I did a little poll on my livejournal about what people were most interested in reading about on this here blog. The winning topic was “books I’m reading and what I think about them” so I am going to make more of an effort to crosspost my thoughts from Goodreads over here.

Here’s some recent reads. If you’ve read any of these, what did you think? And if you are a Georgette Heyer fan, what are your favorites?

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
This is proving a hard book for me to capture as a review. I did enjoy reading it, and I am glad to have done so. Some readers might find the “message” preachy or weird or over-the-top but I appreciated it. Still, it wasn’t quite the type of book I can wholeheartedly love.

I think perhaps there are books that I enjoy because they are wonderful stories that sweep me away and let me dive into the story. And then there are books like this, where what sweeps me away isn’t the story or the characters so much as the words themselves. As I was reading, I kept feeling almost as if it was poetry, not fiction. Part of that comes from the device of having the narrator tell the story looking back from years later. For me, it established a kind of literary distance from the events of the story. It had the feeling of the beginning of some movies, where there’s a voice over filling you in on some of the backstory and introducing the plot, but then instead of fading out and letting the story take over, the voiceover just continues on, so that the events themselves never feel quite center-stage.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King
Even listening to a scratchy, occasionally garbled, obviously-much-played library cassette recording of this couldn’t stop me from loving this book. It’s just the sort of book I like to read for pure pleasure, for interesting characters doing clever and amusing things. The dynamic between Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes could have gone terribly wrong in the hands of another writer, but King handled it perfectly.

And yay, there are more of them! I foresee this being one of the series a dole out to myself slowly over time, when I know I need something that is just a fun, good book.

Frederica by Georgette Heyer
I’ve heard so many good things about Georgette Heyer from so many people who share my tastes in books that I don’t know why I put off reading her for so long. I suppose my consolation is that I now have a large trove of books to delight me, as I expect I will be making my way through a number of her other historical romances in the years ahead.

I listened to Frederica as an audiobook, and I think perhaps it was even more enjoyable than reading it might have been. There are so many wonderful bits of humor, so many excellent little descriptions and insights into character, not to mention the many historical references, that I am glad to have had the chance to savor them at the slightly slower pace of an audio book.

[Total tangent: Harry Potter has ruined the name Vernon for me. I had to strain my imagination mightily to pretend Lord Alverstoke had a different first name every time it was mentioned}

All in all I found Frederica wonderfully entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable, and I am very very eager to read more of Heyer’s work!

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
Chilling and gut-wrenching and poetic all at once. I wouldn’t call this entertainment (it is too brutal, too close to being inside Lia’s enormous pain) but it is certainly powerful.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Sentence description: Teen hacker is abused by the Department of Homeland Security in a near future San Francisco, and proceeds to fights back against the suppression of freedom and government-generated fear that follows a devastating terrorist attack on the city.

I am glad I read (actually, listened to) this book. I am not sure I would say I enjoyed it, completely, but I don’t think I was meant to. I did find it frightening. I would find myself going to look at the news and half-expecting to see accounts of the crazy stuff going on in SF. It felt real to me, and believable.

And also, quite often very funny, and informative. I’m a geeky person and a gamer myself so I loved the asides into the games (even LARP!) and technology (especially cause it pretty much all really exists out there!) and gaming and geek culture. I laughed out loud when the main characters used the phrase “a maze of twisty passages, all alike” at one point and loved that one of the critical climactic scenes involved hundreds of people dressing up as vampires and playing a giant vampire game in the middle of the city.

The DHS is portrayed as being pretty much caricatures of evil bullies getting off on power, and there’s no time for exploration of any other reason why they might be doing what they are doing. I would have liked to have seen that delved into further, but I admit it’s probably outside the scope of this book. I did appreciate, however, the range of reactions we see in the main character’s father and friends and schoolmates. Some embrace the curtailment of freedom in the hope it will bring safety, others just look away, still others want to fight but just can’t do it.

I have to add a note on the audio-version here: I found the reading a bit odd and stilted in places — perhaps this is a function of the abundance of IMs and emails and technotalk in the book.

Tags: reading