Lisa
This is a great middle grades read. I grabbed this for my 4th grader to read and he sat down and finished it in one sitting and told me I had to read it too so we could talk about it. It's a little on the scary side though! Immediately put a hold on volumes 2 and 3 at the library.
Tantalizingly good premise:
A scout mission is sent to a planet 50 light years away to make contact with the inhabitants and test the viability of gathering resources. The 4 scientist group find the planet, Lithia, to be a veritable paradise. The aliens living therein are an inviting, moral, civilized race and welcome the earthlings. Father Ramon, one of the scientists, is a Jesuit who cannot come to terms with the fact that this alien race has achieved perfect morality without religion. He believes the entire planet to be a ruse crafted by Satan. He recommends against further contact with the planet.
As you might guess, he is outvoted. A Lithian he has befriended during the journey sends him back to Earth with a Lthian embryo as a goodwill gift. The alien hatches and develops on Earth, but without the moral societal framework of Lithia, he becomes sort of a douchey Tyler Durden who embraces the worst in human behavior. Everything falls apart.
The beginning of this book was terrific and things got really muddled in the middle.
This was overwritten for my taste. I put it down a few times. The prose is pretty, but I tired of it by the end of the book. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood. But it typically doesn't take me a week to finish a book of this type.
Way to bury the lede with the title.
This was a pretty fascinating look at the Tory side of the Revolutionary War set in CT.
There is a significant amount of cursing in this book, which I found odd for the targeted age range. It didn't bother me as an adult, I just found it odd.
A fictional (constructed well within our known history) memoir of the Emperor Hadrian. This is an old book and so much has been written about that I can add little. It's beautifully written and best understood in the context of its time.
I'd started it once before but it's a book where the prose really matters, and I found when I started it before I couldn't give it my full attention.
I've started working through the book 1,000 books to read before you die (I've read a dismal 84) and MOH is included in that list so I set out to read it in its entirety.
Very glad I did. It's exhaustively researched but never feels dry. I'd recommend it if you are already interested in Roman History. If not, I'm afraid it might be a big of a slog.
Life is short and there are too many books to read. This one wasn't for me, even though I love Neil Gaiman.
I feel like an imposter given everyone I know loves this book!
This was good, but very redundant. It's also not the newest book so if you've read any non-fiction book that touches on criminology or behavioral profiling I would think you've already heard every salient point this book makes. I'm sure it was novel in its time though.
I'm sure this is problematic in some ways I can't really grasp but I enjoyed it. It's a dated look at some Navajo origin tales interwoven into a coming of age story about a young boy destined to be a medicine man.
Going through Newbery winners. This was a decent one about a teenager apprenticed to a Coppersmith in China. Not a lot of conflict in the plot but I did learn quite a bit!
General Observations:
1) Will is a bad-ass.
2) Lord Boreal is a slimy little git.
3) Great payoff moment when you realize who Will's father actually is. One of those: Ohhhhhh, no WAY! moments.
I actually liked [The Subtle Knife:] more than [The Golden Compass:].
[The Amber Spyglass:] and I are having a standoff right now. I want to read it, but I should pack. If I read it, it'll be over! There's nothing like reading a good book for the first time.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Good. So good I skipped lunch. So good I have to go buy the other two books, right now!
I'm a decade late to the party but this was such a great graphic novel. Both in terms of the 1st generation experience and how parables were interwoven. The artwork was punchy and fun. My kids go to a public school with a special Chinese emphasis (they take Chinese once a week and there's a special Chinese classroom). I wouldn't be surprised if the upper grades read this GN. Still a little too complex for my guys, but they would love the story of the Monkey King!
I can't say I enjoyed this book all that much but it was extremely engrossing. Sort of MT Anderson dystopia meets Terry Gilliam. The characterization was great.
This is such a goofy (is that the right word) travelogue about an early 1980s foray into the heart of Borneo.
Borneo is serious business: snakes, leeches, more insects than I'd ever care to see. And yet the writing style of this book treats the journey as a somewhat irreverent romp. I wish there were more pictures. However, it was apparently hell to photograph due to all the humidity.
I'd recommend it if you like Bill Bryson type books.
Very accessible biography of the political life of James Madison. I felt like I got a good sense of Madison's contributions to the Federalist papers (interesting to see the contrast with Chernow's Hamilton), his feelings on the Jefferson embargo, and of course, how the war of 1812 was handled.
This was utterly bizarre. I knew nothing about it or the author and didn't read the forward, thankfully. It's vaguely Pynchonan coming of age story about a young boy who is separated from his mother and brother when a warring faction comes to his African town. He escapes into the bush and enters the Bush of Ghosts. From there, I can honestly say I had no idea what the next page would bring.
I'm doing a reading challenge where I needed to read a book published the year I was born. This was my choice. Somehow I never read this as a kid even though it would have been up my alley. Many people describe it as an American Harry Potter feel but the magic and word building is much darker. It's also a lot more esoteric and without explanation. That's honestly kind of cool. The book has been updated for modern audiences so there's references to things like MP3 players and texting. I'd recommend it to older kids who are interested in magic and have already exhausted the usual suspects.
Not as good as Wild Seed. That really trumps every other book in this series. Still decent though.
Renesmee?
After talking to a lot of friends/family about this book in particular I've been able to come up with a conclusion. People who like happy endings love this book. People who find happy endings smarmy hate this book. Having that knowledge equipped I tried to keep myself impartial because it is a happy ending but I was not on board with a significant portion of the book, and it's an enormous lump of a book...Bella doesn't have to sacrifice anything. Not that she is required to by any means but...she gets every thing she wants, I suppose readers are conditioned into expecting some sort of tradeoff.
There was a lot to like...I liked the pack stuff with Jacob, any scene with Seth in it is a great scene! I liked hearing about the other vampires' abilities...but I just got supporting character overload in the last section of the book. One thing Nate and I brought up several times during the reading of this one is how much Edward seems to lose his bite (hah).
