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Reading Books 2010

After getting my Sony ebook reader, I've been reading a bit more than I usually do. That thing is so convenient to carry around, I'm much more fond of it than I thought I would be. Anyway, I'm going to try and read at least 50 books this year, which is a lot for me as I am usually a very slow reader. Sometimes it takes me months to get through a book, especially if I'm not particularly fond of a book. So here are the books I've read so far, although I am cheating a bit as I got my ebook reader just before Christmas so I actually read some before 2010 started. Oh well, I'm counting them anyway, ha ha.

Currently finished reading 11 books.

1. Dearly Devoted Dexter *****

This one was great, the best of the series so far. Deliciously dark, morbid humour.

2. Dexter in the Dark ***

A pretty big departure from the previous novels. Gets into some "supernatural" stuff that really doesn't work that well. Still pretty entertaining, though.

3. Dexter by Design ***

Gets back to the original tone of the series, and yet doesn't quite hit the mark. It's just not as funny or engrossing as the second novel.

4. Mickey Spillane: I, The Jury *

Even if you can ignore the racism, misogyny, and juvenile wish fulfillment that this novel is so full of, it's still not a very good novel. It reads like something drummed up by a twelve year old boy with poor grades and raging hormones. Sorry, I just don't see the appeal of this novel.

5. A Place of Execution *****

Excellent book! It did seem slow paced at times and the main story seemed to end at the book's halfway point, but from there it builds up to a pretty terrific ending!

6. The Stars My Destination ****

An entertaining novel, very much like Phillip K. Dick's stuff. It's funny how they have instant teleportation and space travel, but tattoo removal? Impossible, I tell you! I've read "The Demolished Man" as well, another great story from the same author.

7. Deja Dead ****

The TV show Bones is based of this book series and this is the first book of that series. The book is nothing like the TV show, thankfully, as the TV show is pretty horrible in a lot of ways. It's set in Montreal and seems very genuine and authentic - the author lives and works there and Carolina, so she has good firsthand knowledge of the city. While it's a pretty good book, especially for a first novel, it also has some glaring, annoying flaws - the characters aren't very sympathetic, the men in the book are almost always ugly, repugnant, filthy pigs [which becomes a bit tiresome after awhile] and the ending has a very long conversation with two characters [although it's mostly one character talking] where they tie up every loose end leftover from the story's climax. Ending the book like that really exposes how contrived much of the plot was and is a rather contrived way in itself to tie up all those messy loose ends. Despite that, I still liked the book, it had a good "Silence of the Lambs" vibe to it.

8. Point Blank ****
Having seen both movies based on this book [1967's Point Blank with Lee Marvin and 1999's Payback with Mel Gibson], I thought I'd check the book out and see how it compares. Pretty good book, not terribly well written as such, but the Parker character is quite the badass and it's fun reading about his exploits. He's definitely one of the more amoral anti-heroes I've ever come across.

9. The Scar ***
This was a brilliantly written book, very imaginative if a tad verbose. Unfortunately, it has a couple of glaring problems. One is a very unsympathetic main character, the same problem I had with Perdido Street Station. I started off not liking Bellis Coldwine from the very beginning and by the end of the novel, I hated her. Self-absorbed, judgmental, bitch. Also, the end was a total dud. Everything leading up to the end was pretty great, but then... nothing. Just a totally useless, meaningless ending. The novel also starts off very slowly, it took awhile to get into. So close to being great, but in the end, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

10. Hominids **
The Neanderthal world presented in this book was pretty cool, but other than that, this book was disappointing.

11. Broken Angels ***
This was a pretty fun novel. Not terribly deep, but the Takeshi Kovacs character was a hoot, a badass with a wicked sense of humour.

12. Frankenstein

Perdido Street Station / Ubik

I finished Perdido Street Station a couple nights ago. Overall, I'd probably not recommend it but mostly because it just wasn't my cup of tea. Although there were a lot of things I liked about it. But the main characters [Isaac and Lin] seemed like a couple of self-absorbed jerks and I really couldn't care less what happened to them. The mass of obscure words at the very begining was a real turn off, although he tones it down later and the story becomes much more readable. The story is rather boring at first, with Isaac working on his 'project' and Lin on her art piece. But then the slake-moths appear and the story gets rolling along and is quite fun and interesting for awhile. The Construct, the Weaver and all the other creations in the story are pretty freaking cool. The ending kind of pissed me off though, rather stupid and bleak. It just kind of left a bad taste in my mouth and made me wonder why I had bothered reading the damn thing. A lot of things in the story irritated me, the combination of sci-fi and fantasy didn't always work, and it seemed like the story didn't quite fit together in some places. I guess you could say I have mixed feelings about this novel.

Anyway, for a totally different pace, I've started in on Ubik, which looks like a quick, easy read compared to PSS.

Perdido Street Station

I'm about 2/3 of the way through "Perdido Street Station" and I'm liking it pretty much now. Unlike my first impression, which was rather negative because of all the obscure language he was using. It becomes much more intelligible after the first couple chapters. I'm still not crazy about the main characters and his penchant for describing things in such detail when it isn't really necessary. Anyway, it is a good book overall and hopefully I can finish it this weekend. Oh, and the slake-moths are very cool.

A Box of Books

My book order from Amazon came in today, here's what I got:

• Ubik by Philip K. Dick - I haven't read much PKD, bit I loved "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" so this should be good. I was trying to get "The Man in the High Castle" but they said delivery would take a few weeks, so I just ordered books that would be shipped in a reasonable amount of time.
• The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham - read "The Chrysalids", "The Midwich Cuckoos" and "Trouble with Lichen" so this was a no-brainer. I love how he writes so simply, yet his stories are very imaginative, original and entertaining. A lot of writers could learn from his style, or lack of it.
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin - never read anything by this author but the story sounds fascinating.
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler - I've read "Wild Seed" and absolutely loved it, one of the most twisted, entertaining stories I've ever read, so if this one's even remotely as good I'll be happy.
• Doomsday Book by Connie Willis - another author I've never read before but it won some awards. And the last book I read that was named after a book was pretty damn good. [Cryptonomicon]
• The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers - another novelist that I'm not familiar with but this book is also well regarded.
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke - the biggest novel of the bunch, hope it's good. Her first novel, rave reviews, yadda yadda.
• Perdido Street Station by China Mièville - never read any of his stuff but this novel got a lot of hype. So I decided to start reading this one first tonight. After a couple chapters I'm very underwhelmed. He uses a lot of words that I'm unfamiliar with so I broke out the dictionary and found that hardly any of them are even listed! He's either using very obscure words that can only be found in the big 3,000 page university dictionaries, or he's just using strange spellings [like chymical rather than chemical] or he's just making words up. So I gave up on the dictionary and am trying to decipher his prose via context. I can't say I've ever run into this problem before, at least not this severely. And I hope he stops going on and on about how bleak this city is, I get it already, get on with the fucking story already! Anyway, despite my bitching, it's still early and this could turn out to be a good novel once I get into it.

So that's it, I'm set for novel reading goodness for like ever now. ;)

Say what?

I was trolling through books on Amazon.ca and I came across this title: How to Teach Math to Black Students. I must be really tired cause that just seems silly. What next, English for really short people?

The DaVinci Code

I just finished reading The DaVinci Code. It was pretty good, although I wasn't terribly impressed with the way everything was wrapped up at the end. Bleh, it just didn't work for me. The ideas it presents in the book are really fascinating and I'm curious to find out how much is true and how much he just made up. Another thing that bothered me was how these people on the run from the law always seem to have time for long conversations about art history and what have you. They also don't seem to ever have to go to the washroom, or eat [much, I think they had a warm Coke and crackers at one point] or sleep, for the whole length of the novel. And there seemed to be more than a few plot holes and inconsistencies in the story. But still, the central theme of the book was pretty damn cool.

Hey, I solved all the riddles on that site too! Woohoo! Too bad I'm too late to win anything.

New Books

Two books arrived from Amazon last week: Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver and Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. I've read the first couple chapters of Quicksilver but it hasn't really grabbed me yet. It seems very dense, there's stuff about puritans, the Salem witch trials, Ben Franklin, Isaac Newton, the Royal Society [?] and a whole whack of other stuff that I'm sure has gone right over my head as I'm not terribly familiar with American history. And that's just the first ~30 pages. Yikes. NS does have a wiki online that provides background essays relating to the QS time period, so that should help. I hope.

Words fail me

A Wuthering Heights roleplaying game. Eeek! Sure, it would be fun playing Heathcliff, but what about the other poor players?

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

I wrote this whole fucking thing about this book. And then I accidently clicked on the screen and my browser went to a new page. I clicked the back button and everything I had written was gone. Completely fucking gone. I wish that Movable Type wouldn't do that. I finished reading this book today, it is very good. If you haven't read it yet, then you should. It will make your brain explode. Really.