Entry tags:

books, sunday book coveting

I am writing a review of Graceling that is also a review critique of too many reactions to the book that have me considering another shower or 16 because I am so grossed out. U-um. I have nothing but love for you, internets, I swear! Nothing but love and a side of tears and misery, that is! It was at 1,000 words the last time I checked. I will be sure to include lots of paragraph breaks!

Meanwhile, this week I have finished my re-read of Graceling and tossed aside Shift by Jennifer Bradbury, which had some awesome throwaway lines I found intriguing, which is code for "I wanted to set the book on fire". The main character (Chris) has a college roommate that is foreign so Chris decides not to take the important looking investigator to his dorm to talk because that foreign roommate would automatically assume he was being deported and freak out. HA HA! Get it? Foreign students probably worry about their student visas all the time, you know, because they're foreign and don't belong here. That was followed by another line later in the book where Chris sees a picture of his roommate in a place "clean and foreign-looking enough to be his home", paraphrased of course but still full of AWESOME. See what Bradbury did there? It was CLEAN, as if most foreign places are dirty like all those foreigners that are not his roommate. Needless to say I was uninterested in finishing this book! I cannot convince myself this was the character's thoughts alone because in the sections I read Chris doesn't mention his roommate much; it just felt like lame comments the author inserted to Other the roommate. Classy!

I have started reading The City in the Lake, which is another Nerds Heart YA title. It's good so far; we'll see how it goes. I'll hope for less skeevy issues, at the least.



1. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis: thebaconfat suggested this title, I believe, years and years ago now. Recently, yati mentioned it and finished and gave it a lot of stars so I moved it back up my list because, shock of shocks, my library actually has it whereas before they were like "Connie who?" It's Victorian, it's comedy, there's time travel—basically, everyone around me has read it and loved it so perhaps I should take a rec instead of giving them constantly.

2. Anathem by Neal Stephenson: I wondered and wondered about how to summarize this and I've got nothing so I just stole from Amazon:

Stephenson (Cryptonomicon) conjures a far-future Earth-like planet, Arbre, where scientists, philosophers and mathematicians—a religious order unto themselves—have been cloistered behind concent (convent) walls. Their role is to nurture all knowledge while safeguarding it from the vagaries of the irrational saecular outside world. Among the monastic scholars is 19-year-old Raz, collected into the concent at age eight and now a decenarian, or tenner (someone allowed contact with the world beyond the stronghold walls only once a decade). But millennia-old rules are cataclysmically shattered when extraterrestrial catastrophe looms, and Raz and his teenage companions—engaging in intense intellectual debate one moment, wrestling like rambunctious adolescents the next—are summoned to save the world.

It was probably the "rambunctious adolescents" that got me.

3. The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch: I came late to the Scott Lynch train, after I recommended his book to some people and they read them, I finally got around to it and discovered that oh hey, SCOTT LYNCH IS AWESOME and I should have read the first two books immediately. I should have been the crazed fan storming the bookstore on release day. I can make up for it when the third book in the series is released, although I have no clue when it's going to be (and no one else does, either). I'll just suffer until then. *tears*




4. Bones of Faerie by Janni Lee Simner: I have not bought into the fairy craze. I was so-so about Tithe, and Wicked Lovely was fun to read except for some of the repetition in the intimate parts between the main characters. It turns out I am picky, guys, with my intimacy. Makes you wonder how I've been reading boys kissing for eight years without getting bored. This book doesn't mention a romance, but it does mention one of my favorite things!

Simner's first novel for YAs is an attention-catching twist of two piping-hot speculative scenarios—a postapocalyptic-wasteland journey layered upon a faerie-world-intruding-upon-our-own setup. A war between our world and a faerie world has left the planet a ruined and perilous wilderness. People huddle in the remains of towns, afraid to venture out at night, and swiftly put to death any child suspected of having been infected by the faerie fallout.

Post-apocalyptic setting? Check? Questionable morals? Check. It's safe to say if I think about this book too much longer I'm going to set my expectations too high and then be brutally disappointed. Sigh.

5. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins: "Renay,", you say, with a tinge of annoyance in your voice, "didn't you talk the first book in this series down for, oh, a month after you read it? Hmm?" To that I say...maybe. Part of my problem with The Hunger Games stemmed from it being, as catherine said (at least I think she said it), an American version of Battle Royale. I claimed it was one that didn't follow through on its themes very well. It set up a horrifying premise and then skipped out to write a really bad love triangle. It's like I was reading My Sister's Keeper, but with a dystopia instead of cancer. If you don't know how I feel about My Sister's Keeper, BEWARE ASKING because I will ramble for hours about how Picoult is a cheat and also a coward and I hope the movie version fixes the story she broke by being a big fat chicken. Meanwhile, I still enjoyed the world-building Collins did and am interested in the setting so I have taken the Kool-Aid along with everyone else. SIGH.

6. Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick: Okay, so there's a romance and a fallen angel and perhaps some creepy stalker, but hey there's a catch, the angel might also be creepy? I'm not sure; it's the cover that sold me on this the first time I saw it. It's true that I will give anything with an interesting cover a shot as long as the blurbs don't talk about vampires.

In other news, Tuesday night, zachariah promised me cheese sticks from Domino's for dinner. Score. I am holding him to his promise.