's Babe - Bernardine Evaristo

2010-05-18T12:36:00.001-04:00

I had previously read Blonde Roots, by the same author, and this novel is just as interesting, enjoyable and heartbreaking.
The Emperor's Babe is the story of Zuleika; she's the daughter of Sudanese immigrants who have moved to Londinium (now called London) years prior to the beginning of the story. It all begins in the early third century when Zuleika, at 11, is married to Felix, a fat Roman merchant three times her age. This is actually not that surprising, since the legal age of marriage for Roman citizen-status girls was twelve years old, but I still think it's really gross that a child be married to a 33 year-old rich Roman (which was considered really old at that time), but hey, that's one of the messed-up things that happened in those times.
Anyways, she is obviously very unhappy in her marriage - I mean, for one thing it was a transaction between her father and Felix, and for another it was sexually messed up. Seriously, she was ELEVEN YEARS OLD, and as she said at one point in the novel, she had "discovered sex before desire". :(
So, unhappy and bored in her passionless marriage, she met a very sexy man who also thought she was very sexy; his name was Septimius Severus. Yep, that Roman emperor who essentially walked all over the Empire (to deal with usurpers and the Scots and the Parthians and such), and founded the Severan dynasty. So, at eighteen, in AD 211, Zuleika was the emperor's mistress for a summer - and as everyone who has studied Roman history knows, Septimius Severus died in Britain during his campaign for Roman expansion into Scotland. So she also had to deal with this heartbreak.
Apart from the historical accuracy (most of the time) that makes this novel really interesting, the characters were also pretty well done and interesting; among others, I really liked the fact that one of Zuleika's best friends, Venus, was actually a trans woman, and that the complicated relationship between slaves and their masters was part of the story. Because seriously, in the Roman times everyone had slaves, and rich people (like Zuleika's husband) were guaranteed to have a ton of them.
Furthermore, another thing that made this novel interesting was the way in which it is presented: at first glance, I thought it was a big poem (and, I'll admit, I was kind of disappointed), but it reads exactly like a regular novel with full paragraphs. To be cynical, I'd say that it was formatted in verse so that it could fill 250 pages - but I find that this format really fit the story well, and permitted it to flow quickly.
Finally, I just really enjoyed the mix of historical accuracy and modern references - for example, everyone wore what they would wear in those times (women wore chitons, men wore togas, etc), but they'd have been designed by famous Romans with names like Valentino, Armani and Gucci. Also, there was a mention of the Emperor's concubine, called Camilla, who was mocked as being no "Helen of Troy", and resembling rather the "Horse of Troy" - British royal family scandals, anyone?
Ok, I'll stop now: I really really really liked this novel. It's set in the Roman Empire (woooot, Roman civilization!), it features characters not usually associated with Great Events in History (woooot, women! Of colour! Or trans!), and it really makes you feel the heartbreak the characters go through (woooot, relating to the characters! Comedy that morphs into drama! Emotion!).

World War Z - Max Brooks

2010-05-16T10:53:00.001-04:00

He's the author of The Zombie Survival Guide, so you know Max Brooks knows what he's talking about when it comes to zombies. In this 342-page novel, he tells the story of the Zombie War: its initial warning signs, the general denial and blame game that followed, the Great Panic when everyone realized what was happening, the "Turn of the Tide" where humanity started to get organized and strike back against the undead menace, tales from the USA and around the world (and above it), the Total War, and some of what happened afterwards. All of this was told from the perspective of random people all over the world, who had survived the zombie war and, twelve years later, had agreed to conduct an interview to tell of their experiences. Most narrators only appear once, except for a few who told a bit about what happened afterwards.
It is a very good, thought-provoking, paranoia-inducing dystopian novel. It makes you wonder what you could do in the narrators' situation; what would you be willing or able to do? Furthermore, I very much appreciated the fact that not all the narrators were able-bodied, young, sane, American, ethical or even likable.
I recommend this novel if you like(d):

Anything with zombies
Post-apocalyptic tales
War stories
Novels that can freak you out and make you paranoid

All I can say, really, is that I enjoyed it.

The Outstretched Shadow - Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory

2010-05-12T16:08:00.002-04:00

This book is awesome, entertaining, enjoyable and something that, if I could, I would make everyone read because it is. that. good. But I do realize that its 604 pages thick brick-ness is huge, so I can understand if you're intimidated. But really, there's no need to be; it's a good book to not read through all at once, since there is a fair bit of repetition while the characters think and re-think and re-consider and re-phrase everything that happened. But still, it's great!
The story begins in the totalitarian city-state of Armethalieh, which is also called the Golden City. This is the centre of human civilization, a mighty "city of bells" that has this name because of its numerous bell-towers that ring in an intricate pattern to tell the time. This works thanks to the High Magic, a tool of the Mages who rule the city.
Now, this is a totalitarian state because not only is the system ruled exclusively by a single class of people (the Mages, who are all male because of the institutionalized sexism of the place), but also because censorship is rampant: books, musical instruments, and even every single kind of spice or ribbon design (for ladies' adornment) must be approved by the ruling Mage Council. Their logic is thus: change is forbidden, because the minutest change can breed discontent, and discontent leads people to want to leave the city. Which is a BAD THING that cannot possibly be allowed! (Read the novel for a better explanation)
Soon enough, though, things happen and the main character leaves the city - and eventually reaches the Elven Lands. But I don't want to give everything away (seriously, read this novel!), so let's leave it at that.

As its first installment, this novel serves to introduce most of the major protagonists of The Obsidian Trilogy:

Kellen, the main character and the guy with the wavy blond hair on the cover (he's supposed to have curly brown hair, and he's 17 - but I guess the cover artist can be forgiven)
Idalia, his older sister; she's a very skilled Wildmage, and a pretty strong character (I like her, even though she isn't on the cover)
Shalkan, the sarcastic unicorn (on the cover)
Jermayan, the Elven Knight (on the cover, on the horse; notice his pointy ears!)
Vestakia. She's not on the cover and is only introduced near the end of the novel, so I'll leave it at that.

There's also a bunch of antagonists:

Arch-Mage Lycaelon, Kellen's and Idalia's power-tripping, corrupt, bigoted father who practically rules the human city of Armethalieh
Undermage Anigrel, during the course of the novel he grows from Kellen's tutor to something far more sinister
Queen Savilla, Queen of the Endarkened (aka "Demons"). Very very evil.
Prince Zyperis, Savilla's son and lover. Yeah, the Endarkened are messed up.

This is a very, very good book, from a very very good trilogy, and I highly recommend it to anyone who liked

Any other Mercedes Lackey novel (she's great!)
The Lord of the Rings
Eragon (this is a WAY better written series)
Any book that involves elves
Any other fantasy novel

Seriously. I don't care if you have to take two months and a bunch of book renewals (if you took it from a library), read this book.

The Breakfast Club - That movie

2010-05-07T21:47:00.003-04:00

Five WASP-y kids are stuck in detention all day, on a Saturday. They are the embodiments of the high school stereotypes that would plague all later depictions of secondary school education: the nerd, the jock, the troublemaker, the popular girl (that the troublemaker's attracted to), and the silent girl that wears black and is pretty weird (to be replaced by the emo in post-2000 high school stereotypes).
Before I saw the movie I expected it to be an overrated disappointment - but I was pleasantly surprised. Despite the appearance that their high school targets twenty-year-olds (seriously, that guy has grey in his hair!), the over-sadistic principal and the cheezy ending, I actually really enjoyed this movie.
Among my favorite moments are:

The part where sushi is treated like this super weird gross-sounding never-before-heard-of foreign food
The exact second you realize all the characters' hair is parted in a straight line (it looks so weird!)
Smoking up in the library

The first 2 are attributable to the fact that this movie is straight from the eighties, and the last one... was just odd. Still, it made for a pretty entertaining movie.

Pygmy - Chuck Palahniuk

2010-05-05T22:41:00.001-04:00

This book features: rape (anal), graphic violence, scenes of psychological torture and brainwashing, as well as an almost continuous hate-spew against American culture, as told from the perspective of a supposedly thirteen-year-old agent from a totalitarian state. He, agent number 67, along with several other agents of the same supposed age are posing as exchange students in the same American community, all the while planning an "unspecified act of massive terrorism" (as read on the inside book cover).
Not suitable for younger readers; reader discretion is advised.
This book is divided into 36 chapters, presented as dispatches from agent number 67. Now, let me be honest: I gave up at chapter 14. This book was just too annoying.
Chuck Palahniuk can be a compelling author, as anyone who's read his memorable short story Guts can confirm: he can write so that you are pulled into the story, where you can't put down the book despite the graphic grossness of it - but really, you don't want to stop reading, because you want to know what happens next, and the narrator's style and tempo beautifully incite you to keep reading until the end.
However, in Pygmy, instead of making the story readable, he decided to really make it sound as though a spy (or terrorist, what the hell) with a somewhat shaky yet precise grasp of the English language narrated the story. During the first few "dispatches" this made for an interesting narrative device, but it quickly lost its appeal; essentially, you have to mentally translate the text, written in definitions-only English, into somewhat-comprehensible English. Here's a quick example of this novel's style, lifted from page 47:

Force compelled to sing how yearning for location on top arched spectrum of light wavelengths created by precipitate. Exact song expressed Judy Garland, woeful martyr, slaughtered pawn of capitalist entertainment machine combined pharmaceutical complex.

Translation: "We had to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". It's the same song that Judy Garland, the actress, sang - before she died of drug overdose."You can still understand what the narrator's saying, but it gets mighty annoying after more than ten pages, and there's 240 pages' worth of it to slug through.
Apart from the sheer annoyance of it, this style also has the side-effect of making all the scenes of violence and turmoil seem grotesque and their impact is lessened on the reader.
Can you really blame me for giving up?

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

2010-05-03T19:27:00.002-04:00

Science fiction! Space! Aliens! War! Dystopia!
This novel won a Nebula award and a Hugo award, which are pretty BIG THINGS in the world of science fiction literature. For once, I agree with the bestowment of awards; this was a very good, heart-wrenching novel. I was (figuratively) glued to this book's 226 pages.
It follows the life of this boy, Ender, who is a Third, a third-born child. Now, this takes place in (where else?) a dystopian future, where overpopulation has made it necessary to limit the number of children allowed; two children per pair of parents is the limit. Ender, however, was allowed to be conceived because Earth needs a military genius, and through unexplained genetic modification two people who were almost good enough were made: Ender's older brother, Peter (too sadistic), and his older sister, Valentine (not violent enough).
When he is six years old, Ender is taken to the Battle School, where gifted children are essentially taught and conditioned to be the soldiers Earth needs. There, he proves to be a tactical genius, and after five years of training and growth, he commands Earth's starship force and destroys the alien menace. However, he did so without knowing he was commanding actual spaceships against the actual alien enemy; he was manipulated to believe it was a big simulation, a big game.
Now that almost all the spoilers have been revealed (not gonna apologize), let's look at a few things that bothered me about his novel, shall we?
First, there were very few girls at the Battle School, because "centuries of evolution" were "working against them" (p.17). Part of it is true; we do have centuries of social conditioning that have instilled the idea that girls are "mild" and "soft" and "meek" - but evolution itself has nothing to do with it. In fact, how do you think girls can be so cruel, psychological-, emotional- and social-bullies, especially when they have a little posse to support them? It's because girls are even more severely punished than boys when they resort to physical violence, aggressiveness needs an outlet, and psychological and emotional bullying are much more "acceptable" ways in which girls can be total assholes.
Second, all the kids at the Battle Academy did not sound like children; those were adults, or at least teenagers speaking, but the characters were all under twelve years old. But I guess this was the point; these children, training to be soldiers since they were six years old, could not possibly have had any childhood... Which is what made this novel so heartbreaking.

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

2010-04-30T19:57:00.002-04:00

Everyone knows its first rule. But I will talk about Fight Club (how rebellious and suicidal of me!). This 218-page novel (if you count the afterword; it's only 208 pages if you don't) with a very annoyingly striped cover is full of quotable lines. Here are 21 such quotes, lifted from the first 21 chapters:

With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the fun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.
This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.
A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second. Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That's how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it.
She isn't dying. Okay in that brainy brain-food philosophical way, we're all dying, but Marla isn't dying the way Chloe was dying.
Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
You can swallow about a pint of blood before you're sick.
I am Joe's Clenching bowels.
HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.
Think about the monkeys shot into space.
The perfume, all those dead whales in the cuts in her hands, it stings.
the club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the center of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else. You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.
My boss stands too close to my desk with his little smile, his lips together and stretched thin, his crotch at my elbow.
On the sticky paper next to my bare ass was a Polaroid picture of my foot that no one wanted.
I told the detective that it was the refrigerator that blew up the condo.
I punch myself, again.
Arson meets on Monday. Assault on Tuesday. Mischief meets on Wednesday. And Misinformation meets on Thursday. Organized Chaos. The Bureaucracy of Anarchy. You figure it out.
"Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing."
We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we'll haul back to Paper Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked out.
I have your license. I know who you are. I know where you live. I'm keeping your license, and I'm going to check on you
I stick my finger through the hole in my cheek and wiggle the finger around.

I haven't included quote from chapters 22-30 because they are spoiler-riffic.

Frankly, I don't know what I think about this book. The first two-thirds of the story weren't that great, but then came a TWIST and I couldn't stop reading until the end. And that's pretty much the only thing that made this book memorable; apart from the whole soap-from-fat-from-liposuctions thing.

Generation A - Douglas Coupland

2010-04-29T13:29:00.024-04:00

"Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago."

So said Kurt Vonnegut during the Syracuse University commencement address of 1994. I read it after the title page, and before the story proper began in Douglas Coupland's latest bit of dystopian fiction, Generation A.

Now, this 297-page novel isn't set in a future that far away; most of the technology and slang showcased already exist. As for it being set in a dystopian future, the signs aren't all up in your face as you start the novel; they're just mentioned as a matter of fact at various points in the book, and treated as perfectly normal by the characters. After all, they live in this world, they've had years to get used to everything. Amongst other things, they treat it as normal that:

Bees are believed to be extinct (before I read the quote above, I thought that maybe the "A" in the title had to do with "abeilles", bees, but I guess not)
Most insects have also disappeared
As a result, there are no flowers anywhere except where people hand-pollinate them
Fruits are also ridiculously expensive, and the black market thrives
There's basically no petrol left; air travel is only for the very rich now
There's this new "chronosuppressant" drug called Solon that shifts people's perception of time and of the future; as a result, people can live without any sense of loneliness even if they are in total social isolation, anxiety about the future can disappear, and time can seem to pass much faster.
This drug is 100% addictive
This drug is also actually composed of the spliceosomic protein snRNP-171, which removes introns from pre-mRNA strands so that this mRNA strand codes for a neuroprotein that has a chronosuppressant effect. (You're allowed to say "whaaaaat?")

Now that we've got the dystopian elements in play, let me quickly introduce the quirky characters Coupland has come up with this time:

Harj, from Sri Lanka; he's lost his entire family in the 2006 tsunami, and he talks and thinks like a sales brochure. Which makes sense considering what he's done with his life since 2007.
Zack, from Iowa; he's a corn farmer and son of a meth chemist, who is introduced to the reader when he rants about how "Cornfields are the scariest things on the entire fucking face of the planet." He sounds a lot like T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics, at times, but with more swearing.
Sam(antha) from New Zealand, who isn't a very memorable character.
Julien from France (more specifically Paris, 12e arrondissement), another somewhat generic character (by Coupland standards)
Diana, the Baptist dental hygienist from North Bay (Canada), who has Tourette's syndrome as well as a pretty graphically violent imagination.

These five characters were the center of a media/scientific/government/international frenzy when they were all stung by bees. Yes, bees came out of extinction to sting them. Weird stuff ensues, and pharmaceutical companies become shadier and shadier.

This novel was pretty entertaining, not the least because it's slightly unhinged, like the best of Douglas Coupland's novels. It wasn't depressing like The Gum Thief, it wasn't as quirky as jPod, and I actually like it better than Generation X (because let's face it, most first novels aren't that great, especially if the author writes more books).

I also particularly enjoyed the research that went into making Solon into a credible-sounding drug; spliceosomes are made of snRNP (small nucleic ribonucleoproteins), and they do remove introns from pre-mRNA (pre-messenger ribonucleic acid) segments, and release the introns to be quickly broken down by nucleases. And mRNA is the template that's followed to create proteins. But proteins take a lot of energy to make, and when things are done to neurons neurotransmitters are usually involved instead of proteins. Now, neurotransmitters can be amino acids (which are the building-blocks of proteins), but I am not sure that proteins - big, complicated proteins which would be coded by a mRNA strand that needed the removal of specific introns - would be effective neurotransmitters, even assuming that "chronosuppression" is possible. I'm not a neuroscientist (yet), though, so don't take my word for it.

Oh well, it's a dystopian novel, not a how-to manual!

Tomorrow, When The War Began - John Marsden

2010-04-28T16:53:00.006-04:00

Before I read this book, I had no idea that it would be turned into a movie - probably because the movie is only going to be released in Australia and New Zealand (as far as I know). Which is still great; the book would make a very entertaining movie.

Seven teens from a (fake) rural community in Australia go camping, and while they're away from civilization an army invades Australia, starting with their town because of its strategic location. When they do get back to civilization, it is to find their homes abandoned, their pets dying or dead, and the streets of the city are teeming with rather trigger-happy soldiers. Drama, explosions, soul-searching and character growth ensues.

This was a very enjoyable book not only for the action-packed scenes (which are bound to be very entertaining in the movie), but also because of the growth and shift in group dynamics the characters go through. It wasn't a character-driven story at all, though (come on, there's a war going on! This is great action-story time!), which was a welcome change from the other stuff I've been reading lately.

I'm not sure if I want to read the rest of the series, though; after such a good start, I'm afraid it will all go a bit downhill. But still, maybe John Marsden has written a good follow-up to this novel? In any case, I recommend this novel; it's not too long, it's not too short, it's entertaining and I liked it.

The Origin of Species - Nino Ricci

2010-04-26T20:15:00.007-04:00

There's a booby on the cover!

But really, that's not what first prompted me to read it; apparently, this 472-page thick brick by Nino Ricci won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. It sounded promising. Please do notice the past tense.
This book took me more than a month to read - granted, I was reading other things at the same time, but still. Its thick, murky prose is not exactly "light" reading, and you should avoid this brick at all costs if you do not want to read about:

- A thirty-something guy

- An anglo, who lives and works and studies in Montreal during the 80's (just after the Chernobyl meltdown)

- Who has a son in Sweden (but only heard about it for the first time when said son turned five)

- Who should stop angsting about his Ph.D thesis and start writing it already

- Who is spineless

- Who is just about one of the worst "romantic interests" anyone could ever have (boyfriend rape, anyone?)

All this is delivered in rambling, unending paragraphs. Really, the most interesting part of this character-driven novel are the internal conversations the main character has with an imaginary interviewer; they highlight the self-centeredness and the desire for attention that is, apparently, pretty common to most of the human race.

Apart from that, I found this novel boring, too long mostly. I don't usually like character-centric stories, since they tend to make the character in question intensely unlikable, and this novel is no exception. Even if there's a booby on the cover.