Showing posts with label Book Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book Review. Show all posts
Posted by Becca In: ,

Twilight

It was Friday night when I broke.


I was sitting at my parent's dining room table eating homemade pizza. Innocent enough, until I opened my mouth. "Mom," I said, "I feel like I need to at least watch Twilight. I've spent too long mocking it without having read the book or seen the movie."

Conveniently, Mom just so happened to have the flick in the house.

So it came to be that I watched Twilight.
I promptly went out and bought the first book the next day.

It was hard for me to admit that I had actually enjoyed this immensely popular teen fiction. When I want to read about vampires, I pick up Laurell K. Hamilton or something similar. I'll have blood, sex, death, sadomasochism, and badass chicks with my supernatural fiction, please. But there was something about the simplicity of the story that captured my attention (and I'm a sucker for a vampire romance... no pun intended).

However, I do have several major issues.

I'm no stranger to Stephanie Meyer - I read and enjoyed The Host, though I thought her origins as a young adult author clung too heavily to her "adult" novel. It had the potential to be truly excellent, but skirted too many deeper issues for me to say more than 'The Host really held my attention, and it could have been really good." I felt similarly about Twilight. The writing felt clumsy and clearly aimed towards young teen girls, yet there were a few moments when it really shone.

I have another problem with the book. Bella bores me. I mean, she bores me to tears. The elements of her character that make her interesting and likeable were completely clouded by her obsession with Edward. Instead of granting her some semblance of independence, Meyer took her protagonist and viciously wrung out all trace of character, leaving her limp as a wet dishrag. And oh my God the teenager angst. I have so little patience with it!

Oh, and can we talk about stalker Edward? Yes, teenage girls, it's romantic to have some guy trespass into your home and watch you sleep.

Yikes.

A quick comment about the film - I thought it was terrible. There's just no getting around it. Robert Pattinson was lovely and actually very good, but the special effects were atrocious, much of the acting was wooden, and the script was painful.

All that harsh criticism aside, the simple truth remains that I did enjoy it - both book and movie. But I enjoyed it in a hey, that was kind of fun sort of way, not in a OMG I love Twilight, it's SO GOOD! kind of way. I feel no pressing urge to run out and get the second book. I feel no thrill of excitement contemplating the release of the next movie. I'm left with that wanting more feeling - not wanting more of the story, just wanting more substance to the story.

I guess what I really want are more adult, interesting characters, and a more adult, interesting romance.

This is why I shouldn't be allowed to read teen fiction.

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Crooked Little Vein

I just finished reading a fascinating little book.


I say "little" because although "Crooked Little Vein" by Warren Ellis has almost 300 pages (which doesn't exactly classify it as "little") it is an amazingly fast read. I do read quickly, but even so I blasted through the book in just a couple of hours.

"Crooked Little Vein" is Ellis's first novel - he has spent most of his career writing comic books for Marvel, Wildstorm, and DC, and you can definitely tell. The book is fast paced, rich in dialog but thin in detail, and honestly kind of reads like a graphic novel without any graphics. In most books I would say this is a detriment, but Ellis pulls it off perfectly.

The premise is completely unrealistic but fun, featuring a private detective main character (whom you can't help but feel an odd mixture of affection, distaste, and sympathy for) and a host of strange supporting characters traversing bizarre, gag-reflex triggering, often shocking situations in their hunt for a magical book misplaced by the White House. Novels looking to get in your face by throwing shocking situations at you are a dime a dozen these days, but what makes Ellis's debut really interesting is how surprisingly deep it is.

My favorite scene saw Mike, the main character, having a conversation with a serial killer on a plane. He ends up telling the serial killer about crawling through America's underground, to which the serial killer asks him to share his experiences. Mike does, all he gets for a response is, "I've seen most of that on the internet." The serial killer goes on to discuss what can now constitute "mainstream" and "underground" in this day and age. Really an interesting chapter.

All in all, it was surprisingly thought provoking, but certainly nothing that will give you an epiphany and change your outlook on life. The perverted scenarios are a little off-putting, but I think they actually really enhance the message Ellis was trying to convey instead of just being there to shock you.

Let's hear it for finally paying off library overdue fines!

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The Dogs of Babel

Just in case anyone was wondering, yes I did finally clean my kitchen. And my living room. And most of my dining room. Bathroom and bedroom are next, and then if I'm feeling really ambitious, I might tackle my office (which is much bigger and much messier than my bedroom)..... but probably not.


BUT. I read The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst yesterday. Well, I started it on Tuesday and finished it yesterday. The book follows the story of a man who comes home one day to find that his wife has fallen out of a tree to her death, and as he searches desperately to understand what happened that day, he decides to try to learn what happened through the only witness to the event, his wife's Rhodesian Ridgeback, Lorelei. Being a linguist, he embarks on an effort to teach her to talk.
I love to wander through bookstores and just pick up whatever happens to catch my interest. I picked this one up and put it back down twice before I finally decided to hang on to it. I already had The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart in hand, and I wasn't entirely convinced The Dogs of Babel would be worth the money. The premise sounded vaguely silly to me at the time, but I thought, hey it's under 300 pages, it'll be a quick read, might as well give it a shot.
I was very pleasantly surprised.
It is a very depressing book. Each chapter alternates between the bereft husband's efforts to teach Lorelei to communicate and his reminisces about how he and his wife first met, their week-long first date, and their marriage. The story is extremely sad and tenderly written, and has a very realistic feel to it. And despite a touchy point towards the last third of the book that I thought was a bit jarring and maybe a bit unnecessary, the end is absolutely phenomenal. And when I say the end is phenomenal, I mean the end is phenomenal. That last chapter just completely blew me away, and the last page nearly moved me to tears.
I promise I'm not generally one to get all that sappy about books, but this one really managed to touch me. I can't recommend it highly enough.

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In My Sister's Country


'In My Sister's Country'

Lise Haines


I have abandoned my star system of rating books. That works for movies, but I think that books are to complex to be summed up in a short series of symbols, even for a brief opinion of how much I liked the book. So no more stars for me!


This book was one of those books (for me) that you start reading, and realize halfway through that you don't actually want to be reading it, but you can't put it down. Following the life of a teenager's whimsical, sometimes desperate actions as she goes through life dwelling with her viciously manipulative older sister, this book grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go, even after you've read the last word on the last page.


From the tragic, terminally ill figure of her mother and absent cold, clinical father, to the shallow friend and impossible older sister, this book weaves in and out of desperate sadness to a sick kind of levity, but over it all weighs an oppressive feeling of... truth. The book is fictional, but the story is told in such a way that you can imagine Molly out there somewhere really going through everything detailed in the pages.


It's hard to swallow at times, but the book is a quick read at only 304 pages. I finished it in under a day. It's worth it.

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The Devil in the White City book review


"The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson

*** out of ****


This is a brilliant non fiction book about the Chicago world fair in 1893...'92? Wow, I just finished the book and I can't even remember the year the fair took place in. Well, that should show you how well I retain information. ^_^ Anyway, whenever the fair was, that's when the book takes place. It alternately chronicles the construction and running of the fair and the exploits of H. H. Holmes, a notorius serial killer.


Most of the time I don't particularly like historical non fiction, but my dad lent me the book so I decided to give it a shot. I was more than pleasantly surprised. I find most historical non fiction dry and boring, but Larson is anything but boring. There were a couple segments that seemed to drag on, but most of the time Larson keeps you completely sucked in. Larson spends less than half the book on killer Holmes, making the book more about the fascinating aspects of the construction of the fair than sensationalistic true crime, which I thought was really nice, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.


One of the things I loved most about the book was the way Larson would sneak in passages about famous historical figures. He'll write a paragraph or two about when they visited the fair, or something they said, before revealing their identity. It never failed to make me smile. ^_^ More nice touches were the excerpts from letters written by people figured prominantly into the book, menus from society dinners, and even a list of ailments that the hospital at the fair treated patients for. More interesting factoids were all the various things that were invented especially for the fair, like Pabst Blue Ribbon beer! XD


Well worth the read!

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