January 2014 – My Book Report, by Jean Age 20-Something

The City & The City

Title: The City & The City by China Mieville
Scored a: C+
Status: Unfinished due to mishap

The City & The City was a book I was very eager to read, because the concept sounded great. Two cities occupying the same space? And the book delivers on the idea. The bits and pieces I saw of the cities before the Mishap was just what I was hoping for.

Unfortunately, I only saw bits and pieces. Mieville’s characters proceeded to get in the way of the world over and over. This wouldn’t have been so bad if the characters had been fun in some way, or at least interesting, but they were ciphers. Stick figures who kept standing in front of the shot you were trying to take.

And then, of course, I accidentally lost the book and can’t bring myself to buy a new copy to finish it. So I guess I’ll never find out how the murder mystery turned out, which is a shame. I’m also sad I didn’t get to enjoy the cities if Beszel and Ul Qoma as much as I would have liked.

When I was talking about my problem with the book before the Mishap with my friend, she told me she’d had the same problem with other books of his. Great worlds, not so great characters. Another friend assured me Mieville was really nice, but that didn’t quite explain the problem with the book.

So much for making this book 41 on my 100 books of winter.

Currently working on: All Creatures Great And Small by James Herriot, and Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones. Both of which involve a lot of animal care, but I don’t think Herriot gets anything combat worthy from his efforts, unless you count all that cow shit he gets covered in.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and Fuan no Tane

A wight from Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs ended on a sour note because I didn’t realize it was part of a series so the ‘TUNE IN NEXT TIME’ ending was more’n a little annoying.

That said, I liked it! Ransom Riggs is good at atmosphere, and his description of the world around Jacob is great. The vintage photographs used to illustrate the characters and concepts throughout are a nice touch.

The plot is, Jacob’s grandfather always told him stories about the magical children he grew up, as well as monsters he fought. When Jacob grew up, his father told him that the children’s magic was that they were Jewish, like Jacob’s grandfather, and the monsters were the nazis.

Then Jacob finds out his grandfather was telling the truth.

Like I said, I overall liked this and my only stylistic complaint is the mythos in the book didn’t mesh fully with itself.

The other thing I read was Fuan no Tane by Masaaki Nakayama without realizing I’d read a book until I was entering Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children into the spreadsheet and went ‘oh wait, that counted, didn’t it!’. It’s a collection of ghost stories in scenes, some stories no more than two pages. One of the stories is here, it takes place in a hospital.

Don’t expect an origin or explanation to the ghosts, it’s just a nice little capsule of horror. My favourite is early on, The Giant. I will enclose it in this post, since there’s no legal English version of this comic and I can’t just tell you to buy it.

Below is The Giant:
Continue reading Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and Fuan no Tane

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents & Only Human

Read The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett years ago, the day it first came out in Canada. I went to the bookstore, bought it, went to the food court and finished it before I got home.

A couple years ago I got the audiobook, which is good but it was a couple ipods ago and I lost my place, so I figured for my challenge it would do perfectly (Book 63, I am now working on book 67).

It’s technically set in the Discworld, but except for a mention of some wizards and it taking place in Uberwald, it’s not a big detail.

The plot is Maurice, a talking cat, a bunch of talking mice, and a stupid looking kid are running a Pied Piper scheme and end up in a town where something really creepy is afoot. And there’s a girl named Malicia who likes to make up stories. In the audiobook she’s got this great sort of Transylvanian accent, which isn’t actually in the book beyond where she comes from, so I had to mentally put it there as I read.

Maurice is great narrator. He’s very much a cat, with cat priorities. And the rats are forming their own civilization bit by bit, and learning what it really means to think. It’s a pretty solid piece of kid’s fiction, and again if you’re worried about needing to know about the Discworld series, it’s not even relevant.

I also read Only Human by Tom Holt which was aggressively mediocre mixed with casual racism. And thus, Only Human has been rated a D.

Bunnicula

Hell yes Bunnicula! Deborah and James Howe wrote a funny little story that I liked as much now as when I read it as a kid. Harold the dog is quite the narrator, with very typical dog priorities (although I went NO when I found out his favourite snack was chocolate cake) that make him pretty endearing, since it’s mixed with a mature, humanlike viewpoint.

To those not familiar with the plot, it goes: The family that Harold the dog lives with goes to see Dracula, and in the theatre seats they find a baby bunny and bring it home. The bunny is then named Bunnicula in honour of the film.

Chester the cat, the last character, senses something is immediately Not Right when white, drained vegetables start appearing…

A lot of the appeal of this book is the writing. It has Harold’s narration, Chester’s catlike ways of trying to stop a vampire rabbit, and really adorable descriptions of Bunnicula. The characterization of the family is pretty ace too.

Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain

Art by Ann Larimer

Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain by A. Lee Martinez was great! The plot: Emperor Mollusk, former Warlord of Terra (he retired after conquering the planet and deciding he didn’t feel like ruling anymore) has been targeted for assassination. Taken into protective custody by the Venusian warrior Zala (she can’t bring him to justice for his crimes against Venus if he’s dead), Mollusk is swept into finding out who wants him dead (in the narrowing down sense), and what to do if for the first time ever, he might not win? Also along for the ride is his pet ultrapede Snarg. Good girl, Snarg.

The Earth in this book’s world is an alternate history of ours, where we’ve been fighting off alien attacks for centuries and there’s even a Viking colony on Ceres (no one knows how they got there). Our narrator and main character is Mollusk, a moral-less little octopus from Neptune, but he doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s friendly and reasonable, without much blood lust. His likeability carries you through some of the weaker parts of the book quite tidily.

My only complaint about this book was that Zala and Kreegah (a Jupitron) are criminally underused. There’s some very interesting characters waiting there to be written, but unfortunately that doesn’t really happen, especially in Kreegah’s case.

A nice, light book. Shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to read this, but I made the mistake of starting writing again and it’s hard to shift my brain from one gear to the other.

Spellbinder

The two covers of Spellbinder by Helen Stringer

This is a book I picked up because of the cover. See the first one? It’s quite nice. When I got the ebook version for easier reading, it had a new cover, the second one. Note how generic it is. Unfortunately, the second cover was the accurate one.

There was a somewhat interesting story hiding in Spellbinder by Helen Stringer, but it was overshadowed by the author’s inability to dole out information properly (the main method seemed to be that instead of saying something useful/expositiony, the people talking would get incredibly irritated, I am pretty sure the word ‘irritated’ appears in this book around five hundred times, and refuse to speak more) and near the end it all got a little frayed. There was a set up for a sequel but I couldn’t be bothered.

I will say, this would have made a pretty good video game.

Okay, the plot is: Belladonna Johnson’s parents died in a car crash, but she still lives happily with their ghosts. One day all the ghosts in the world disappear and it’s up to Belladonna to find out what happened.

I liked the premise, not so much the final execution. I think of the characterizations had been better (everyone seemed generally angry all the time) I would have enjoyed this book a lot more. I don’t regret my time reading it, but I can see how it could have been much better.

Harriet the Spy

Harriet performs her onion dance

Tonight I read Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (had to look that up, I was looking at the tiiiny cover on my ipod and thought her last name was Pittsburgh) which was the source of my childhood fixation on tomato sandwiches. I’m also realizing I must have read the sequels, because there was a scene I clearly remembered involving goat cheese that did not, in fact, happen in this book.

Harriet wants to be a spy, so she keeps a dossier on everyone. Everyone. Unfortunately, Harriet doesn’t have very nice things to say to people and the inevitable happens.

When I read this the first time, I was eleven which is Harriet’s age, so her behaviour seemed perfectly natural. Now that I’m an adult with an eleven year old stepbrother, I see how accurate Harriet’s behaviour was. Running around, screaming when talking for no reason, not understanding how feelings work outside her. Don’t let that imply I don’t think my step-brother is totally awesome, but now I see how typical eleven year old Harriet’s attitude was.

A sort of thorny read emotionally, the part that really got me wasn’t even overtly sad, but it was just Harriet dealing with the fallout when things went wrong and her parents trying to help. There was just something about watching a kid suffer, even if the kid wasn’t fully aware they were suffering.

Great book, I can see why I loved it so much as a kid, even if I didn’t take its lesson to heart and had a brief fling with wanting to be a spy. Thank god for short attention spans.

The Adventures of Sally

“I have been asked,” repeated Mr. Faucitt, ignoring the unmannerly interruption [of who had asked him], which, indeed, he would have found it hard to answer, “to propose the health of our charming hostess (applause), coupled with the name of her brother, our old friend Fillmore Nicholas.”

The gentleman referred to, who sat at the speaker’s end of the table, acknowledged the tribute with a brief nod of the head. It was a nod of condescension; the nod of one who, conscious of being hedged about by social inferiors, nevertheless does his best to be not unkindly. And Sally, seeing it, debated in her mind for an instant the advisability of throwing an orange at her brother. There was one lying ready to her hand, and his glistening shirt-front offered an admirable mark; but she restrained herself. After all, if a hostess yields to her primitive impulses, what happens? Chaos. She had just frowned down the exuberance of the rebellious Murphys, and she felt that if, even with the highest motives, she began throwing fruit, her influence for good in that quarter would be weakened.

The Adventures of Sally by PG Wodehouse

The news tonight made me sick, so I read a book. I know that’s my response to everything, but there you go.

Not much to say about this, except it was nice to see Wodehouse write from the perspective of a woman for once. I love the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but women don’t usually come off very well in them, so I was curious how this would be. Turns out Sally’s quite lovely and well-rounded.

It went on a bit with some fat-shaming, but overall I liked it and it distracted me a bit. I liked Sally, her brother, and all the people in her life.

Truckers

To clear the bad taste out of my brain, for book #50 I chose one I knew I’d like: Truckers by Terry Pratchett.

It’s a problem solving book. The Nomes have a problem: their home sucks. So they get on a lorry and see where they end up next, which turns out to be a place full of more nomes. These nomes live in a giant department store and don’t believe in the outside and it’s rather idyllic.

Except it’s going to be demolished.

There’s also a small box from space telling them what to do, and the joy of this book is the solutions the nomes come up to for their problems, in-between their arguing (nomes love to argue).

Masklin, the main character, suffers a bit from the sort of ‘good, but just kinda there’ lead problem that Pratchett’s books sometimes have, but I liked him a lot anyway. But my favourite part of the book was that unlike A Spell for Chameleon, women were suddenly people again.

And just for that, this book makes me so happy. I blew right through it, I was enjoying myself so much. It’s part of a series, the Bromeliad Trilogy, and the next book is Diggers, followed by Wingers.

A Spell For Chameleon

Image smaller than usual because I don’t think it deserves that much bandwith

A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony, first in the Xanth series, was to be my quickie 49th book on my list. It proceeded to keep me delayed for days.

This book is toxic.

From a scene where it’s explained how horrible it is for men to be convicted of rape and how women make up accusations, to two scenes where the main character is sexually attracted to fourteen year olds, and the fact that the main character could not think or look at a woman without thinking about their fuckability factor, the creepshow going on in this book was unending.

The worst, however, is near the end, where he’s with a woman who for reasons I won’t explain currently had the intellect of a very stupid child where he thinks ‘no, I won’t tell her what sex is, her mind is too young’ and then proceeds to have sex with her in the next paragraph. Seriously. This is what’s going on.

Looking up Piers Anthony, I found his preoccupation with teenage or younger and the intellectually challenged being molested was a big thing with him. From ages five and up, with the child being the ‘instigator’.

I do not recommend this book. It’s the first one to get an F on my list.

Why did I read it? When I was a preteen, I was majorly into the Xanth books after reading Dragon On a Pedestal in the school library. I stopped reading as a teenager when he wrote the ridiculously stupid The Color Of Her Panties, so I thought I’d revisit my childhood. Instead I spent most of it sick and disgusted.

On a side note, if Piers Anthony could have turned off the badtouch for at least a few chapters, there was actually an interesting story going on in the book. Unfortunately he ruined it by writing with his dick, not his hands.

EDIT: A blog post that further covers Piers Anthony’s themes of rape and molestation he writes as good times for all that I will give a major trigger warning to if you click.