Bookish Thoughts

Mira Grant's Countdown is a novella rather than a proper novel. It's really short. Short enough that I had no problem reading it on my phone. Grant wrote it as a prequel to Feed , and released it in the month leading up to Feed 's sequel, Deadline . Countdown is a prequel, detailing the events that led to the zombie apocalypse and setting the stage for Feed. Countdown relies pretty heavily on dramatic irony. If you've read Feed , you know exactly how and when the zombie rising happens. You're passingly familiar with many of these characters and already know their fates. I think Grant does a good job of using that to ramp up the tension in this book. If you enjoyed Feed (which you should definitely read), give Countdown a try. My only complaint is that it's only available as an e-book (hence my reading it on my phone). I can't put it on my shelf with the rest of the series.

This is my first attempt at Shakespeare in a non-classroom setting. I've read several plays before now ( Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Leer, and King John ), but they were all for assignments. And they were all really hard to get through. I have a tendency to get lost in the rhythm of Shakespeare's language. It flows so well that, without even realizing it, I'll have read two pages and retained nothing. I'll be so eager to finish a line that I won't even realize it's switched characters. I have difficulty keeping track of who's talking because that interrupts the flow of the language. To get around this, I used to go through and highlight each character in a different color before reading so I'd have a visual cue to keep me on track. But since I didn't want to do that to my fancy Complete Works (or carry that beast of a book around), I never got around to any plays that hadn't been assigned. Then Joss Whedon decided to make a fil...

I enjoyed this, the third book in Tamora Pierce's Alanna quartet, a lot more than the previous two. As a whole, it's more cohesive. Whereas the previous two books seemed largely like a series of vignettes, this book actually had a plot that carried through all the chapters and connected them into a single story. Alanna is now a knight and off looking for adventure. While riding through the desert, she's taken hostage by a tribe. Eventually the tribe accepts her as one of their members and even makes her their shaman so she can train their gifted children. Even though she's technically an adult now, it turns out that Alanna still has a lot to learn. She becomes more comfortable with her talents and has a couple of romances. The final two chapters seemed more like setup for the final book, and it all wrapped up a little hastily. But Pierce continues to improve with each subsequent book. I'm definitely hanging on to this series for my future daughter.

This was my second time through Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game , and the first since I've learned how bigoted and awful that man is. I actually didn't expect the book to hold up as well as I remembered it, and I probably wouldn't have ever read it again if not for a book club I'm actually enjoying. But I ended up liking it just as much, if not more, this time through. I guess it just goes to show that you don't have to be a good person to make good art. The first time I read it, I remember being struck be an overwhelming sense of despair. Ender is so thoroughly manipulated by the military higher ups (and, ultimately, the buggers) that he seems to have no free will at all. He does exactly what everyone else wants him to do. Even when he looks in the mirror and sees a monster, he can't get off the path he doesn't want to be on. When I expressed this to a friend, she said that she'd had the opposite reaction. Ender's Game was ...

I enjoyed Feed so much, that I decided to pick up another of Seanan McGuire's books: Rosemary and Rue . This book is the first installment in a series of urban fantasy mystery novels. The protagonist, October Daye, is half-human, half-faerie, and serves as a P.I. in San Francisco, taking on cases from both worlds. The title is a reference to Ophelia's final monologue in Hamlet , one of the Shakespeare plays I'm actually familiar with. I even played Ophelia when I was in middle school. According to the play, rosemary is for remembrance and rue is for repentance. October struggles with both of these over the course of the book. There's a brief prologue that takes place roughly 14 years before the story starts. While on a case, October is magically imprisoned. By the time she's freed, her fiance and daughter have given her up for dead and the rest of her life is in similar shambles. Not knowing what to do, but knowing that she doesn't want to repea...

Brenna Yovanoff's The Replacement  was my All Hallow's Read gift this year. It's about a changeling who doesn't really fit in with the humans who raised him, but also isn't so sure that he fits in with the people who live under the ground of his town and swapped him for a human child 14 years prior. As he's trying t navigate both worlds and figure out where he belongs, another child is taken, and there's a chance that he can save her. This book is full of teen angst. The premise makes it pretty easy. A teenager who doesn't fit in anywhere and is considered a freak by basically everyone? Yeah, it's ripe for lots of woe-is-me and my life sucks and no one understands. But beyond that depressing layer is a pretty cool world. My favorite part of the book is how much thought Yovanoff put in to this world. I'm not sure I understand why a bunch of people who are deathly allergic to iron would set up underneath a steel town, but it does ...

Feed is the first book of the Newsflesh trilogy written by Seanan McGuire under the pen name Mira Grant. The title is a clever double-play on the word. It refers to both the desire of zombies to feast on human flesh and the RSS feeds that many people get their news from, both today and in the near-future of the novel. This book takes place 26 years after the zombie apocalypse. Both sides have survived the initial uprising of the zombies and have managed to find a sort of equilibrium in which they can both continue to live. The main character, George, and her brother, Shaun, are bloggers who report on the zombie situation near their northern California home. But then they get their big break, following the presidential campaign of Senator Ryman, and take off on the road with their friend Buffy. Grant creates a world that is staggering in it's detail. She's thought through security protocol (zombie tests at every door), diet changes (many people have chos...

Thud  is another Discworld  book. I know I'm getting close to the end of the series, because this one was actually recommended to me by a coworker a few years ago. At the time we were studying a game that isn't all that dissimilar from the eponymous game in this novel, so he had picked it up without really knowing anything about the series. The game actually figures very little into the plot of the book. It appears on the fringes of the story, acting sometimes as a metaphor and sometimes as a possible resolution for the main plot. It's played between dwarves and trolls and requires quite a bit of strategy. The book mostly concerns itself with the not-so-great relations between dwarves and trolls in the main city of Ankh-Morpork. As more members of both species have immigrated to the city, tensions between them have been running higher. And with the murder of a high-ranking dwarf on eve of a bloody battle between them, things are about to boil over. It'...