amanda_lodden

Madeline voted for cut-and-paste, and it's sort of a reverse-veto vote: it only takes one person. However, I'm not numbering, because that requires me to bother to go look up what the last one was, and I'm lazy.

Whiiiich means I'll probably not have Goodreads post to Facebook anymore, because it'll duplicate the LiveJournal crosspost. I still want the search capabilities included in Goodreads, though.

* Finger Lickin' Fifteen by Janet Evanovich (16)

This book was a solid "meh". Stephanie continues to act more like a grown-up, but doesn't actually make any more progress than that. Lula doesn't even act like an adult, and I stand by my assessment-- she either needs a huge shot of character growth or she needs to die a horrible death.

If I were basing my opinion of the entire series on this one book, I probably wouldn't read any more. But I remember how much I avoided picking up Eleven On Top because I had gotten so tired of the series, and then being pleasantly surprised at how good it was. This book is pretty much just a placeholder while we wait for Evanovich to pull out of this latest slump.

I'm giving Goodreads a go. We'll see how it works out.

This does mean that reviews will post to Facebook but not LiveJournal. I know that at least one person on my flist has boycotted Facebook over privacy concerns, and I respect that. Should I cut and paste my Goodreads entries here, or do y'all just not care?

When I was sick, I had very little focus, so I tended to gravitate to short stories. In no particular order (meaning, I switched between the books frequently and don't remember what order I started or finished them in):

11. The Curious Republic of Gondour, and Other Whimsical Sketches by Mark Twain

Didn't care for most of it. I keep WANTING to like Twain, but most of the time, I just don't.

12. Sparks and Shadows by Lucy Snyder

A mixed bag. Snyder can lean towards horror, and I tend not to like horror. But I did enjoy getting a deeper look at some of the side characters in her other books, and I enjoyed most of the stories (including a few that were technically horror).

13. A Modern Cinderella Story Or, The Little Old Shoe and Other Stories by Louisa May Alcott

It's odd to read something that calls itself "modern" when it is so obviously dated, which makes me wonder at what future generations will think of our "modernity". But the stories are sweet.

14. Anno Dracula by Kim Newman

If there were such a thing as vampirepunk, this would be it. Vlad Tepes seduces the widowed Queen Victoria and becomes Prince Consort... and society changes, yet in many ways stays the same-- there is a definite difference between how the wealthy and powerful approach vampirism and how the poor and downtrodden do.

However, I could have done without the literary hide-and-seek. At first, it was cute when the main detective on the murder case was Inspector LeStrade, but after a while it got old, and by the time Drs Jekyll and Moreau showed up, I was pretty well sick of it.

15. Blackveil: Book Four of Green Rider by Kristen Britain

As the subtitle implies, it's the fourth book in a series that I enjoy. The writing seems to be aimed more at late teens, which colors the tenor of the main romance, but other than occasionally wanting to slap some sense into the main character, it hasn't been annoying. I confess that I'm very curious where Britain will take the story next.

Added bonus! One of the interesting side-effects of the Kindle is that I find I'm much more willing to just stop reading a book that I dislike than I am with dead-tree books. The "screw it, not reading any more of these" folder currently contains:

* Fables for the Frivolous by Guy Whitmore Carryl

A lot like Aesops' Fables, but poorly formatted. The fables are rhyming poems, and the linebreaks are missing. I suspect that I would be more willing to bother with this book if the eBook had been properly formatted. Then again, the rhyming format makes it seem hokey.

* The Game of Logic by Lewis Carroll

I'm not sure if Carroll honestly thinks "some x-Cakes are y-(Cakes)" is supposed to make logic more approachable or if he's really just that far removed from what "approachable" means, but this is another eBook that suffers greatly from poor formatting. Notably, the tables are not images, so that most of them just look like "|||1|||" as the white spaces are removed. As you might guess, a book entirely about logic contains a lot of tables.

* Ten Great Events In History by James Johonnot

Great, perhaps. Interesting, not at all. Johonnot is that high school history teacher who speaks in monotone while reciting the litany of facts that you're supposed to regurgitate onto the test. I find this particularly infuriating, because history is made up of interesting people doing interesting things for a whole slew of reasons, and it took me *years* to get past the "history is boring" notion that all those monotone teachers instilled in me.

From the looks of things, I stopped listing the books I read somewhere around our Florida vacation. Hopefully, I'll remember them all.

5. The Maiden's Tale by Margaret Frazer

Another non-Victorian historical mystery (I have a soft spot for them). It's somewhere in the middle of the series, which is something I did not realize when I picked it up. There were a few references here and there that I figured must have been about a different book, but I didn't feel like I was picking up in the middle of loose ends, like I did with Lethal Justice. Enjoyable, but slightly frustrating in that it dealt with the politics of its setting, which is not one I'm overly familiar with.

6. A Double-Barrelled Detective Story by Mark Twain

Not what I'd expected. Not a lot of detecting, for starters. Not horrible, but not something I'd recommend.

7. Drinker of Blood by Lynda S. Robinson

I seem to be very good at picking up this series out of order, but I really like it.

8. Hunted Down: the Detective Stories of Charles Dickens

This made so little impression on me that when I was going through the Kindle to make sure I'd gotten everything, I completely didn't remember this story. But at least it has some detecting in it, which makes it better than Twain's detective story.

9. The Better Mousetrap by Tom Holt

British, so the humor's a little dry, and Holt doesn't always bother to point the jokes out to you. I tend to find that makes the jokes funnier when I get them, so that's alright.

10. Stupid American History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions by Leland Gregory

Mistitled; it's more like "Misconceptions of American History With Some Interesting Trivia Thrown In." It was interesting, but not stellar.

4. Shotgun Sorceress by Lucy Snyder

Have you ever had one of those moments when you realize that multiple people you know all know a particular person, and you're not entirely sure how it happened? I knew that M and Lucy Snyder went to Clarion together, but until I read the acknowledgements, I didn't fully understand that D & T also know Ms Snyder in more than a "yes, she's one of my favorite authors" way. It was driven home later when a character was given D & T's last name, which I found a tad bit jarring. I suspect others, people who don't know D & T nor their last name, might not find it so weird.

You may recall that I really liked the first book in this series. I like this one as well, but it's a lot less stand-alone. For the most part, I'm okay with that-- I really don't need the typical first chapter that explains what the characters did in the books before-- but the ending was slightly less satisfactory because this book sets up the third book, in a very obvious manner. What's irritating to me is that it doesn't need to; if the last half-page were left off, this book would have a perfectly fine ending, and the last half-page would work pretty well as the opening of the third book. (Well, with a slight re-hash of what happened in this book as a refresher.)

I still highly recommend reading it, though.

I had a grand plan for my reading list, now that I have the Kindle. I still want to thin out my books, and the easiest way to do it is to read all the ones in the "to be read" pile, so I had planned to read one that I bought, one that was lent to me, then one on the Kindle, so that I could pare down the dead-tree books without ignoring the Kindle (which is a joy to read on) entirely.

But then I read the two paperbacks I had stacked up and it came time for the Kindle, I wanted to take a bath. So I read a third paperback, sending the Grand Plan up the river much faster than I expected. The good news is that the third paperback is another borrowed one, and borrowed books are the easiest to get rid of when I'm done with them. Hopefully I'll manage to get back into a general rhythm soon, and hopefully I won't have to cycle between two books (I hate doing that) so that I have something to read in the bathtub.

1. Someplace To Be Flying by Charles De Lint
I had a hard time getting into this book at first, and put it down several times, for weeks at a shot (I started this book before I got the Kindle in mid-December). There's a lot of Native American mythos in here, which is not one I'm overly familiar with, and that didn't help. De Lint is also perfectly happy to let his characters wander around with knowledge that the reader doesn't have for long periods of time, so for a good half of the book, it made very little sense to me. And then, midway through, all the pieces started coming together, and I had a hard time putting it down. Once I finally got into it and had enough pieces of the puzzle to feel like I knew what was going on, it was an incredibly engaging book.

2. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
Don't pick this series up if you like happy endings, because there aren't any here. Not one character gets to live happily ever after, and most of the ones who aren't dead by the end are miserable. There's almost a point in the very ending where you think Pullman might be setting up for a fourth book, but it's been 10 years and there isn't one, so there's every indication that the miserable people stay miserable. On the plus side, I've forgiven Pullman for the ending of the last book, because the bit with Will's father was actually important in the last book. I can live with WTF? moments as long as they have a purpose. On the whole, I enjoyed the series, but it's the sort of thing that I can't recommend to a lot of people, as it takes a new and disturbing look at God. If you can't stand the idea of God being anything but 100% good, this is not the series for you.

3. Manhunting by Jennifer Crusie
Not a book I would pick for myself, but it appeared with a stack of others. Light, fun, and fluffy at first. I still haven't decided if I like the main characters, but when the inevitable late-book breakup occurred, I confess that I had tears in my eyes.

32. Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

When I was a toddler, I used to looooove to be read to. My grandmother was happy to oblige, but she got tired of the childish stuff really quickly, and switched over to other stories. She read most of Pinocchio to me in doctor's waiting rooms. I know she read other books, but for some reason Pinocchio stuck out in my memory. Maybe it was that I'd seen the Disney movie, and could more easily envision the characters because of it. Maybe it was because one doctor was really really slow, and after she'd finished the very last chapter she had to find other ways to amuse me. I honestly don't know. But for my first Kindle read, I opted to go back to my childhood and my first "real" book.

I remember this book being much, much longer. Of course, the first time through it took months, so maybe that's why it felt long. It's really only a short story, perhaps bordering on a novella. I still liked it, but it doesn't have the same shine as an adult that it did as a kid.

33. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

Feh. Overhyped.

34. The Mysterious Key and What It Opened by Louisa May Alcott

Another short story, are you sensing a trend in my Kindle choices thus far? I liked Little Women but not enough to pick up the rest of her books. This is a short mystery, but given the author it's probably not surprising that there's some innocent romance in it as well. It was okay; the big secret at the end was probably shocking and scandalous 100 years ago, but just not that big of a deal today.

35. Black Magic Sanction by Kim Harrison

One of the few books I actually purchased rather than got for free. I like this series quite a bit, but sometimes it's frustrating. I found it very difficult to get into this one at first, as it seemed like things dragged on and on with no seeming purpose. And then all of a sudden midway through, I couldn't put it down, as all the plot came rushing in at once. It's possible that some of the problem at first was reading it on a new platform, but I suspect that it's simply badly paced.

On the plus side, there was actual character development. I like character development.

31. Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich

I laughed my ass off. Stephanie continues her recent pleasant trend of being vaguely competent, Lulu continues her trend of being really annoying, and the host of sidekicks this time around are amazingly funny. At least this time I didn't want Lulu to die in a fire, so I suppose that's progress.

27. Visions of Sugar Plums by Janet Evanovich

Short and silly. Not bad, not re-readable.

28. Murder At the Feast of Rejoicing by Lynda S. Robinson

I have a soft spot for historical mysteries, so when I stumbled into Robinson's first book, Murder In The House of Anubis, in a used bookstore I was pleased to find a historical mystery that wasn't Victorian. When it turned out to actually be good, I was ecstatic. I stumbled into another of her books in the same series in another used bookstore, and now I have to go track down the book in between the two, because I really really like this series.

29. Spellbent by Lucy A. Snyder

I blame this book for the wrinkles on my toes. I took a bath, and picked this book to read while I was there. A couple hours later, CJ knocked on the door to ask if I was okay, because I'd been in there so long. My original plan hadn't included finishing the book before dinner either, but I devoured it instead of doing the things I'd intended to this afternoon (so this book is to blame for my not having clean underwear, too.)

I kept meaning to post these.

24. Full Speed by Janet Evanovich and Charlotte Hughes

This book really drove home for me the idea that Evanovich has a formula she uses. It's a completely different series from her Stephanie Plum novels, yet if you were to substitute "Stephanie" for the main character's name, and "Ranger" for the romantic lead, it would be hard to tell it from a Plum novel.

I gave this a lot of wiggle room because it's the 5th book in the series but the only one I've read, so I assume there's some background info I'm missing. I''m not sure I'll bother with the rest of the series, but it made for a decent in-flight popcorn book.

25. The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

I had to stop reading this for a while because I found it a little difficult-- Sarah's style is pretty chatty, but she uses a lot of quotations from 18th century Puritans, which were considerably harder to read. Overall, it was interesting, though I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't a history buff.

26. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

I confess. I managed to make it this far into my life without reading LotR. You may take away my Geek Cred now, if you like. I *tried* to read it about 15 years ago, and couldn't slog my way through the first couple of chapters. But I adore the movies, and I thought that perhaps reading the book might be easier now that I know what's going on. It was easier, and I'll probably continue on and read the other books as well, but I still think that Tolkien is too bloody wordy, and takes forever to get to his point.

Also? Now that I've read it, I can confidently say that Everett is wrong about Tom Bombadil being important. That hour+ that I had to spend listening to him rant on and on about how they left Tom out of the movie? I want it back.

I was somewhat surprised when the book ended with Boromir still alive. (If that's a spoiler for you by now, then you weren't going to watch the movie anyway.) Once I thought about it, I realized that the movie needed a strong ending with a good hook to get people to see the next one, but I still feel slightly ... I dunno. Off-kilter, I suppose.