Book Logging
Dec. 25th, 2015 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckAndrews, Donna. Lord of the Wings - This is another installment in Andrews’ Meg Langslow mysteries. I can’t remember if it’s #16 or #17, but it’s way up there. Fortunately, the books are still a lot of fun. Andrews doesn’t work particularly hard at making the murders creative. Instead, she focuses on the community she’s created through the course of the series and has twenty or thirty continuing characters who all play their parts in the community and contribute their bit to events. The town is having a Halloween festival in an effort to bring in some much needed tourist revenue, but they’re having problems because the event planner they hired isn’t actually competent. And then a tourist turns up dead. The whole thing is very funny and charming and comfortable. I don’t really care so much about the mysteries in these books except as an excuse to get the characters to interact. I’d quite happily have read about the Halloween festival without the murders. I am also pleased to note that Meg’s twin sons finally seemed to be acting their ages— In previous books, it had nagged at me that, as three year olds, they acted in ways that, to me, seemed like they were older and that, as five year olds, they acted in ways that seemed too young. Now they’re six, and I could buy them as six year olds.
Baba Yaga’s Assistant - This graphic novel pretty much gives the reader what the title promises. The main character sees an ad saying that Baba Yaga is looking for an assistant. Growing up, she heard Baba Yaga stories from her grandmother (who seems to have had her own adventures with Baba Yaga in her youth). The Baba Yaga here still sets impossible tasks with death as the price of failure and still brings home bad children who she intends to eat, but the main character meets every challenge and isn’t about to let kids get eaten even though she very much wants to work for Baba Yaga.
Castle Waiting v. 2 - It’s been many years (possibly more than a decade) since I read the first book in this series, but everything felt comfortable when I started. I couldn’t remember the specifics of the first book, but the characters are nicely distinct, both in appearance and in personality. I’m really very sad that there isn’t more. I don’t think I’ve read Castle Waiting: The Brambly Hedge which is backstory, but I want to know what comes next. Does anyone know— the blurb for Castle Waiting 2: Solicitine mentions a character I don’t recognize, Peaceful Warren. Is Castle Waiting 2: Solicitine a different book? The Wikipedia entry for the series doesn’t mention it at all.
Hereville: How Mirka Caught a Fish - I really and truly adore this series, and I think this one might be the best so far. It has a lot more of Mirka interacting with her family and of the things she’s doing having repercussions for her family. I enjoyed getting to know Mirka’s step-mother better. The villain here is actually pretty darned scary, too.
Little Robot - This was cute but kind of… How to put it? The whole thing was very bare bones, and I wanted more context. There’s not much dialog in the book, and a considerable chunk of what is there is in robot noises as opposed to human words. At first, I actually thought there wasn’t going to be any text at all. I’m not sure how much the child’s words added. I’m not sure they were superfluous, but I think the story could have worked without them, too, just maybe requiring a little more work from the reader.
Monster on the Hill - I really have no idea why my library has this cataloged as an adult graphic novel. It’s humorous and not particularly scary or violent. There’s absolutely zero sex (no female characters to speak of). The conceit is that every town has a local monster that will come into town occasionally to cause some property damage and scare people silly. The monster of the title has a problem— He’s depressed and not able to do his job. The leaders of the town blackmail a mad scientist into going to talk to the monster and see if he can fix the problem. The final problem has a clever solution instead of a big fight, and I appreciated that.
Started but not finished:
Babbage, Charles. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher - There are two reasons I didn’t finish this, and neither has to do with not being interested. The first thing is that I couldn’t renew it any more because it was an interlibrary loan book. The second was that my eyes glazed over every time Babbage got deep into talking about the workings of the difference engine and/or analytical engine. Not only do I not have the background to understand him, but I’m also not interested in working that hard. I enjoyed Babbage’s anecdotes quite a lot. He seems to have looked at everything from a different angle than most people did (which makes sense). Still, reading about him makes me sad. He kept turning from whatever he was working on to chase a better idea and ended up with nothing at all.
Bad Machinery 1, The Case of the Team Spirit - I read 1/3 to 1/2 of this graphic novel. I never quite managed to connect the images of the characters to their names in spite of having several pages devoted to nothing but introducing the characters individually. I’m really bad at that when I deal with graphic novels and webcomics generally. I did end up wondering why on earth our library considers this an adult graphic novel as opposed to a teen graphic novel. I didn’t see any graphic violence or nudity or even particularly strong language in the parts I looked at. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t finish this as there was nothing actively bad about it. I think I just wasn’t finding anything actively compelling to make me feel like continuing.
Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards - I may try this one again later when my brain is fully online, but I couldn’t focus enough to get into this one. Part of it was that I was losing track of who was who in spite of the characters not being drawn anything alike. I was thinking of them all as 'that guy' without differentiating them. I also… I wasn’t feeling sympathetic with the level of obsession that was required for these folks to accomplish the things they did. I did, however, read all of the end notes and enjoy them, so maybe what I need is a prose book with a bit more distance from the subject.
Day, Felicia. You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) - I read about fifty pages of this and then stopped because, for no reason I could figure out, I couldn’t go on. I had the book sitting by my bed for about three weeks, and I never managed to pick it up again. I liked Day’s style, and I was interested in hearing about her life. I don’t know… Maybe I just hit a point where I was expecting something terrible to happen? She was in the middle of talking about hanging out, online, on early discussion boards and rp (though she labeled it as primitive fanfic) forums and interacting with folks who seem to have been pretty much exclusively male. But there was no indication in the text that anything bad happened to her online. I got the impression that the internet was a serious lifeline for her at that point in her life. So I don’t know what set me off.
5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth and Other Useful Guides - There were some bits of this that I found genuinely funny, and others that completely grossed me out. Most of it, though, was stuff that made me feel very uncomfortable about the notion that I was supposed to find this funny.
Kendrick, Stephen. Night Watch: A Long-Lost Adventure in Which Sherlock Holmes Meets Father Brown - I got about halfway through this, and I kept picking at the details of it. The idea is that a murder has been committed at a secret gathering of representatives of a variety of faiths in London in 1902. Holmes is called in by his brother to investigate, and a very young Father Brown is there, acting as interpreter for the Vatican’s representative. I can deal with the interfaith conference being heavy on the Christians (three out of seven) because, in that time and place, it would be, but… Who selected the rabbi who is attending? Who selected the Brahmin representing Hinduism? I’d give a pass on the Buddhist representative because it’s implied that he was selected because he was known to the Anglican minister who is hosting (but who did not help organize) the gathering, but… He’s supposed to be a Japanese monk and the head of a large Buddhist monastery in Japan. All the large Buddhist monasteries got dissolved by the Meiji government in the late 1860s/early 1870s. It seems peculiar that, thirty years later, there would be a community, in Japan, large enough to put someone forward to represent all Buddhists everywhere. I also tripped over the fact that Watson talked about his Methodist upbringing and then, six pages later, mentioned something offending his Church of England soul without any recognition in the text that those are two different things.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: poems and other writings - I skipped around in this quite a bit, but I don’t think I read more than half. I had the problem that I kind of skidded off the surface of a lot of the poems. That’s a common thing for me with poetry, so it’s by no means unique to Longfellow. I actually did better with the very short poems and with the very long story poems. I didn’t like Evangeline because I’m not prepared to deal with that sort of story. Hiawatha intrigued me but mostly made me really desperate for a properly annotated study of the poem (I googled a little but didn’t find anything online that looked useful in that direction at all) that would tell me the origin of each non-English word and source the legends that Longfellow was obviously drawing on. There were bits that seemed peculiar to appear in the work of a poet of Longfellow’s background and bits (some of them the same bits) that seemed clipped, robbed of proper context and possibly as if Longfellow didn’t quite understand where those parts of the story came from or properly fit. Longfellow’s use of language appealed to me. When I touched a poem, the words flowed. Sometimes, there was a layer of formality between me and the proper flow (I think this, in addition to the tragedy, put me off of Evangeline), but I think that’s an artifact of the time period as much as an intrinsic part of Longfellow’s style.
Lowell, Elizabeth. Beautiful Sacrifice - I was doing okay with this book until I flipped to the end and got really pissed off at the heroine. Her attitude wasn’t unrealistic, but it angered me. She and the hero spend the book trying to track down some (Mayan?) ancient religious artifacts stolen from government custody. At the end of the book, most people believe that the artifacts have been destroyed, but the heroine is sure that the locals took them to use in the practice of their religion and that she can still get them back. I wanted to smack her because, if the artifacts have been taken by the descendants of the people who made them to be used for the purpose for which they were made— Well, that’s their right. No outsider is entitled to take those things away to study them and put them in a museum. Just… not. Ethics. It’s a thing.
Lowell, Elizabeth. Dangerous Refuge - I gave up on this romantic suspense novel about three chapters in. The main characters were okay, but I could spot the villains immediately, and I stumbled on another thing that will make me put a book down for good. This is the book with a character named Harold Hill. To me, Harold Hill is Robert Preston in The Music Man, and any other use of the name has to acknowledge that somehow. In this book, Harold Hill is a politician who can’t figure out what people want without three focus groups and who can’t speak off the cuff and who has no original thoughts. To me, Harold Hill is the man in this YouTube clip. I’m now zero for three on Elizabeth Lowell novels, and I’m not sure trying another is worthwhile. Then again, the main thing wrong with the first one I tried wasn’t a writing problem of any sort— I just can’t read stuff set on a boat like that.
Messner, Kate. Capture the Flag - I think I’d have liked this book better if the bad guy hadn’t been telegraphed so blatantly (for me, his name was a sure tip off). I rather liked the idea of a secret society dedicated to keeping great works of art and bits of the heritage of humanity safe and available to the public (I got the impression that the public in question was meant to be the public in the country the work came from originally, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I think I recall a mention that the society was actually founded in Latin America by people trying to preserve treasures from the Spanish, but I could be imagining it). This is a book aimed at tweens, so the danger isn’t quite as dangerous as it could be. The action is confined to a snowed in airport. I got a little frustrated because I got the impression that one of the main characters might be black but couldn’t find anything until the last chapter that confirmed it.
Rossetti, Christina. Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti - I got really ticked off at the author of the preface of this book as they went on about how there simply haven’t been any female poets with the brilliance of any of a long list of male poets and how that just goes to show. This came after a long bit of saying that Rossetti was quite good but not really all that. The preface put me off enough that I had to put the book aside for about a week, and that was frustrating because it had nothing to do with the poetry.
Spera 1 - I just didn’t click with this graphic novel. I think that a big part of it was that I found all three characters ciphers. One of them was meant to be, and I got the impression that bits and pieces about him were going to come out as things went along, but the two princesses seemed to spring out of nothing at all. The text didn’t give me any actual evidence that they were friends (or girlfriends), but them being friends was the only explanation I could see for them to travel together as they did. I could see the one princess rescuing the other just out of general humanity, but I didn’t see them continuing on together after that unless they actually liked each other. One of the princesses seemed fairly helpless, but I think finding somewhere safe to leave her would have been possible. Also, if I hadn’t had the back cover blurb, I’m not sure I would have realized that both characters were female. Neither had a name I was familiar with, and one of them wore a dress and had long hair (this was the fairly helpless one, sadly) while the other had short hair and wore pants and didn’t have visible breasts or hips. I wish that the text had established how the character thought of herself (or himself or whatever pronouns might be appropriate) because it came across as the character presenting male, and I’m not sure that was at all intended. The volume was a series of shortish chapters, each with a different artist. I didn’t look closely enough to see if there was a different writer for each; it’s just that the differences in the art were very, very obvious.
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl v.1: Squirrel Power - I read a lot of fragments of this but couldn’t bring myself to read straight through because I kept feeling too much secondhand embarrassment. The supporting characters intrigued me, and I liked the fact that the main character was willing to talk to her opponents and try to come up with an alternative solution for them. But I shan’t be trying volume 2.
Baba Yaga’s Assistant - This graphic novel pretty much gives the reader what the title promises. The main character sees an ad saying that Baba Yaga is looking for an assistant. Growing up, she heard Baba Yaga stories from her grandmother (who seems to have had her own adventures with Baba Yaga in her youth). The Baba Yaga here still sets impossible tasks with death as the price of failure and still brings home bad children who she intends to eat, but the main character meets every challenge and isn’t about to let kids get eaten even though she very much wants to work for Baba Yaga.
Castle Waiting v. 2 - It’s been many years (possibly more than a decade) since I read the first book in this series, but everything felt comfortable when I started. I couldn’t remember the specifics of the first book, but the characters are nicely distinct, both in appearance and in personality. I’m really very sad that there isn’t more. I don’t think I’ve read Castle Waiting: The Brambly Hedge which is backstory, but I want to know what comes next. Does anyone know— the blurb for Castle Waiting 2: Solicitine mentions a character I don’t recognize, Peaceful Warren. Is Castle Waiting 2: Solicitine a different book? The Wikipedia entry for the series doesn’t mention it at all.
Hereville: How Mirka Caught a Fish - I really and truly adore this series, and I think this one might be the best so far. It has a lot more of Mirka interacting with her family and of the things she’s doing having repercussions for her family. I enjoyed getting to know Mirka’s step-mother better. The villain here is actually pretty darned scary, too.
Little Robot - This was cute but kind of… How to put it? The whole thing was very bare bones, and I wanted more context. There’s not much dialog in the book, and a considerable chunk of what is there is in robot noises as opposed to human words. At first, I actually thought there wasn’t going to be any text at all. I’m not sure how much the child’s words added. I’m not sure they were superfluous, but I think the story could have worked without them, too, just maybe requiring a little more work from the reader.
Monster on the Hill - I really have no idea why my library has this cataloged as an adult graphic novel. It’s humorous and not particularly scary or violent. There’s absolutely zero sex (no female characters to speak of). The conceit is that every town has a local monster that will come into town occasionally to cause some property damage and scare people silly. The monster of the title has a problem— He’s depressed and not able to do his job. The leaders of the town blackmail a mad scientist into going to talk to the monster and see if he can fix the problem. The final problem has a clever solution instead of a big fight, and I appreciated that.
Started but not finished:
Babbage, Charles. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher - There are two reasons I didn’t finish this, and neither has to do with not being interested. The first thing is that I couldn’t renew it any more because it was an interlibrary loan book. The second was that my eyes glazed over every time Babbage got deep into talking about the workings of the difference engine and/or analytical engine. Not only do I not have the background to understand him, but I’m also not interested in working that hard. I enjoyed Babbage’s anecdotes quite a lot. He seems to have looked at everything from a different angle than most people did (which makes sense). Still, reading about him makes me sad. He kept turning from whatever he was working on to chase a better idea and ended up with nothing at all.
Bad Machinery 1, The Case of the Team Spirit - I read 1/3 to 1/2 of this graphic novel. I never quite managed to connect the images of the characters to their names in spite of having several pages devoted to nothing but introducing the characters individually. I’m really bad at that when I deal with graphic novels and webcomics generally. I did end up wondering why on earth our library considers this an adult graphic novel as opposed to a teen graphic novel. I didn’t see any graphic violence or nudity or even particularly strong language in the parts I looked at. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t finish this as there was nothing actively bad about it. I think I just wasn’t finding anything actively compelling to make me feel like continuing.
Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards - I may try this one again later when my brain is fully online, but I couldn’t focus enough to get into this one. Part of it was that I was losing track of who was who in spite of the characters not being drawn anything alike. I was thinking of them all as 'that guy' without differentiating them. I also… I wasn’t feeling sympathetic with the level of obsession that was required for these folks to accomplish the things they did. I did, however, read all of the end notes and enjoy them, so maybe what I need is a prose book with a bit more distance from the subject.
Day, Felicia. You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) - I read about fifty pages of this and then stopped because, for no reason I could figure out, I couldn’t go on. I had the book sitting by my bed for about three weeks, and I never managed to pick it up again. I liked Day’s style, and I was interested in hearing about her life. I don’t know… Maybe I just hit a point where I was expecting something terrible to happen? She was in the middle of talking about hanging out, online, on early discussion boards and rp (though she labeled it as primitive fanfic) forums and interacting with folks who seem to have been pretty much exclusively male. But there was no indication in the text that anything bad happened to her online. I got the impression that the internet was a serious lifeline for her at that point in her life. So I don’t know what set me off.
5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth and Other Useful Guides - There were some bits of this that I found genuinely funny, and others that completely grossed me out. Most of it, though, was stuff that made me feel very uncomfortable about the notion that I was supposed to find this funny.
Kendrick, Stephen. Night Watch: A Long-Lost Adventure in Which Sherlock Holmes Meets Father Brown - I got about halfway through this, and I kept picking at the details of it. The idea is that a murder has been committed at a secret gathering of representatives of a variety of faiths in London in 1902. Holmes is called in by his brother to investigate, and a very young Father Brown is there, acting as interpreter for the Vatican’s representative. I can deal with the interfaith conference being heavy on the Christians (three out of seven) because, in that time and place, it would be, but… Who selected the rabbi who is attending? Who selected the Brahmin representing Hinduism? I’d give a pass on the Buddhist representative because it’s implied that he was selected because he was known to the Anglican minister who is hosting (but who did not help organize) the gathering, but… He’s supposed to be a Japanese monk and the head of a large Buddhist monastery in Japan. All the large Buddhist monasteries got dissolved by the Meiji government in the late 1860s/early 1870s. It seems peculiar that, thirty years later, there would be a community, in Japan, large enough to put someone forward to represent all Buddhists everywhere. I also tripped over the fact that Watson talked about his Methodist upbringing and then, six pages later, mentioned something offending his Church of England soul without any recognition in the text that those are two different things.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: poems and other writings - I skipped around in this quite a bit, but I don’t think I read more than half. I had the problem that I kind of skidded off the surface of a lot of the poems. That’s a common thing for me with poetry, so it’s by no means unique to Longfellow. I actually did better with the very short poems and with the very long story poems. I didn’t like Evangeline because I’m not prepared to deal with that sort of story. Hiawatha intrigued me but mostly made me really desperate for a properly annotated study of the poem (I googled a little but didn’t find anything online that looked useful in that direction at all) that would tell me the origin of each non-English word and source the legends that Longfellow was obviously drawing on. There were bits that seemed peculiar to appear in the work of a poet of Longfellow’s background and bits (some of them the same bits) that seemed clipped, robbed of proper context and possibly as if Longfellow didn’t quite understand where those parts of the story came from or properly fit. Longfellow’s use of language appealed to me. When I touched a poem, the words flowed. Sometimes, there was a layer of formality between me and the proper flow (I think this, in addition to the tragedy, put me off of Evangeline), but I think that’s an artifact of the time period as much as an intrinsic part of Longfellow’s style.
Lowell, Elizabeth. Beautiful Sacrifice - I was doing okay with this book until I flipped to the end and got really pissed off at the heroine. Her attitude wasn’t unrealistic, but it angered me. She and the hero spend the book trying to track down some (Mayan?) ancient religious artifacts stolen from government custody. At the end of the book, most people believe that the artifacts have been destroyed, but the heroine is sure that the locals took them to use in the practice of their religion and that she can still get them back. I wanted to smack her because, if the artifacts have been taken by the descendants of the people who made them to be used for the purpose for which they were made— Well, that’s their right. No outsider is entitled to take those things away to study them and put them in a museum. Just… not. Ethics. It’s a thing.
Lowell, Elizabeth. Dangerous Refuge - I gave up on this romantic suspense novel about three chapters in. The main characters were okay, but I could spot the villains immediately, and I stumbled on another thing that will make me put a book down for good. This is the book with a character named Harold Hill. To me, Harold Hill is Robert Preston in The Music Man, and any other use of the name has to acknowledge that somehow. In this book, Harold Hill is a politician who can’t figure out what people want without three focus groups and who can’t speak off the cuff and who has no original thoughts. To me, Harold Hill is the man in this YouTube clip. I’m now zero for three on Elizabeth Lowell novels, and I’m not sure trying another is worthwhile. Then again, the main thing wrong with the first one I tried wasn’t a writing problem of any sort— I just can’t read stuff set on a boat like that.
Messner, Kate. Capture the Flag - I think I’d have liked this book better if the bad guy hadn’t been telegraphed so blatantly (for me, his name was a sure tip off). I rather liked the idea of a secret society dedicated to keeping great works of art and bits of the heritage of humanity safe and available to the public (I got the impression that the public in question was meant to be the public in the country the work came from originally, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I think I recall a mention that the society was actually founded in Latin America by people trying to preserve treasures from the Spanish, but I could be imagining it). This is a book aimed at tweens, so the danger isn’t quite as dangerous as it could be. The action is confined to a snowed in airport. I got a little frustrated because I got the impression that one of the main characters might be black but couldn’t find anything until the last chapter that confirmed it.
Rossetti, Christina. Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti - I got really ticked off at the author of the preface of this book as they went on about how there simply haven’t been any female poets with the brilliance of any of a long list of male poets and how that just goes to show. This came after a long bit of saying that Rossetti was quite good but not really all that. The preface put me off enough that I had to put the book aside for about a week, and that was frustrating because it had nothing to do with the poetry.
Spera 1 - I just didn’t click with this graphic novel. I think that a big part of it was that I found all three characters ciphers. One of them was meant to be, and I got the impression that bits and pieces about him were going to come out as things went along, but the two princesses seemed to spring out of nothing at all. The text didn’t give me any actual evidence that they were friends (or girlfriends), but them being friends was the only explanation I could see for them to travel together as they did. I could see the one princess rescuing the other just out of general humanity, but I didn’t see them continuing on together after that unless they actually liked each other. One of the princesses seemed fairly helpless, but I think finding somewhere safe to leave her would have been possible. Also, if I hadn’t had the back cover blurb, I’m not sure I would have realized that both characters were female. Neither had a name I was familiar with, and one of them wore a dress and had long hair (this was the fairly helpless one, sadly) while the other had short hair and wore pants and didn’t have visible breasts or hips. I wish that the text had established how the character thought of herself (or himself or whatever pronouns might be appropriate) because it came across as the character presenting male, and I’m not sure that was at all intended. The volume was a series of shortish chapters, each with a different artist. I didn’t look closely enough to see if there was a different writer for each; it’s just that the differences in the art were very, very obvious.
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl v.1: Squirrel Power - I read a lot of fragments of this but couldn’t bring myself to read straight through because I kept feeling too much secondhand embarrassment. The supporting characters intrigued me, and I liked the fact that the main character was willing to talk to her opponents and try to come up with an alternative solution for them. But I shan’t be trying volume 2.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-25 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-25 11:08 pm (UTC)I suspect that most people don't know the stuff I read since I'm skewing toward middle grade stuff.
Am I recalling correctly that you're Jewish? The Mirka series are a middle grade series of graphic novels about an Orthodox Jewish girl having magical adventures. There are three books so far. The first is Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. I've really enjoyed all three of them.