Book Logging
Sep. 17th, 2015 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckCastle, Jayne. Siren's Call - I've been trying to figure out what I like about this author's romances. I think that it may actually be that the hero and heroine are pretty much never in conflict with each other. There's always an external conflict (and it's usually very, very easy to spot the bad guy), and I deal with that better than with big misunderstandings and horrible angst about being unworthy or having terrible past secrets. I have a very, very hard time finding romance novels that work for me.
Here - I had more trouble following this graphic novel than I expected. The conceit is that it's the story of a single location that's shown in small bits over millions of years. Each double page spread has windows (one, two, or even three) within it that show parts of the space at a different time than the main spread does. There's a date on each window, and the artist returns to the same time period more than once. There's even sometimes dialog. I couldn't always tell the people apart from each other, so following the 20th and 21st century stories was harder.
High, Philip E. Speaking of Dinosaurs - I think I tried reading this one before and didn't finish it-- The first half was familiar to me, but the second half wasn't, and I'd rated it on GoodReads. I'd given it three stars, and I have no idea at all what I was thinking. This is not a good book by any stretch of the definition. It's fairly dull, without much story tension. The science is silly (and was even when the book was first written). It has the features that seem to be common to most of High's books in terms of alien meddling, the emergence of homo superior, and the existence of soul mates. I really enjoyed some of High's books in high school and college. I'm not sure if those were better books or if I'm pickier now.
Maddy Kettle: The Adventure of the Thimblewitch - I didn't like the art of this very much. The story was reasonable. The main character is a girl whose parents have been turned into rats by the Thimblewitch and then snatched by spider-demons (I forget the exact term used for them in the book). The story moves along briskly, and nobody turns out to be actually evil, just desperate. There's a clear set up for further adventures.
The Misadventures of Salem Hyde 3: Cookie Catastrophe - This book continues the adventures of a young (elementary school age) witch who's trying to learn to control her magic while hiding the fact that she has it. In this set of adventures, she joins the (if I'm recalling correctly) Squirrel Scouts. First she has to sell cookies. Then she and her troop go on a camping trip.
The Misadventures of Salem Hyde 4: Dinosaur Dilemma - This time, the young witch makes life size dinosaur models come to life as she tries to figure out an easy way to complete her science project (trying to get her mentor/familiar to do it for her didn't work).
Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip v.2-3 - I think I like the comic strips better than the novels. I don't mind the characters wandering in and out quite so much, and I think it's easier for me to deal with the characters at a little bit of a remove. I don't tend to engage as closely with characters in comics as I do with characters in text. It also helps that each volume has about six self-contained stories. Those are more easily digested right now than a longer story would be.
Three Thieves, Book One: Tower of Treasure - I didn't fall in love with this one, but I am going to pick up v.2 from the library. I think part of it is that the quest to find a missing family member is something I've seen a zillion times before. The fact that the questing character is a teenage girl isn't quite enough to make it different. I was more interested in the supporting characters (including the antagonists) than in the main character.
Tiny Titans: Penguins in the Batcave! - Short, cute and very, very silly. There wasn't really enough there to get into. Each story was two to four pages long, and the entire book can't have been more than thirty pages, including the cast list and study questions (?!). I will probably read all that the library has, but I don't expect I'll remember any details at all.
Tiny Titans: Report Card Pickup! - See above.
Tiny Titans: Sidekick City Elementary - I'm a little frustrated because I can't tell most of the female characters apart. I don't know if it's that I don't know them as well or if it's that they tend to dress alike while the boys have much more distinctive costumes. I think there's a tendency for the female characters to be drawn as generic little girls while the male characters look a lot more like their older incarnations. I don't know.
Books started but not finished:
Ashford, Barbara. Spellcast - I don't remember where I saw this recommended or what the person said about it. I had to get it interlibrary loan (which feels weird to do for a paperback sort of fantasy sort of romance). I liked what I read of it. There was a fair amount of theater stuff, not as much as I wanted because I really like theater stuff but enough to convince me that the author knew the plays and the theater in general. The magic started pretty low key. It was obviously magic, but I could see how the people involved might not spot it. I ended up skipping around a bit in the book. I just found that I couldn't deal with the ending. It was a good, solid ending with things happening the way they needed to, but I'd been expecting a romance novel ending, and this decidedly wasn't. I think I might have finished the book if I'd been reading a month ago or a month from now. I may try the sequel later on. I just hope that that doesn't undo what happened in this first book in pursuit of a HEA.
Dodd, Christina. One Kiss from You - I only got through five to ten pages of this. This is the book with the title research fail that had an unmarried woman referred to as a duchess because her father was a duke. I'm pretty sure that this specific book wasn't the one that was recommended to me, but I can't for the life of me remember which one was. Our library has fairly rapid turnover on romance novels and pretty much never bothers to replace those that fall apart or go missing unless they're extremely recent, so it could have been anything. I think I wouldn't have finished this, even without the research difficulty. The basic scenario was very iddy, but it didn't actually make any sense at all, given the setting-- The heroine is an impoverished relative pretending to be her cousin, the actual 'duchess,' whose father staked her while he was gambling with the utterly ruthless hero who demanded that the duchess come live with him (apparently unchaperoned) and accompany him to ton events. True love, complicated by plans for revenge (of course), will ensue. WTF?
Grayson, Kristine. Wickedly Charming - I just couldn't get into this one. I liked the basic idea of two fairy tale characters who wouldn't normally be matched up (the Prince and the Wicked Step-mother) entering the mundane world and finding love with each other, but I kept putting the book down because I wasn't strongly engaged. I did try opening it at a couple of points later in the story to see if there was anything to draw me in. My main conclusion was that I really couldn't imagine any sensible parent naming a daughter Imperia. It's just asking for trouble.
Holt, Victoria. Mask of the Enchantress - I just wasn't into the style in which this was written. I know that going back into a character's early childhood is a thing that some authors do with this sort of first person narrative, but I got annoyed with it and wasn't at all intrigued by what was going on. It seemed like a lot of set up to slog through before getting to the story proper, and it wasn't making me like the point of view character any better.
Lowell, Elizabeth. Love Song - I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered to check this one out if I'd realized that it involved near drowning and a lot of time on boats. That sort of thing sets off a bit of a phobic reaction in me and made me reluctant to go forward with the book. It does seem to be an inter-racial romance, and that may appeal to some readers who, unlike me, can get past the beginning of the book. I have no idea at all how well the story is handled, so I can't rec or anti-rec.
Manga Guide to the Universe - I kept feeling irritated by the main characters in the frame story for this. I also had trouble when the astronomy professor said that a geocentric model of the universe could explain what we observe about the heavens. That's pretty much when I put the book down for good. I just don't think that, at this point, that's true. We've observed too much that just wouldn't work in a geocentric model. If he'd said that it could explain what most people observe with their naked eyes, I'd probably have accepted it because the geocentric model is kind of intuitive (and wrong!) in the same way that the idea of air not being anything at all is intuitive (and also wrong). There's a lot of the universe that looks one way until we have enough information to discover how it really works.
Here - I had more trouble following this graphic novel than I expected. The conceit is that it's the story of a single location that's shown in small bits over millions of years. Each double page spread has windows (one, two, or even three) within it that show parts of the space at a different time than the main spread does. There's a date on each window, and the artist returns to the same time period more than once. There's even sometimes dialog. I couldn't always tell the people apart from each other, so following the 20th and 21st century stories was harder.
High, Philip E. Speaking of Dinosaurs - I think I tried reading this one before and didn't finish it-- The first half was familiar to me, but the second half wasn't, and I'd rated it on GoodReads. I'd given it three stars, and I have no idea at all what I was thinking. This is not a good book by any stretch of the definition. It's fairly dull, without much story tension. The science is silly (and was even when the book was first written). It has the features that seem to be common to most of High's books in terms of alien meddling, the emergence of homo superior, and the existence of soul mates. I really enjoyed some of High's books in high school and college. I'm not sure if those were better books or if I'm pickier now.
Maddy Kettle: The Adventure of the Thimblewitch - I didn't like the art of this very much. The story was reasonable. The main character is a girl whose parents have been turned into rats by the Thimblewitch and then snatched by spider-demons (I forget the exact term used for them in the book). The story moves along briskly, and nobody turns out to be actually evil, just desperate. There's a clear set up for further adventures.
The Misadventures of Salem Hyde 3: Cookie Catastrophe - This book continues the adventures of a young (elementary school age) witch who's trying to learn to control her magic while hiding the fact that she has it. In this set of adventures, she joins the (if I'm recalling correctly) Squirrel Scouts. First she has to sell cookies. Then she and her troop go on a camping trip.
The Misadventures of Salem Hyde 4: Dinosaur Dilemma - This time, the young witch makes life size dinosaur models come to life as she tries to figure out an easy way to complete her science project (trying to get her mentor/familiar to do it for her didn't work).
Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip v.2-3 - I think I like the comic strips better than the novels. I don't mind the characters wandering in and out quite so much, and I think it's easier for me to deal with the characters at a little bit of a remove. I don't tend to engage as closely with characters in comics as I do with characters in text. It also helps that each volume has about six self-contained stories. Those are more easily digested right now than a longer story would be.
Three Thieves, Book One: Tower of Treasure - I didn't fall in love with this one, but I am going to pick up v.2 from the library. I think part of it is that the quest to find a missing family member is something I've seen a zillion times before. The fact that the questing character is a teenage girl isn't quite enough to make it different. I was more interested in the supporting characters (including the antagonists) than in the main character.
Tiny Titans: Penguins in the Batcave! - Short, cute and very, very silly. There wasn't really enough there to get into. Each story was two to four pages long, and the entire book can't have been more than thirty pages, including the cast list and study questions (?!). I will probably read all that the library has, but I don't expect I'll remember any details at all.
Tiny Titans: Report Card Pickup! - See above.
Tiny Titans: Sidekick City Elementary - I'm a little frustrated because I can't tell most of the female characters apart. I don't know if it's that I don't know them as well or if it's that they tend to dress alike while the boys have much more distinctive costumes. I think there's a tendency for the female characters to be drawn as generic little girls while the male characters look a lot more like their older incarnations. I don't know.
Books started but not finished:
Ashford, Barbara. Spellcast - I don't remember where I saw this recommended or what the person said about it. I had to get it interlibrary loan (which feels weird to do for a paperback sort of fantasy sort of romance). I liked what I read of it. There was a fair amount of theater stuff, not as much as I wanted because I really like theater stuff but enough to convince me that the author knew the plays and the theater in general. The magic started pretty low key. It was obviously magic, but I could see how the people involved might not spot it. I ended up skipping around a bit in the book. I just found that I couldn't deal with the ending. It was a good, solid ending with things happening the way they needed to, but I'd been expecting a romance novel ending, and this decidedly wasn't. I think I might have finished the book if I'd been reading a month ago or a month from now. I may try the sequel later on. I just hope that that doesn't undo what happened in this first book in pursuit of a HEA.
Dodd, Christina. One Kiss from You - I only got through five to ten pages of this. This is the book with the title research fail that had an unmarried woman referred to as a duchess because her father was a duke. I'm pretty sure that this specific book wasn't the one that was recommended to me, but I can't for the life of me remember which one was. Our library has fairly rapid turnover on romance novels and pretty much never bothers to replace those that fall apart or go missing unless they're extremely recent, so it could have been anything. I think I wouldn't have finished this, even without the research difficulty. The basic scenario was very iddy, but it didn't actually make any sense at all, given the setting-- The heroine is an impoverished relative pretending to be her cousin, the actual 'duchess,' whose father staked her while he was gambling with the utterly ruthless hero who demanded that the duchess come live with him (apparently unchaperoned) and accompany him to ton events. True love, complicated by plans for revenge (of course), will ensue. WTF?
Grayson, Kristine. Wickedly Charming - I just couldn't get into this one. I liked the basic idea of two fairy tale characters who wouldn't normally be matched up (the Prince and the Wicked Step-mother) entering the mundane world and finding love with each other, but I kept putting the book down because I wasn't strongly engaged. I did try opening it at a couple of points later in the story to see if there was anything to draw me in. My main conclusion was that I really couldn't imagine any sensible parent naming a daughter Imperia. It's just asking for trouble.
Holt, Victoria. Mask of the Enchantress - I just wasn't into the style in which this was written. I know that going back into a character's early childhood is a thing that some authors do with this sort of first person narrative, but I got annoyed with it and wasn't at all intrigued by what was going on. It seemed like a lot of set up to slog through before getting to the story proper, and it wasn't making me like the point of view character any better.
Lowell, Elizabeth. Love Song - I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered to check this one out if I'd realized that it involved near drowning and a lot of time on boats. That sort of thing sets off a bit of a phobic reaction in me and made me reluctant to go forward with the book. It does seem to be an inter-racial romance, and that may appeal to some readers who, unlike me, can get past the beginning of the book. I have no idea at all how well the story is handled, so I can't rec or anti-rec.
Manga Guide to the Universe - I kept feeling irritated by the main characters in the frame story for this. I also had trouble when the astronomy professor said that a geocentric model of the universe could explain what we observe about the heavens. That's pretty much when I put the book down for good. I just don't think that, at this point, that's true. We've observed too much that just wouldn't work in a geocentric model. If he'd said that it could explain what most people observe with their naked eyes, I'd probably have accepted it because the geocentric model is kind of intuitive (and wrong!) in the same way that the idea of air not being anything at all is intuitive (and also wrong). There's a lot of the universe that looks one way until we have enough information to discover how it really works.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-18 02:06 pm (UTC)Although, oddly enough, I don't care for Victoria Holt, but love her historical biographical novels (part fiction, part fact) written as Jean Plaidy.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-18 02:13 pm (UTC)I'll have to try a Jean Plaidy book. I'm not sure I ever have.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-18 02:17 pm (UTC)I've read several of Jean Plaidy's - I've enjoyed her Tudor based novels particularly but I've liked almost all of the ones I have read - I didn't care for her book about George III, but it may have been part of a trilogy, I felt it ended at a rather strange point and most of her books seem to have natural ending points.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-18 04:01 pm (UTC)Have you read any of these? Are there any you'd consider a good starting point?
The Reluctant Queen
The Murder in the Tower
The Princess of Celle
Queen of This Realm
The Wandering Prince
Epitaph for Three Women
Madame Serpent
The Vow on the Heron
The Queen's Husband
Mary, Queen of France
The Queen's Secret
Victoria Victorious
no subject
Date: 2015-09-19 03:03 pm (UTC)I'd recommend all of them, but my favourite of all her books are her stories of King Charles II and The Wandering Prince is the first in that trilogy and it stands alone completely as well, so that would be my first rec.
Mary, Queen Of France is the story of King Henry VIII's sister and is also really interesting.
The Murder In The Tower has quite a few twists and turns.
The Queen's Husband is the story of Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-25 04:54 pm (UTC)Oh, well. I'll try one of the others.