Books: Slightly behind, and GenCon reading

[amanda_lodden]

I stopped reading during the busies parts of the spring and summer, and I'm getting back into it with a vengeance.

16. Long Hot Summoning by Tanya Huff

Maybe it's just been too long since I read the first couple of books in this series, but I had a hard time getting into it. Or maybe it's just that what Huff excels at is giving her characters depth, and I simply don't like the main character. At all. Regardless, I was largely disappointed in this book.

16 1/2. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Continuing the theme of "characters I do not like", Fat Charlie is a whiner. CJ borrowed this from the library, and I snagged it from him when he was done. But I could never bring myself to read more than a little bit at a time, because after a few pages I wanted to slap Fat Charlie. Eventually, the book was due back to the library and they wouldn't let CJ renew it any more, and I simply couldn't be arsed to care enough to go with him and check it out for myself. I'm told that the book gets better, and that it largely about FC's transformation from whiner to someone who actually DOES something with his life, and I may someday pick it up and give it another try. For now, I've got a shelf full of books that need to be read that actually look interesting.

17. Remember Me by Mary Higgins Clark

I've avoided MHC for a while, because her mysteries tend to be tinged with horror, and I don't like horror much. I picked this one up because I was going out to get the car maintained, and it was on the top of the stack. I'm glad I did. There's definitely a bit of horror, but not as bad as I'd imagined there would be. I was gratified at the end [minor spoiler alert] when it turned out to not have any supernatural explanation at all. Also, she's not as crazy as she was being led to believe. What I didn't like? The motive for tormenting the main character seemed weak and petty. Also, the parts that were written from the POV of the killer showed emotion that didn't match what it should have-- it's one thing to include the killer as one of the perspectives, it's another to spend his sections writing about how much he's grieving and having him wonder what happened. MHC had shown the death scene incorrectly, too, and that pisses me off.[/spoilers] And yet? Still a decent book. I liked the rest of it enough that I could forgive the ending.

18. The Cartoon Introduction of Economics by Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman, PhD.

Cute. Economics is one of those "I sort of get it, but not really" things for me. This was a general introduction, and was well done. I got a bit lost during the last real chapter ("Elasticity"), but I suspect that a re-read later will help.

19. Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris

Another of Harris's non-Sookie books. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this one. Once again, I didn't feel that the motivation for killing was strong enough, although I suppose it's intended to be partially an accident. At least there were proper clues; the reader could have solved it very early on, if they were paying more attention than I was. This is clearly intended as the first in a series (and according to the intro pages before the story, there are already three or four others), so what I felt irritated about was the need to set up recurring characters and potential love interests. Lily is interesting, but her past is over-the-top. I confess that I'm curious as to whether Harris has plans to bring back pieces of Lily's past, or if she was just looking for something so horrific that she could justify anything she wanted to have Lily do later. I will probably continue this as a "get from the library" series for a bit, and see which way it goes. If Harris actually USES Lily's backstory, then I like the pre-planning and weaving things in early on. If it's just a method of justifying increasingly odd or stupid behavior in Lily, then I'll drop the series.

Comments

[allanh.livejournal.com]

Gaiman takes an effort to get into. Ultimately, this book and American Gods are worth the effort, but it helps to have read American Gods first. The only piece of continuity between the two is Mr. Nancy (and Anansi Boys was written before American Gods, so go figure), but as a set, the two books present an interesting mythology.

If you've not yet done so, try American Gods, which I felt was a better written book with a bit more meat to it.

[amanda_lodden.livejournal.com]

See, and that's the thing. I *have* read American Gods... and I didn't care for it that much. I gave Anansi Boys a try after being told that it's "much better", but I'm just not seeing it. It may get better as it goes along, but I'm not willing to invest the effort into getting past the beginning to get to the good parts.