The Gone-Away World

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I wish I could give this 3.5 stars. This book was part Matrix, part Fight Club, part Catch-22, but mostly it's own thing; really original.

Good: I liked the characters, I didn't see the twist coming and was completely baffled and a little bit unsettled by it. It was interesting and thought provoking. Well, I knew there was a twist coming, I just didn't know what it was going to be. And, the writing is really good. I mean, who else can think of calling someone a "geosynchronous shrew." What does that even mean?

Bad: There is A LOT of swearing in it. Like, a lot, a lot. To be honest, I only kept reading it because I was too sick to go to the library to pick up something else. And, the first chapter is in medias res, which is exciting, and then it goes back for 150 pages of sort of boring and seemingly pointless exposition and the only thing that kept me reading was the promise made in chapter 1 of a good story, and that I was sick and had nothing else to read.

But, I don't really regret it. After those almost painful 150 pages, it picks up quite nicely and sails right to the end.

View all my reviews >>

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

Graceling by Kristin Cashore


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read this book in 1.5 days, much to the dismay of my family. I think Bridget said it best (although she was talking about a different book):

The point here is that Catching Fire is one of those lovely, delicious books that sucks you into its world and makes you want to ignore every other responsibility in your life, every other engagement, commitment, or member of your family, even the tiny helpless ones, and just READ. As much as I love reading, this particular kind of book doesn't come around very often (the Twilight series and some of the Shannon Hale books come to mind as other examples...)

This book did remind me a lot of Goose Girl in style and the mythical world milieu but edgier and it didn't end quite how I wanted it to end. But, I couldn't put it down, and will probably read the companion prequel, even though the review says it has dragons in it, and I usually draw the line at dragons. And Fairies.

View all my reviews >>

The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas

Another fly-by find from the library, this book is made great by both the characters and the mode of storytelling. Conn is the first person narrator, but in between each chapter you get a page or two of notes or letters from the wizard Nevery, so the change in perspective helps further along the plot. Loved all the characters. Loved Conn's strong stubbornness and innate trust in himself. Loved his matter-of-fact approach to life. Loved the way the relationships developed. I recommend this book for a quick getaway (sometimes I just want to escape from my life for a little while, don't you?). Highly enjoyable.

I'm utterly useless with pictures tonight. Blame the nasty cold complete with sinus headache. Here's a link.

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

A friend of mine recommended the movie to me, which I was surprised to learn is an anime movie that was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005 (lost to Wallace and Grommet, which I find creepy but my kids love). I have yet to see the movie, but I found the sequel to this book in the library during a fly-by and was thus reminded to check out the book. Sorry, long intro.

The basic premise is that Sophie gets turned into an old woman by a witch and goes out to seek her fortune and try to get her own figure back. Along the way she strikes a bargain with a fire demon and becomes housekeeper to the wizard Howl. It was a pretty good story. Not fantastic, but I did enjoy it. There was a little too much description of the scenery for my taste.

The sequel, written some 22 years later, I found much more compelling. It's called House of Many Ways. It has a different main character and a different setting, but Sophie and Howl and the fire demon get wrapped up in the plot, as well. The author employs a very imaginative use of magic (bending time and space).

Apparently there's another one called Castle in the Air. I think they all stand on their own and are only sequels in that some of the characters overlap.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If I read this book as a child, I don't remember it. But, that didn't matter at all because I really liked this book. It was a quick read and it had just the right amounts of suspense and love story and happy feelings.

View all my reviews >>

Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount Jr.

Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, ... With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory by Roy Blount Jr.


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a book about words; the subtitle sums it up very nicely. Roy Blount Jr. is one of my favorite panelists on Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, so I thought I'd try out one of his books. I liked this book because I really like words. Not just reading them, but saying them and learning about them. If you are not interested in reading this book, I offer three highlights:

tmesis- inserting a word into another word for an intensifying effect. Example from my life: Tyler was trying to come up with a mnemonic (which word is also treated by RBJ) for the first three letters of our new license plate, AFZ. What he came up with - Ari-frickin-zona. RBJ points out that, ironically enough, the word tmesis looks like it should have something stuck in the middle of it, an apostrophe (t'mesis) or some vowels (tamesis).

level- the most even word in the English language. Just look at it.

portmanteau- "a British term for a suitcase that opens out into two halves. Portmanteau words are inspired combinations such as guestimate from guess and estimate." Personally I find this delicious and I can see in my minds eye guess and estimate as the two sides of a suitcase getting closed up into guestimate.

The cons of this book are as follows. 1. It was kind of long for what it was, 364 pages about words. 2. RBJ is sort of a rambly and I often found it hard to follow where he was going. 3. There are all sorts of references to movies that were made 50 years before I was born and actresses and other famous people that I've never heard of, so I didn't get a lot of the jokes, I guess you could call them... puns, humor?

This is the third book I've read that was organized into 26 alphabetical chapters and it blows Reading the OED: One Man One Year 21 730 Pages out of the water, but does nothing to touch The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Person In The World. So, if you're going to read one book like this, read that one. If you are going to read two, read that one, and then this one.

View all my reviews >>

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

I think the measure of how much I like a book could be how much I hide from my children in order to read it. And, if I have too many more days like yesterday, CPS might come and take my children away.

Flavia de Luce is 11 and when she finds a body in the cucumber patch, she's determined to solve the mystery of who he is and what he's doing there.

The writing is very good, and it's a lot like Harry Potter in that it's technically for children or young adults, but it makes no attempt to dumb anything down (I kept a list of words I had to look up, and it numbered well over 30); except one time. The word was "hesternal." I attempted to look it up but it wasn't in the dictionary. As I kept reading, Flavia says something like, "I remembered that hesternal means 'pertaining to yesterday.'"

You know a book is good when you want to start right over on page one as soon as you finish to pick up everything you missed the first time around.

The only thing I found unrealistic was Flavia's age. After being put in primary, I've met a few 11-year olds, and there is no way even the most sophisticated of them could walk/talk/think/act like Flavia. Oh well.

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

I read about this book in TIME magazine and thought it sounded interesting. It's a biography of Percy H. Fawcett, a Victorian-era explorer who was obsessed with finding the lost city of Z, or El Dorado, in the Amazon. He led several expeditions into the Amazon, and disappeared there in 1925.

It's pretty interesting, I especially liked the parts about how the Indians have adapted to live in the rain forest which, it seems, is actively trying to kill all it's inhabitants. My favorite bit was when they talked about how certain Indians could whistle worms out of your skin, like a really gross snake charmer.

In finding the image of the book, I stumbled upon a website that told me they were making it into a movie with Brad Pitt starring as Colonel Fawcett.