Sati - Christopher Pike

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

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

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)

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

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:

1. the Harry Potter series (obviously)
2. George Orwell's 1984 ("Here comes a candle to light you to bed/Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!")
3. The Lord of the Flies (something about islands and pigs)
4. Freddy Krueger (somewhat; I might be stretching things here)
5. 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)

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

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.