Fiction Book Reviews

…because I am swamped with school, and also I want to enter this contest, which requires posting this in my blog. Therefore: Random Thoughts is celebrating a one-year blogiversary by giving away stuff.

1st PRIZE
$25 - c/o Random Thoughts
Customized Blog Layout (blogger platform) c/o My Web-Blog Designs
1 Swarovsky Bracelet c/o Yen’s Handmades [Click here to see the ITEM]
$20 + 2000 EC credits c/o Windmill on the Hill
$10 + 500 EC credits c/o My Life’s Journey to Success
$10 + 500 EC credits c/o Things I Did Not Know Before
$10 + 500 EC credits c/o Unique Ideas For Your Beach Weddings
2000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Night Clicks
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o NetFreeSource
3000 - EC credits c/o Random Thoughts
1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Dashing Beauty
1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Tales of a Pinay Single Mommy
1 Photo Pop Art Make-over c/o Sweety Tots

2nd PRIZE
$20 - c/o Mira’s Web Journal
2500 - EC credits c/o Mira’s Web Journal
2000 - EC credits c/o A Moment to Exhale
20GB Web Hosting c/o http://angelic-melody.net + 500EC credits
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o My Countryhome
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Live Love Pink
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Samantha’s Own
1 month 125×125 ad space c/o 1716 South
1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Garage Sale
1 Photo Pop Art Make-over c/o Sweety Tots

3rd PRIZE
$15 - c/o A Moment to Exhale
3000 - EC credits c/o Big Boys Have Toys Too
2000 - EC credits c/o A Taste of Both Worlds
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Kharlota dot Com
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o A Girl for All Status
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o A Fil-Am Journey
1 year text link ad c/o http://glamorous-heart.info
1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Symphony of Love
1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Sweepstakes Girl
1 Photo Pop Art Make-over c/o Sweet…Pretty…Naughty

4th PRIZE
$10 - c/o My Barefoot Journey
2000 - EC credits c/o Mommy’s Little Corner
2000 - EC credits c/o My Online Paradise
2000 - EC credits c/o Kinda Life of Mine
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Just About Anything
1 month text link ad Thomas Travel Tales
1 month text link ad Great Finds and Deals

5th PRIZE
2000 - EC credits c/o Wife of a Warrior
3000 - EC credits c/o Life’s Sweets and Spices
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Simply Irresistible
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o My Sweet Haven
1 month text link ad Work At Home Jobs
1 month text link ad Erlinda‘s Wandering Thoughts

6th PRIZE
2000 - EC credit c/o The Solitairy Love
1500 - EC credit c/o My Barefoot Journey
1000 - EC credits c/o My Kitchen Table
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Kalidadis
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Cooking is Fun
1 month text link ad CompTechGadgets.com
1 month text link ad Healthy Living and Lifestyle

7th PRIZE
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Simplement Belles
1000 - EC credits + 1 month 125×125 ad space c/o Moi et mon univers!
1000 - EC credit c/o Scrappy Mommy
1000 - EC credits c/o Dashing Smiles
1000 - EC credits c/o Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink
1000 - EC credits c/o One at a Time
1 month text link ad Thomas Web Links
1 month text link ad Bohol Paradise

8th PRIZE
1000 EC + 1 month 125×125 ad space from My Daily Sunset
1000 - EC credits c/o My Kitchen
1000 - EC credits c/o My Life and Family Journey
1000 - EC credits c/o My Whole New World
1000 - EC credits c/o Definitely Maybe
500 - EC credits c/o I Thought So
1 month text link ad Batuananons

9th PRIZE
1000 EC + 1 month 125×125 ad space from Lovely Pink
1000 - EC credits c/o Small Side Bits
1000 - EC credits c/o In His Steps
1000 - EC credits c/o Moments of My Life
1000 - EC credits c/o My Crossroads
1 month text link ad Filipino Online Community

10th PRIZE
1000 EC + 1 month 125×125 ad space from Hobby and Such by Carlota
1000 - EC credits c/o My Life’s Adventure
1000 - EC credits c/o Wonderful Things In Life
1000 - EC credits c/o The Joy of Life Forever
500 - EC credits c/o Life’s Journey
1 month text link ad from Nita’s Random Thoughts

11th PRIZE
1000 - EC credits c/o Medan Daily
1000 - EC credits c/o Wiehanne Lounge
1000 - EC credits c/o Simply WP
1000 - EC credits c/o Everything Under the Sun
1 month text link ad from Nita’s Corner

12th PRIZE
1500 - EC credits c/o A Moment to Exhale
1000 - EC credits c/o My Barefoot Journey
1000 - EC credits c/o EastCoastLife

I haven’t actually read this, which is not my fault, because it was published when I was in England for the semester and UEA’s lame uni library wasn’t at all like my uni library–connected to the municipal library system and able to get new books, in other words. I even tried getting Small Favor, the newest Dresden Files book, and Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox off interlibrary loan, and then I found out that ILL, at least at that library, is only for stuff you really need for school and you have to have your professor sign off on it. So much for that idea. I made do by periodically raiding the YA section instead and mostly read lots and lots of Diana Wyne Jones.

Now that I’m back, though, I’ve already read Small Favor and Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox, and I’ve got Inkdeath (another book released while I was gone) and The Graveyard Book checked out and sitting on my nightstand. (Hm, I also need to read The Tales of Beedle the Bard. I could’ve actually bought that in the UK and decided I’d wait until I could get it cheap. Even though it was, like, three pounds. Whatever. I am not, however, planning to read Brisingr. I don’t even know how to pronounce that.)

Anyway, I’m looking forward to it; I understand it’s sort of like The Jungle Book except the kid is raised by ghosts, not animals, which is a highly intriguing premise in and of itself–and anyway, it’s Neil Gaiman, so it’s bound to be good. But that’s not the point of this particular post. The point is, I found out this morning from Neil’s blog that The Graveyard Book just won the Newbery. That’s also not the main point, although it’s really cool and I’m thrilled about it. The main point is that his blog and Twitter entries about this are really, really cute. I mean his blog is pretty awesome in general, in large part because of his journal labels and also because of entries like these (also, he likes Doctor Who) and Twitter posts like “Mr Gaiman briefly ponders putting marmalade in tea, then realises he has lost his mind,” but…I don’t even know. He’s very normal and just kind of adorable, y’all.

Isn’t that a beautiful, evocative title for a book? I mean, you read that and you haven’t a clue what it means, but it sounds pretty, right? Which probably sums up how a lot of people tend to feel about poetry, and I admit that often goes for me too. I adore T.S. Eliot, but do I have a clue what, say, The Waste Land actually means? Yeah, not so much. To be honest I suppose I’m especially wary of analyzing poems I really love, because I’d rather enjoy Eliot for his marvelous imagery and wordplay than say “Clearly, J. Alfred Prufrock is sexually frustrated.”

Even when I read a poem like one of Eliot’s and have no idea precisely what, if anything, he’s trying to say with it, I still tend to find myself coming away with some idea of what the poem’s about, even if I can’t always put it into words. I suppose that’s one of my biggest criteria for any kind of art: it should mean something, whether I’m positive what that something is or not. Art that makes me go “Uh…what was the point of all that?” rarely counts as art in my book, if for no other reason than because the simple fact that I’m wondering what the point was means I wasn’t distracted by something else, like how pretty it was. (more…)

(Spoilers throughout, because…the book kind of sucks and I really don’t care enough to keep it spoiler-free? In fairness, I should also add that I wrote this without having read any other books in the Underground Zealot series, of which there are now three, looks like. …good God, I can’t even write “Underground Zealot” with a straight face.)

Ever since The Mark, I think, I’ve started losing respect for Jerry Jenkins. (As far as I’m concerned, Tim LaHaye doesn’t count.  I think he does research and maybe Tsion’s sermons—in other words, virtually none of the actual writing.)  I think he’s become too aware of his own popularity; he creates characters and kills them just to play with his readers’ emotions, but he’s stopped caring about the poor fools he creates. (more…)

Pretentious as it might sound, the word that kept coming to my mind as I read Perdido Street Station was “virtuosity,” and I can’t think of any other way to sum it up. Mieville has more skill in painting with words than possibly any other author I’ve ever read; the way he uses words is nothing short of astounding. The steampunk and fantastical elements are somehow believable because it’s not presented as strange; dark and bizarre as it is, New Crobuzon seems real, a place where real people truly live and die. The city is beautiful in its ugliness; the characters love it because it’s home, for all its horror. The plot is more than a little slow to start, but once it does, things pick up and move along fairly swiftly, and you realize that you’ve slowly begun to care about these odd characters.

…and those strong points are exactly the novel’s weak points. Mieville evokes a wonderfully gritty atmosphere, but in doing so he tends to take time out from the plot to describe a certain section of the city–all of which is important for setting the stage, and it all left me rather in awe of his worldbuilding, but when the plot gets going, all that description throws off the pacing. Things start moving quickly, and then the next chapter starts with two pages of description, and I found myself wanting to skip it to get to some more action. The action scenes in particular can be more than a little hard to picture or understand, too.

And as for the ending…I’ll try not to spoil it. But here’s the thing: when I started reading this book, I got the feeling that it was more than a little cynical and dystopian, and as such it was almost certainly not going to end happily (putting the “punk” in “steampunk,” I suppose, since steampunk doesn’t always seem to require the dystopian elements cyberpunk does). In fact I thought it was the sort of book where one or more of the main characters would die in the end. So I kept myself distant from the characters, and in some ways it wasn’t too hard. Lin, Isaac, Yagharek, and Derkhan are all very interesting, but in their own different ways, they all manage to be just a little bit unsympathetic, even alien. But then we get the slake-moths, and things heat up, and they’re all forced out of normality and into situations that make them choose to fight back. In a way they were growing up because of all this horror. I started really rooting for them, wanting them to succeed. And…well, I admit it: I like happy endings. In fact I’d just rather not read a book that doesn’t end happily, somehow or other. I like seeing characters go through hell, but I want them to come out okay, somehow or other, with hints that there’s still hope. For these characters, they all get what they wanted, sort of…and at the same time, none of them does. It’s just too bad that by the time they came to that point, I really liked all of them.

I don’t really know what to think about this book.

As a rule, I love Diana Wynne Jones’ work. Dark Lord of Derkholm was my first introduction to her novels; I think I first picked it up at the library because its cover looked so very, very cliched, I wanted to see what it was about and have a laugh at it.  Joke was on me, of course, because parodying fantasy cliches is one of the whole points of that book, along with a plot that’s fantastic in its own right, a lot of humor, and a family of wizards and griffins that bicker like crazy and still love each other to death. It’s one of those books where you’ve got a huge grin on your face when you finish because it’s just that much fun. Not all of her books are quite as good–the older ones like A Tale of Time City a bit less so, seems like, and I found Fire and Hemlock and Hexwood good but confusing (the former gets bonus points just for being a Tam Lin retelling, though)–but generally speaking you can’t go wrong with them, especially the Chrestomanci books.

The Homeward Bounders, though…I dunno, really. It’s…very different from her others. Oh, it shares a lot in common with others–even in books that aren’t actually related, she uses the idea of parallel worlds and dimensions all the time (I can think of at least five different books or series of hers that have nothing to do with each other but use alternate worlds in one way or another, and generally in different ways), and most of hers have young protagonists who end up having to save the world, often finding themselves faced with very difficult choices in the process.

But most of her books have an enemy that can, in some way, be known–the villains here are only referred to as They–and I’m pretty sure all her other characters get happy endings in one way or another. In this, you can kind of see the ending coming by the way the book begins and by hints the narrator drops along the way, and it’s not like it’s a bad ending exactly, but…it’s different. I found it depressing, to be honest, though I can’t say much more without entirely giving it away.

(It’s probably not too surprising, though, that I immediately thought of the perfect fix-it fic: the Doctor shows up, puts things properly to rights, and takes Jamie home in the TARDIS. This would of course allow the Doctor to angst about how he can never go home, but whatever.)