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Feb. 4th, 2015 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckAbbott, Elizabeth. A History of Mistresses - This was very modular. I felt like, as I read, I could stop at any point and not really have missed anything. The entire thing was story after story about specific women without much sense of the common threads between them.
Andrews, Donna. The Nightingale Before Christmas - This time the main character is overseeing a show house in which several different interior decorators have been assigned rooms to decorate. Then one of the participants gets murdered. Andrews is really good at sketching in characters and at the rhythms of regular life. I'm still not altogether comfortable with the main character's children. They never quite feel like they're actually whatever age they're supposed to be, but that's a minor flaw in an otherwise quite thoroughly enjoyable book.
Angleberger, Tom. The Strange Case of the Origami Yoda - The books in this series are wildly popular at Cordelia's school. She insisted, a couple of years back, that we buy her all of those that were then out, and Scott read them too. I didn't get around to the series until just now. I enjoyed it enough that I'll have to dig the next book out of Cordelia's room and read. This one was a quick read. It took me about half an hour. The story is episodic-- One kid is trying to decide whether or not to follow advice given by a little puppet, so he gathers the stories of people who have gotten the puppet's advice in the past.
Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking - GoodReads recommended this, and the library had it, so I thought I'd try it. It was a collection of page long comics about a bear. It was moderately amusing but no more than that. It was also part of a series aimed at very early readers.
Hilda and the Black Hound - Hilda is having trouble fitting in in the city, so her mother signs her up to be (I think) a Sparrow Scout. Hilda keeps getting distracted from scouting activities by supernatural critters whose problems she tries to solve.
Otto's Backwards Day - This was part of the same early readers series that the Benjamin Bear book was. It had more story, but felt like it had less substance. It's a about a kid who ventures into a backwards world in pursuit of a thief who has taken his birthday cake and presents.
Owly and Wormy: Friends All Aflutter! - This was really short and formatted as a picture book rather than a graphic novel. It was cute, and I'm not sorry that I read it, but there wasn't much substance to it.
The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents: Macbeth - This was cute. The animals in the zoo perform a version of Macbeth that actually has no deaths.
Started but not finished:
Brown, Nancy Marie. The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman - I read about two thirds of this, but I realized that I was forcing myself through it and that I wasn't absorbing any of the information as I read. I think part of the problem is that there's so very little to go on that the author couldn't construct a narrative (but definitely wanted to).
Hilda and the Troll - I didn't finish this because it's the exact same book as Hildafolk. The only change is the title. Even the cover illustration is the same. I think I'm going to leave a review on the library website to that effect so that people know that, if they've read one of the books, they don't need to check out the other.
Huff, Tanya. The Future Falls - I was surprised not to finish this one because I've sped through the other two books in the series. I just couldn't get myself really interested in this one. I renewed it a couple of times and just didn't finish it.
McCall Smith, Alexander. The Handsome Man's De Luxe Cafe - I was looking forward to this book because usually I just breeze on through the books in this series. This time, however, I just couldn't. Too much of the plot hinged on a character I liked trying something big and failing miserably. When I realized where things were going, I looked at the end, and I wasn't pleased by what I found. I just couldn't finish this one.
Tiptree, James. Up the Walls of the World - I only read the first chapter of this. The style didn't work for me. GoodReads has been recommending a lot of Tiptree to me, just not the titles that my library actually has.
Magazines read:
Scientific American August 2014
Scientific American November 2014
Scientific American December 2014
Smithsonian November 2014
Smithsonian December 2014
Andrews, Donna. The Nightingale Before Christmas - This time the main character is overseeing a show house in which several different interior decorators have been assigned rooms to decorate. Then one of the participants gets murdered. Andrews is really good at sketching in characters and at the rhythms of regular life. I'm still not altogether comfortable with the main character's children. They never quite feel like they're actually whatever age they're supposed to be, but that's a minor flaw in an otherwise quite thoroughly enjoyable book.
Angleberger, Tom. The Strange Case of the Origami Yoda - The books in this series are wildly popular at Cordelia's school. She insisted, a couple of years back, that we buy her all of those that were then out, and Scott read them too. I didn't get around to the series until just now. I enjoyed it enough that I'll have to dig the next book out of Cordelia's room and read. This one was a quick read. It took me about half an hour. The story is episodic-- One kid is trying to decide whether or not to follow advice given by a little puppet, so he gathers the stories of people who have gotten the puppet's advice in the past.
Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking - GoodReads recommended this, and the library had it, so I thought I'd try it. It was a collection of page long comics about a bear. It was moderately amusing but no more than that. It was also part of a series aimed at very early readers.
Hilda and the Black Hound - Hilda is having trouble fitting in in the city, so her mother signs her up to be (I think) a Sparrow Scout. Hilda keeps getting distracted from scouting activities by supernatural critters whose problems she tries to solve.
Otto's Backwards Day - This was part of the same early readers series that the Benjamin Bear book was. It had more story, but felt like it had less substance. It's a about a kid who ventures into a backwards world in pursuit of a thief who has taken his birthday cake and presents.
Owly and Wormy: Friends All Aflutter! - This was really short and formatted as a picture book rather than a graphic novel. It was cute, and I'm not sorry that I read it, but there wasn't much substance to it.
The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents: Macbeth - This was cute. The animals in the zoo perform a version of Macbeth that actually has no deaths.
Started but not finished:
Brown, Nancy Marie. The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman - I read about two thirds of this, but I realized that I was forcing myself through it and that I wasn't absorbing any of the information as I read. I think part of the problem is that there's so very little to go on that the author couldn't construct a narrative (but definitely wanted to).
Hilda and the Troll - I didn't finish this because it's the exact same book as Hildafolk. The only change is the title. Even the cover illustration is the same. I think I'm going to leave a review on the library website to that effect so that people know that, if they've read one of the books, they don't need to check out the other.
Huff, Tanya. The Future Falls - I was surprised not to finish this one because I've sped through the other two books in the series. I just couldn't get myself really interested in this one. I renewed it a couple of times and just didn't finish it.
McCall Smith, Alexander. The Handsome Man's De Luxe Cafe - I was looking forward to this book because usually I just breeze on through the books in this series. This time, however, I just couldn't. Too much of the plot hinged on a character I liked trying something big and failing miserably. When I realized where things were going, I looked at the end, and I wasn't pleased by what I found. I just couldn't finish this one.
Tiptree, James. Up the Walls of the World - I only read the first chapter of this. The style didn't work for me. GoodReads has been recommending a lot of Tiptree to me, just not the titles that my library actually has.
Magazines read:
Scientific American August 2014
Scientific American November 2014
Scientific American December 2014
Smithsonian November 2014
Smithsonian December 2014
