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Nov. 20th, 2016 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckAsterix and the Magic Carpet - Silly, silly, silly. I think these may not work for me in large doses. Maybe one or two a month? This kind of reminds me of something a friend said about a character in Ranma ½-- “He doesn’t have a personality; he has a schtick.” So zero depth and not much history. Just a lot of puns.
Beaty, Andrea. Ada Twist, Scientist - This is a picture book and very much aimed at young children. I thought it was cute. It’s about a black girl and her family. The girl is curious about everything, asking questions and performing experiments. Her parents have to adapt. For some reason, I thought this was a graphic novel when I put a hold on it.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Sonnets from the Portuguese - Eh. There were some phrases I liked, but mostly these didn’t work for me. Reading these felt like trying to hold water in my fist, and I think I wouldn’t have finished the book if it hadn’t been short. This particular edition also used a font that I had to work at reading.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden (annotated by Gretchen Gerzina) - There were a lot fewer annotations than I expected which disappointed me. The annotator also really, really wanted to draw parallels between Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden on what I considered fairly flimsy grounds and insisted that Burnett only used the word ‘wuthering’ as a reference to Wuthering Heights. That made me dubious about everything else she said, even the things I knew to be accurate.
Case Closed 28 (Detective Conan 28) - This is another volume with a cliffhangerish ending. In this case, none of the on-going characters are at risk, but the murder has just been discovered, and nobody’s had time to start gathering clues yet. I’ve read enough of these to have some guesses, but who knows? The other cases in the volume didn’t seem compelling to me, either, which might be about me being tired in general or might be about me needing to wait a couple of months before I read more of this series. I just worry that the library will lose their last copies of some of these volumes before I get to them and not replace them. They haven’t purchased anything after v.34.
Lackey, Mercedes. Closer to the Chest - It’s just as well that I don’t read these for the plot because Lackey didn’t even try to be subtle or complicated here. If I hadn’t known who the villains were ten pages in, I would have had to be willfully ignoring it. I took four weeks to read this which is unusual for one of these books, but a large part of it was that holding the book made my hands hurt. At any rate, this is bog standard Lackey.
Lucy & Andy Neanderthal - This is Jeffrey Brown’s latest graphic novel. I think that this will appeal to people who’ve liked his other stuff (which I did). The characters don’t have as much depth as I’d like, but the book really wasn’t long enough to give much. A fair number of pages are given over to information about what is currently known or theorized about Neanderthals.
Lumberjanes 4 - It’s very frustrating that I can remember who the characters are in terms of personality and such but can’t remember the names. Jen and Rosie are the only ones I can name accurately. I still adore this series because it’s got lots of girls and because they’re all individuals. I enjoyed the hints of a bigger picture in this volume and am very curious to see where they lead.
Mighty Jack - This is another Ben Hatke graphic novel, the start of a series. This one ends in a cliffhanger, so I kind of wish I’d waited until the series was done. Jack plants a magic garden, and he and his sister and a female friend tend it. Then things go sideways… I think that people who liked Zita will like Jack.
Teen Titans, Go! Heroes on Patrol; Teen Titans, Go! Truth, Justice, Pizza! - The episodes in these two volumes reminded me more of the silly episodes of the older Teen Titans cartoon series than of the Teen Titans, Go! cartoon series. They were longer and more substantial, generally speaking, than I expected, and there was a bit more of lessons learned.
Tintin: Cigars of the Pharaoh - I don’t think I’d recommend this one to anyone. The adventures aren’t actually interesting because they’re entirely Tintin stumbling on things in several different places around the world by complete chance and not being at all intelligent, and there’re a lot of racist caricatures.
What Did You Eat Yesterday? 3 - I really wish that I was more into cooking and food because the cooking scenes are so very detailed. I still really like the characters. They’re so very ordinary that I feel like they’re people I could meet.
What Would Dewey Do? - This is a collection of strips from the webcomic Unshelved. The webcomic is about working in a public library. It’s funny (and even funnier if you’ve ever worked in a library because so much is true).
Yoko Tsuno: Daughter of the Wind - The pages on this library book were loose, so I was kind of hesitant to open it far enough to read it. I suppose that the books in this series being poor quality in terms of binding would explain why the local library doesn’t have the full set. I don’t actually know if this is the next one in original publication order because I’m currently going by what’s on the shelf when I go looking. This volume gives some information about Yoko’s family and childhood.
Yoko Tsuno: On the Edge of Life - This has Yoko visiting a friend and finding another mystery that looks like one thing but is revealed as something else on further investigation. I’m not convinced that the backstory for the mystery quite works, but that may be because I’m reading it in 2016 instead of 1980.
Yoko Tsuno: The Prey and the Ghost - I lost track of who was who in this particular story and so was greatly confused by a certain character’s actions. This one didn’t involve weird science but rather was a straightforward mystery.
Yoko Tsuno: The Time Spiral - It says something when I get to a bit of ‘science’ in a comic and wave my hands in the air, going, “No! No! No! Antimatter does not work that way!” Apart from that, I enjoyed this reasonably well. A time traveler from the distant future works with Yoko to keep that future world from being destroyed.
Started but not finished:
Dane, Lauren. Laid Bare - This is a M/M/F erotic romance. I read bits here and there but not the whole thing. There was a wait list at the library, and I simply couldn't focus on reading in order to finish the book in time. I didn't dislike what I read, but I wasn't sufficiently into it to care that I hadn't finished. The sex scenes were focused on being emotionally sweet as opposed to emotionally complicated which left me feeling like something was missing there.
Four Points. Book 1, Compass South - I only got about 40 pages into this before I had to return it to the library. Up until the day it was due, it had been renewable, so I hadn’t given it priority. I will check it out again, later, and finish it because I’m intrigued to find out what’s going on. I do wish, though, that there were more female characters. Maybe that will get better later on?
Kennedy, James. The Order of the Odd-Fish - This was a peculiar read. I wanted very much to like it, but I didn’t. I never connected with any of the characters, and the wackiness felt strained in a way that made it not wacky. I generally ended up just frowning at the parts I’m pretty sure I was supposed to find laugh out loud funny. Maybe the humor works better for tween readers (the intended audience).
Jughead v.1 - I think that my mind basically rebelled at the notion of having a long plot in any sort of Archie related comic. I haven’t looked at those since I was buying Archie Digests in my teens because they were reliably funny. I tend to expect stories that take, at most, a dozen pages. So, in terms of what I read of this one, I most enjoyed the dream sequences because they best fit my expectations.
Monstress. Volume 1: Awakening - This is very pretty, but it went too far into horror for me. Also, it needs warnings for child harm/death which is something I can only deal with on rare occasions.
New Teen Titans Omnibus 1 - This book is huge and heavy and therefore hard to read for more than a few minutes at a time. I didn’t finish it because I had to return it to the library because someone else wanted it. I got cranky about a couple of bits I read that were a little too… How to put it? Some bits were too on the nose, and some bits were obviously written by people who had done absolutely minimal research before writing what they’d planned to write anyway. The characters did grow on me, though, so I wanted to go back and finish the collection, but the copy the library had seems to have vanished in as much as the title on my holds list is no longer a link to a record in the catalog. I have no idea what can have happened to it because it was in good shape when I had it. I suppose the person who got it right after me might have lost or destroyed it somehow. Hard to say.
Pterror Over Paris and the Demon of the Eiffel Tower - I really had problems with the art on this graphic novel. All of the faces were… kind of creepy. I was kind of interested in the story, but I couldn’t handle the art.
Stevens, Wallace. Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose - What I read of this, I selected by opening the book at random several times. I enjoyed some of the poetry, and my Gdoc with fic title ideas now has a vast amount of snippets from Stevens, but I’m not sure that I actually followed any of what I read. The difficulty was more obvious with the prose because it was mostly literary analysis of the type that I find utterly opaque. Also, I’m not sure that Stevens ever encountered a long word that he didn’t prefer over anything simpler and more commonplace. Sometimes, using words like that increases precision, but in this case and for this reader, it just increased irritation and confusion.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Children of Hurin - Audiobook read by Christopher Lee. The first CD is entirely prologue/introduction and is read by Christopher Tolkien. That confused me a bit because I kept thinking that I didn’t recognize the voice and had thought that Christopher Lee sounded quite different. At any rate, there are two reasons I stopped going forward. The first is that I couldn’t track all of the names and events even when I was giving the story all of my attention (I’m not sure that reading it myself would be different, either). The second was that Christopher Lee’s voice kept making me sleepy.
Beaty, Andrea. Ada Twist, Scientist - This is a picture book and very much aimed at young children. I thought it was cute. It’s about a black girl and her family. The girl is curious about everything, asking questions and performing experiments. Her parents have to adapt. For some reason, I thought this was a graphic novel when I put a hold on it.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Sonnets from the Portuguese - Eh. There were some phrases I liked, but mostly these didn’t work for me. Reading these felt like trying to hold water in my fist, and I think I wouldn’t have finished the book if it hadn’t been short. This particular edition also used a font that I had to work at reading.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden (annotated by Gretchen Gerzina) - There were a lot fewer annotations than I expected which disappointed me. The annotator also really, really wanted to draw parallels between Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden on what I considered fairly flimsy grounds and insisted that Burnett only used the word ‘wuthering’ as a reference to Wuthering Heights. That made me dubious about everything else she said, even the things I knew to be accurate.
Case Closed 28 (Detective Conan 28) - This is another volume with a cliffhangerish ending. In this case, none of the on-going characters are at risk, but the murder has just been discovered, and nobody’s had time to start gathering clues yet. I’ve read enough of these to have some guesses, but who knows? The other cases in the volume didn’t seem compelling to me, either, which might be about me being tired in general or might be about me needing to wait a couple of months before I read more of this series. I just worry that the library will lose their last copies of some of these volumes before I get to them and not replace them. They haven’t purchased anything after v.34.
Lackey, Mercedes. Closer to the Chest - It’s just as well that I don’t read these for the plot because Lackey didn’t even try to be subtle or complicated here. If I hadn’t known who the villains were ten pages in, I would have had to be willfully ignoring it. I took four weeks to read this which is unusual for one of these books, but a large part of it was that holding the book made my hands hurt. At any rate, this is bog standard Lackey.
Lucy & Andy Neanderthal - This is Jeffrey Brown’s latest graphic novel. I think that this will appeal to people who’ve liked his other stuff (which I did). The characters don’t have as much depth as I’d like, but the book really wasn’t long enough to give much. A fair number of pages are given over to information about what is currently known or theorized about Neanderthals.
Lumberjanes 4 - It’s very frustrating that I can remember who the characters are in terms of personality and such but can’t remember the names. Jen and Rosie are the only ones I can name accurately. I still adore this series because it’s got lots of girls and because they’re all individuals. I enjoyed the hints of a bigger picture in this volume and am very curious to see where they lead.
Mighty Jack - This is another Ben Hatke graphic novel, the start of a series. This one ends in a cliffhanger, so I kind of wish I’d waited until the series was done. Jack plants a magic garden, and he and his sister and a female friend tend it. Then things go sideways… I think that people who liked Zita will like Jack.
Teen Titans, Go! Heroes on Patrol; Teen Titans, Go! Truth, Justice, Pizza! - The episodes in these two volumes reminded me more of the silly episodes of the older Teen Titans cartoon series than of the Teen Titans, Go! cartoon series. They were longer and more substantial, generally speaking, than I expected, and there was a bit more of lessons learned.
Tintin: Cigars of the Pharaoh - I don’t think I’d recommend this one to anyone. The adventures aren’t actually interesting because they’re entirely Tintin stumbling on things in several different places around the world by complete chance and not being at all intelligent, and there’re a lot of racist caricatures.
What Did You Eat Yesterday? 3 - I really wish that I was more into cooking and food because the cooking scenes are so very detailed. I still really like the characters. They’re so very ordinary that I feel like they’re people I could meet.
What Would Dewey Do? - This is a collection of strips from the webcomic Unshelved. The webcomic is about working in a public library. It’s funny (and even funnier if you’ve ever worked in a library because so much is true).
Yoko Tsuno: Daughter of the Wind - The pages on this library book were loose, so I was kind of hesitant to open it far enough to read it. I suppose that the books in this series being poor quality in terms of binding would explain why the local library doesn’t have the full set. I don’t actually know if this is the next one in original publication order because I’m currently going by what’s on the shelf when I go looking. This volume gives some information about Yoko’s family and childhood.
Yoko Tsuno: On the Edge of Life - This has Yoko visiting a friend and finding another mystery that looks like one thing but is revealed as something else on further investigation. I’m not convinced that the backstory for the mystery quite works, but that may be because I’m reading it in 2016 instead of 1980.
Yoko Tsuno: The Prey and the Ghost - I lost track of who was who in this particular story and so was greatly confused by a certain character’s actions. This one didn’t involve weird science but rather was a straightforward mystery.
Yoko Tsuno: The Time Spiral - It says something when I get to a bit of ‘science’ in a comic and wave my hands in the air, going, “No! No! No! Antimatter does not work that way!” Apart from that, I enjoyed this reasonably well. A time traveler from the distant future works with Yoko to keep that future world from being destroyed.
Started but not finished:
Dane, Lauren. Laid Bare - This is a M/M/F erotic romance. I read bits here and there but not the whole thing. There was a wait list at the library, and I simply couldn't focus on reading in order to finish the book in time. I didn't dislike what I read, but I wasn't sufficiently into it to care that I hadn't finished. The sex scenes were focused on being emotionally sweet as opposed to emotionally complicated which left me feeling like something was missing there.
Four Points. Book 1, Compass South - I only got about 40 pages into this before I had to return it to the library. Up until the day it was due, it had been renewable, so I hadn’t given it priority. I will check it out again, later, and finish it because I’m intrigued to find out what’s going on. I do wish, though, that there were more female characters. Maybe that will get better later on?
Kennedy, James. The Order of the Odd-Fish - This was a peculiar read. I wanted very much to like it, but I didn’t. I never connected with any of the characters, and the wackiness felt strained in a way that made it not wacky. I generally ended up just frowning at the parts I’m pretty sure I was supposed to find laugh out loud funny. Maybe the humor works better for tween readers (the intended audience).
Jughead v.1 - I think that my mind basically rebelled at the notion of having a long plot in any sort of Archie related comic. I haven’t looked at those since I was buying Archie Digests in my teens because they were reliably funny. I tend to expect stories that take, at most, a dozen pages. So, in terms of what I read of this one, I most enjoyed the dream sequences because they best fit my expectations.
Monstress. Volume 1: Awakening - This is very pretty, but it went too far into horror for me. Also, it needs warnings for child harm/death which is something I can only deal with on rare occasions.
New Teen Titans Omnibus 1 - This book is huge and heavy and therefore hard to read for more than a few minutes at a time. I didn’t finish it because I had to return it to the library because someone else wanted it. I got cranky about a couple of bits I read that were a little too… How to put it? Some bits were too on the nose, and some bits were obviously written by people who had done absolutely minimal research before writing what they’d planned to write anyway. The characters did grow on me, though, so I wanted to go back and finish the collection, but the copy the library had seems to have vanished in as much as the title on my holds list is no longer a link to a record in the catalog. I have no idea what can have happened to it because it was in good shape when I had it. I suppose the person who got it right after me might have lost or destroyed it somehow. Hard to say.
Pterror Over Paris and the Demon of the Eiffel Tower - I really had problems with the art on this graphic novel. All of the faces were… kind of creepy. I was kind of interested in the story, but I couldn’t handle the art.
Stevens, Wallace. Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose - What I read of this, I selected by opening the book at random several times. I enjoyed some of the poetry, and my Gdoc with fic title ideas now has a vast amount of snippets from Stevens, but I’m not sure that I actually followed any of what I read. The difficulty was more obvious with the prose because it was mostly literary analysis of the type that I find utterly opaque. Also, I’m not sure that Stevens ever encountered a long word that he didn’t prefer over anything simpler and more commonplace. Sometimes, using words like that increases precision, but in this case and for this reader, it just increased irritation and confusion.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Children of Hurin - Audiobook read by Christopher Lee. The first CD is entirely prologue/introduction and is read by Christopher Tolkien. That confused me a bit because I kept thinking that I didn’t recognize the voice and had thought that Christopher Lee sounded quite different. At any rate, there are two reasons I stopped going forward. The first is that I couldn’t track all of the names and events even when I was giving the story all of my attention (I’m not sure that reading it myself would be different, either). The second was that Christopher Lee’s voice kept making me sleepy.
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Date: 2016-11-21 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-22 12:06 am (UTC)