Book Logging
Dec. 25th, 2016 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckAsterix at the Olympic Games - Utterly ridiculous. Not much else to say about it.
Batman Beyond: Brave New Worlds 1 - This has a time traveling Tim Drake taking over as Batman after Terry McGinnis died while in the past. The setting is horrific in terms of everything being nasty. There’s a megalomaniac AI brainwashing everyone in sight and turning them into cyborged peripherals of itself. It’s been in operation long enough that only Gotham is left and that only because the AI can’t find it. There were some nice bits with Barbara Gordon and Inque. The library has a volume 2. I expect that will either be rebuilding or trying to restore the timeline.
Case Closed 29 - I’m enjoying the little bits of story arc running through these episodes now. I hadn’t thought there ever would be anything of the sort. I’m still frustrated that the Black Organization is the sort of bogeyman villain that is somehow everywhere, completely secret, and powerful enough to do absolutely anything. The logistics of those always boggle me because I can think of so very many ways in which people and organizations simply do not work that way. Suspension of disbelief… I can do that some of the time.
Case Closed 30 - This one had a Kaito Kid story and a story in which no one died. It also ended with an incomplete story. This was the first time I'd seen Hakuba (I've run into him a lot in fic), and he didn't actually lock the way I'd pictured him. Somehow I hadn't thought he'd be slender. I have no idea why I thought that.
Case Closed 31-32 - And back to episodic stories. I’ve almost finished everything the library owns.
Finding Gossamyr v.1 - I really liked this graphic novel. The art and the story worked together. It’s a portal fantasy story with a brother and sister who end up in another world. The boy is younger and seems to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. I can’t speak as to how well that aspect is written, so it might have nasty sharp edges that it shouldn’t. The story gets kicked off by the sister wanting to find a way not to have to take care of her brother any more. This isn’t portrayed as her doing the right thing, and she later apologizes to her brother for it (and means it), but she does get some sympathy as having human limitations and being young and confused and desperate. She loves him, but she’s still college age, and he’s about ten years younger.
Krentz, Jayne Ann. When All the Girls Have Gone - This had, for a change, a hero who wasn’t wealthy. He wasn’t broke by any means, but he had to think about what things cost and how the case at hand was taking away from paying work. The heroine was more typical for a Krentz book. There is rape in the backstory for several supporting characters (not for the heroine or hero). It’s plot pertinent, referenced rather than detailed, and didn’t bother me, but it might bother other people.
New Poetry from Spain (edited and translated by Marta Lopez-Luaces, Johnny Lorenz, & Edwin M. Lamboy) - This was the right length for a book of poetry in terms of me being able to read the entire thing. Because it has English and Spanish on facing pages, I was only reading about 90 pages worth of material. I tried some of the Spanish and discovered that I’m way, way too rusty with the language to manage poetry, but I really liked having the option to compare the feel of the original to the the translation.
Porath, Jason. Rejected Princesses - I had a lot of fun with this book. The various profiles were nicely bite sized. I caught a couple of research errors and cases where the wrong word was used, so I wonder about errors I didn't catch. (For the former, I'm almost certain that the only source for the thing with Theodora and the swan is The Secret History. It's a stunning image, and I suppose it's possible that Procopius didn't completely invent it, but I wouldn't bet that way. For the latter, saying that the Puritans hated 'Protestants’ is… ah, they were Protestants themselves. It's a broad umbrella. It would be accurate to say that they hated other flavors of Protestantism than their own, but that takes more words.)
Princeless: Raven the Pirate Princess Book Two: Free Women - This was a Christmas present from Scott. For some reason, the library hasn’t gotten it yet. I enjoyed it a lot and would want to own it and reread it even if I had read it from the library. I’m still figuring out who all of the characters are because there are a lot of women in the crew. They all have different personalities and skills and body types and are distinct from each other in other ways.
Sandburg, Carl. Poems for Children Nowhere Near Old Enough to Vote - This was very, very short. I’m not sure there were more than a dozen poems. The illustrations by Istvan Banyai add a lot. This was compiled and published after the author’s death, so I’m not sure if the shapes given to the poems (one about the word nobody is like stair steps, and another one spirals) were Sandburg’s or not. That seems like an odd thing to add, though, so maybe it is Sandburg’s choice.
Tan, Shaun. The Singing Bones - I only recognized half to two thirds of the stories here. Each was represented by a very brief excerpt that wasn't quite enough to jog my memory in many cases. The accompanying art work wasn't really to my taste, more because that's not a style that I am into than because it was bad. I simply didn't get most of the sculptures.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon Prequel series: Foundation v.1-4 - I couldn’t tell the characters apart. I’m intrigued by the story, but each of these volumes is extremely short, maybe twenty five pages long, which wasn’t nearly enough to feel like there was a story in any one of them to get into. I’m not at all sure why this story is divided into four hardcover volumes, but that’s what the library has.
Unshelved: Library Mascot Cage Match - I laughed a lot while reading this. I really needed that. The strip is a mix of library (public library) and geeky humor. Unshelved is a webcomic, so checking it out isn’t hard even if your library doesn’t have any of the books.
Yoko Tsuno: The Morning of the World - This is the last book our library has in this series. There's more time travel in it. There's a character in the book who must have been introduced in one of the volumes not owned by the library, and I really felt I needed more information about her. Sadly, the volumes the library doesn’t own aren’t readily available via interlibrary loan, either. I’m not sufficiently interested to try to buy them or to get them in some other way.
Started but not finished:
Beowulf (translated by Seamus Heaney) - I didn't get very far in this because I found it kind of pedestrian compared to other versions I've read. The text is very clear and easy to understand, though, so this might be a decent place to start for a person who hasn't read the poem before. I might have pushed onward with this, but I couldn't renew it.
Black, Shayla. Wicked Ties - This erotic romance hinges on one of my least favorite tropes-- the hero seducing the heroine in order to get revenge on another man and then falling for her. The blurb I read didn’t mention that. If it had, I wouldn’t have bothered to check it out.
Cartwright, Sierra. Bind - The romance here was relatively sweet, but the sex scenes irritated me because I kept hitting bits where I went, “No. Human bodies do not work that way.” This was a very mild BDSM erotic romance. It wasn’t the BDSM parts that didn’t work. It also wasn’t fantasy refractory periods or anything like that. It was very definitely things like, “His shoulders are where? While he’s doing that? What happened to his torso?”
Clifton, Lucille. Blessing the Boats - These poems were not really my sort of thing. I’m trying to learn to appreciate free verse, but it doesn’t come easily to me. Of course, I’m also picking poetry books from the library based on number of pages-- Lower page counts are more likely to get finished just through sheer stubbornness, but it’s a terrible way to tell whether or not I’ll enjoy something.
Green, Dominic. Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 - I simply ran out of time for this interlibrary loan book. I was very interested in what I read, but I didn’t have the mental focus to finish it, given everything else happening in December. I probably won’t go looking for this one again because it was an interlibrary loan book.
Introduction to French Poetry (edited by Stanley Appelbaum) - I think Appelbaum is also the translator, but I couldn’t find anything that confirmed that or that listed another translator. This is a book with the French version of the poem and an English translation on facing pages. According to the introduction, these translations are meant to be ‘literal rather than poetic.’ I think that the intended audience is people who read French at a level higher than my ‘I recognize book publishing terms and cognates for Spanish and English words, and I own a French-English dictionary if I can find it’ proficiency but lower than full fluency. I found most of these translations kind of pedestrian. I have no idea how they flow in French. Basically, this is a book intended for an audience that does not include me.
Johnson, Kij. The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe - I read about half of this but realized that I simply wasn’t interested in the setting, so I went and read the last ten to fifteen pages and didn’t read the rest. I liked the main character a lot. It’s very rare to see an older woman as the focus of a story like this, and I think that that kept me reading longer than I might have otherwise. I just didn’t get the impression that she was developing at all as the story went on.
Myers, Amy. Classic in the Barn - I only read a chapter of this mystery. The first person narrator didn’t appeal to me as someone to spend an entire book with. He did have a consistent voice, and the nuts and bolts of the prose were fine, so this would likely work for someone else. I got this from the library because I’d seen someone, I forget who, recommend a different series by the author. The library didn’t have that but did have this and related books.
The October Faction - I didn’t like the art, generally, and also found the rather overwhelming brown, gray and black of all the backgrounds uninviting and difficult to make sense of.
Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan - This is another interlibrary loan book that I ran out of time on. I don’t know if I’d have finished it if December hadn’t been so awful because I didn’t get far enough into it to have a strong sense of the book in terms of style and focus.
Tintin: The Blue Lotus - I just couldn’t bring myself to read more of this. It’s more of Tintin in Asia, a bit in India and a lot in China, and I found it very uncomfortable.
Batman Beyond: Brave New Worlds 1 - This has a time traveling Tim Drake taking over as Batman after Terry McGinnis died while in the past. The setting is horrific in terms of everything being nasty. There’s a megalomaniac AI brainwashing everyone in sight and turning them into cyborged peripherals of itself. It’s been in operation long enough that only Gotham is left and that only because the AI can’t find it. There were some nice bits with Barbara Gordon and Inque. The library has a volume 2. I expect that will either be rebuilding or trying to restore the timeline.
Case Closed 29 - I’m enjoying the little bits of story arc running through these episodes now. I hadn’t thought there ever would be anything of the sort. I’m still frustrated that the Black Organization is the sort of bogeyman villain that is somehow everywhere, completely secret, and powerful enough to do absolutely anything. The logistics of those always boggle me because I can think of so very many ways in which people and organizations simply do not work that way. Suspension of disbelief… I can do that some of the time.
Case Closed 30 - This one had a Kaito Kid story and a story in which no one died. It also ended with an incomplete story. This was the first time I'd seen Hakuba (I've run into him a lot in fic), and he didn't actually lock the way I'd pictured him. Somehow I hadn't thought he'd be slender. I have no idea why I thought that.
Case Closed 31-32 - And back to episodic stories. I’ve almost finished everything the library owns.
Finding Gossamyr v.1 - I really liked this graphic novel. The art and the story worked together. It’s a portal fantasy story with a brother and sister who end up in another world. The boy is younger and seems to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. I can’t speak as to how well that aspect is written, so it might have nasty sharp edges that it shouldn’t. The story gets kicked off by the sister wanting to find a way not to have to take care of her brother any more. This isn’t portrayed as her doing the right thing, and she later apologizes to her brother for it (and means it), but she does get some sympathy as having human limitations and being young and confused and desperate. She loves him, but she’s still college age, and he’s about ten years younger.
Krentz, Jayne Ann. When All the Girls Have Gone - This had, for a change, a hero who wasn’t wealthy. He wasn’t broke by any means, but he had to think about what things cost and how the case at hand was taking away from paying work. The heroine was more typical for a Krentz book. There is rape in the backstory for several supporting characters (not for the heroine or hero). It’s plot pertinent, referenced rather than detailed, and didn’t bother me, but it might bother other people.
New Poetry from Spain (edited and translated by Marta Lopez-Luaces, Johnny Lorenz, & Edwin M. Lamboy) - This was the right length for a book of poetry in terms of me being able to read the entire thing. Because it has English and Spanish on facing pages, I was only reading about 90 pages worth of material. I tried some of the Spanish and discovered that I’m way, way too rusty with the language to manage poetry, but I really liked having the option to compare the feel of the original to the the translation.
Porath, Jason. Rejected Princesses - I had a lot of fun with this book. The various profiles were nicely bite sized. I caught a couple of research errors and cases where the wrong word was used, so I wonder about errors I didn't catch. (For the former, I'm almost certain that the only source for the thing with Theodora and the swan is The Secret History. It's a stunning image, and I suppose it's possible that Procopius didn't completely invent it, but I wouldn't bet that way. For the latter, saying that the Puritans hated 'Protestants’ is… ah, they were Protestants themselves. It's a broad umbrella. It would be accurate to say that they hated other flavors of Protestantism than their own, but that takes more words.)
Princeless: Raven the Pirate Princess Book Two: Free Women - This was a Christmas present from Scott. For some reason, the library hasn’t gotten it yet. I enjoyed it a lot and would want to own it and reread it even if I had read it from the library. I’m still figuring out who all of the characters are because there are a lot of women in the crew. They all have different personalities and skills and body types and are distinct from each other in other ways.
Sandburg, Carl. Poems for Children Nowhere Near Old Enough to Vote - This was very, very short. I’m not sure there were more than a dozen poems. The illustrations by Istvan Banyai add a lot. This was compiled and published after the author’s death, so I’m not sure if the shapes given to the poems (one about the word nobody is like stair steps, and another one spirals) were Sandburg’s or not. That seems like an odd thing to add, though, so maybe it is Sandburg’s choice.
Tan, Shaun. The Singing Bones - I only recognized half to two thirds of the stories here. Each was represented by a very brief excerpt that wasn't quite enough to jog my memory in many cases. The accompanying art work wasn't really to my taste, more because that's not a style that I am into than because it was bad. I simply didn't get most of the sculptures.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon Prequel series: Foundation v.1-4 - I couldn’t tell the characters apart. I’m intrigued by the story, but each of these volumes is extremely short, maybe twenty five pages long, which wasn’t nearly enough to feel like there was a story in any one of them to get into. I’m not at all sure why this story is divided into four hardcover volumes, but that’s what the library has.
Unshelved: Library Mascot Cage Match - I laughed a lot while reading this. I really needed that. The strip is a mix of library (public library) and geeky humor. Unshelved is a webcomic, so checking it out isn’t hard even if your library doesn’t have any of the books.
Yoko Tsuno: The Morning of the World - This is the last book our library has in this series. There's more time travel in it. There's a character in the book who must have been introduced in one of the volumes not owned by the library, and I really felt I needed more information about her. Sadly, the volumes the library doesn’t own aren’t readily available via interlibrary loan, either. I’m not sufficiently interested to try to buy them or to get them in some other way.
Started but not finished:
Beowulf (translated by Seamus Heaney) - I didn't get very far in this because I found it kind of pedestrian compared to other versions I've read. The text is very clear and easy to understand, though, so this might be a decent place to start for a person who hasn't read the poem before. I might have pushed onward with this, but I couldn't renew it.
Black, Shayla. Wicked Ties - This erotic romance hinges on one of my least favorite tropes-- the hero seducing the heroine in order to get revenge on another man and then falling for her. The blurb I read didn’t mention that. If it had, I wouldn’t have bothered to check it out.
Cartwright, Sierra. Bind - The romance here was relatively sweet, but the sex scenes irritated me because I kept hitting bits where I went, “No. Human bodies do not work that way.” This was a very mild BDSM erotic romance. It wasn’t the BDSM parts that didn’t work. It also wasn’t fantasy refractory periods or anything like that. It was very definitely things like, “His shoulders are where? While he’s doing that? What happened to his torso?”
Clifton, Lucille. Blessing the Boats - These poems were not really my sort of thing. I’m trying to learn to appreciate free verse, but it doesn’t come easily to me. Of course, I’m also picking poetry books from the library based on number of pages-- Lower page counts are more likely to get finished just through sheer stubbornness, but it’s a terrible way to tell whether or not I’ll enjoy something.
Green, Dominic. Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 - I simply ran out of time for this interlibrary loan book. I was very interested in what I read, but I didn’t have the mental focus to finish it, given everything else happening in December. I probably won’t go looking for this one again because it was an interlibrary loan book.
Introduction to French Poetry (edited by Stanley Appelbaum) - I think Appelbaum is also the translator, but I couldn’t find anything that confirmed that or that listed another translator. This is a book with the French version of the poem and an English translation on facing pages. According to the introduction, these translations are meant to be ‘literal rather than poetic.’ I think that the intended audience is people who read French at a level higher than my ‘I recognize book publishing terms and cognates for Spanish and English words, and I own a French-English dictionary if I can find it’ proficiency but lower than full fluency. I found most of these translations kind of pedestrian. I have no idea how they flow in French. Basically, this is a book intended for an audience that does not include me.
Johnson, Kij. The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe - I read about half of this but realized that I simply wasn’t interested in the setting, so I went and read the last ten to fifteen pages and didn’t read the rest. I liked the main character a lot. It’s very rare to see an older woman as the focus of a story like this, and I think that that kept me reading longer than I might have otherwise. I just didn’t get the impression that she was developing at all as the story went on.
Myers, Amy. Classic in the Barn - I only read a chapter of this mystery. The first person narrator didn’t appeal to me as someone to spend an entire book with. He did have a consistent voice, and the nuts and bolts of the prose were fine, so this would likely work for someone else. I got this from the library because I’d seen someone, I forget who, recommend a different series by the author. The library didn’t have that but did have this and related books.
The October Faction - I didn’t like the art, generally, and also found the rather overwhelming brown, gray and black of all the backgrounds uninviting and difficult to make sense of.
Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan - This is another interlibrary loan book that I ran out of time on. I don’t know if I’d have finished it if December hadn’t been so awful because I didn’t get far enough into it to have a strong sense of the book in terms of style and focus.
Tintin: The Blue Lotus - I just couldn’t bring myself to read more of this. It’s more of Tintin in Asia, a bit in India and a lot in China, and I found it very uncomfortable.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-26 05:50 pm (UTC)If it's any consolation on the Tintin book, Herge consulted with a Chinese friend of his, especially on the backgrounds/lettering. This friend also appeared as a character in the story, and later on, in Tintin in Tibet, my favorite Tintin book of all time.
And, yeah, utterly ridiculous is a good way to describe any Asterix book. :D
no subject
Date: 2017-01-03 02:49 am (UTC)