Book logging (paper)
Mar. 22nd, 2019 08:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckHamilton, Kersten. The Mesmer Menace - Part of the Gadgets and Gears series. I'm pretty sure this comes before The Tick-Tock Man, but I'm not sure if it's book 1 or book 2, just the year of publication relative to those of the other volumes the library has. This one involves a murderous pigeon with mind control powers. There were a lot of supporting characters who seemed more interesting than the main plot.
Hamilton, Kersten. The Tick-Tock Man - Book 3 in the Gadgets and Gears series. I haven't read the earlier books but had no trouble picking things up. The book is just the barest step above a chapter book aimed at beginning readers in terms of difficulty. The plot has more complications and more characters, but the narrator keeps interpolating paragraphs that explain what big words mean. The setting is steampunk-ish. The POV is a dog who's following a boy inventor around. The stakes are actually life and death, and someone dies (a villain sacrificing himself).
Krentz, Jayne Ann. Untouchable - This was a fairly bog standard Krentz romance with a mystery plot to give the characters something to do. It wraps up a trilogy and relies a bit on a villain with a throughline of involvement. Krentz's books usually have the conflict external to the romance, using it as a reason for the hero and heroine to met and spend time together while under threat. The presence of some sort of psychic powers runs about 50-50.
Tamaki, Mariko. Lumberjanes: Unicorn Power! - Sometimes, I really liked the style of this; other times, I winced because the prose clunked terribly. The tone that the story seemed to be aiming at is that sort of detached feeling of absurdity where events and facts follow from each other logically but aren't anchored to the reader's reality. That fits Lumberjanes, but it's really damned hard to pull off entirely in text, especially when trying to keep the prose at a level that will work for elementary school kids who haven't necessarily read the comics. I think this works more often than it doesn't, but YMMV.
Started but not finished:
Enders, Giulia. Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ - This book is straddles categories for me in terms of containing some information that I didn't know and that seems to be accurate, some information that I'm dubious about the accuracy of, and some omissions. The first category is mostly anatomical and neurological. The second category (comprising the second half of the book) focuses on gut flora and sings the praises of probiotics. I believe that gut flora are important; I'm simply not convinced by probiotics or by the idea that we have anything like this level of understanding about our microbiomes. The third category is mostly me going, "But you don't even mention x, y, or z thing even I know about!" At any rate, I read the first half of the book with interested and then skipped around in the second half. There's a waitlist at the library, and I'm not sufficiently interested in the author's assertions about gut flora to try to get this book a third time. (To reiterate-- I don't think the author's wrong that the bacteria that live in our guts affect a lot of things in terms of our health. I'm just wary about assertions that we understand enough yet for tinkering to be anything but a crapshoot.)
Jennings, Luke. Codename Villanelle - I bounced off of this one hard. Some of it was the prose style, and some of it was the focus and structure of the story. This is the book upon which Killing Eve is based, and I loved season 1 of Killing Eve. The book starts out with backstory/explanation for Villanelle, written from her POV. It's all in present tense and lacks a sense of interiority for the characters. They do things, but they don't feel things, at least not on the page.
Tan, Shaun. Tales from the Inner City - This is an illustrated collection of short stories and poems with both the words and the art by Shaun Tan. This reminded me of Simon Stalenhag's books, but these vignettes didn't have the sort of unified setting and narrator that Stalenhag's did. There is, though, a similar sense of getting only a partial and very limited glimpse of something bigger that operates according to alien rules. I gave up on the book because I realized that I wasn't really processing what I was reading and that I didn't care. I expect that not-me people will appreciate this book considerably more than I did.
Hamilton, Kersten. The Tick-Tock Man - Book 3 in the Gadgets and Gears series. I haven't read the earlier books but had no trouble picking things up. The book is just the barest step above a chapter book aimed at beginning readers in terms of difficulty. The plot has more complications and more characters, but the narrator keeps interpolating paragraphs that explain what big words mean. The setting is steampunk-ish. The POV is a dog who's following a boy inventor around. The stakes are actually life and death, and someone dies (a villain sacrificing himself).
Krentz, Jayne Ann. Untouchable - This was a fairly bog standard Krentz romance with a mystery plot to give the characters something to do. It wraps up a trilogy and relies a bit on a villain with a throughline of involvement. Krentz's books usually have the conflict external to the romance, using it as a reason for the hero and heroine to met and spend time together while under threat. The presence of some sort of psychic powers runs about 50-50.
Tamaki, Mariko. Lumberjanes: Unicorn Power! - Sometimes, I really liked the style of this; other times, I winced because the prose clunked terribly. The tone that the story seemed to be aiming at is that sort of detached feeling of absurdity where events and facts follow from each other logically but aren't anchored to the reader's reality. That fits Lumberjanes, but it's really damned hard to pull off entirely in text, especially when trying to keep the prose at a level that will work for elementary school kids who haven't necessarily read the comics. I think this works more often than it doesn't, but YMMV.
Started but not finished:
Enders, Giulia. Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ - This book is straddles categories for me in terms of containing some information that I didn't know and that seems to be accurate, some information that I'm dubious about the accuracy of, and some omissions. The first category is mostly anatomical and neurological. The second category (comprising the second half of the book) focuses on gut flora and sings the praises of probiotics. I believe that gut flora are important; I'm simply not convinced by probiotics or by the idea that we have anything like this level of understanding about our microbiomes. The third category is mostly me going, "But you don't even mention x, y, or z thing even I know about!" At any rate, I read the first half of the book with interested and then skipped around in the second half. There's a waitlist at the library, and I'm not sufficiently interested in the author's assertions about gut flora to try to get this book a third time. (To reiterate-- I don't think the author's wrong that the bacteria that live in our guts affect a lot of things in terms of our health. I'm just wary about assertions that we understand enough yet for tinkering to be anything but a crapshoot.)
Jennings, Luke. Codename Villanelle - I bounced off of this one hard. Some of it was the prose style, and some of it was the focus and structure of the story. This is the book upon which Killing Eve is based, and I loved season 1 of Killing Eve. The book starts out with backstory/explanation for Villanelle, written from her POV. It's all in present tense and lacks a sense of interiority for the characters. They do things, but they don't feel things, at least not on the page.
Tan, Shaun. Tales from the Inner City - This is an illustrated collection of short stories and poems with both the words and the art by Shaun Tan. This reminded me of Simon Stalenhag's books, but these vignettes didn't have the sort of unified setting and narrator that Stalenhag's did. There is, though, a similar sense of getting only a partial and very limited glimpse of something bigger that operates according to alien rules. I gave up on the book because I realized that I wasn't really processing what I was reading and that I didn't care. I expect that not-me people will appreciate this book considerably more than I did.
