it is out! I’m listening! (review of Under Heaven to come!)
This book starts exactly where Bone Season left off, so if you’ve not read that (or the first 20% or so of Mime Order ) massive spoilers ahead! Continue reading
I wanted to like this book more then I did. It’s not that I didn’t like it but I found it hard to get into it and stay into it. I’m not sure if it was the writing style or the characters or the pacing. I just never truly connected with it fully. Maybe I have hit my threshold on Hunger Gamesish type dystopian.
Red Rising is about Darrow, who is a miner on Mars. He and his family are Reds. The lowest of the color castes. Their job is to mine precious elements to prepare the surface of Mars for colonization. They were told they were colonist but really they are slaves. Mars was colonized for centuries and the ruling color castes, Golds, have been living it up on the surface, while Reds toil away below. All this is revealed to Darrow after his wife, Eo, is executed and Darrow joins the Army of Ares to take down the Golds and the Society from the inside.
Maybe for me it’s more of a question of pacing then anything else. Eo, is executed so early in the book, that I was never able to get to know her or Darrow or their relationship. Obviously they were in love. I got that much and apparently Eo was someone that everyone loved. True, it’s sad when anyone is killed at such a young age. Especially over something that is a simple as a song but it was a blink and you miss her and she’s gone. Oh, ok. Then Darrow is whisked away by the Army of Ares, told the truth about how the Society really is and joins the rebellion. I guess I never felt I had time to know who Darrow was before all this happened. I didn’t get to know where he came from before he was set out on his revenge. I think this is also a problem of the author because to compare to the Hunger Games, the reaping happens very early on in the book and Katniss and Peeta are on the train to the capital by the third chapter but by then the connection for me was already made. I was invested.
After a lengthy process of changing Darrow from a Red to a Gold, which includes surgeries, we finally get to the Institute that turns Golds into the leaders and rulers of the Society. The Institute is nothing but a Hunger Games style of live action game of Risk. The students are set up into different houses where they try to invade, conquer and slave the other students. Again with the pacing. At times, it was exciting and I hated that I was at my stop on the train and had to stop reading to get off but then momentum would end and I was like “can we get on with it” The ending itself was also a little meh. I guess it does set up nicely for the sequel, Golden Son, which is out now.
It was ok. I’ll probably will read the sequel eventually but not right away. I think this was Pierce Brown’s first book, so hopefully the next one will be better. I like the concept, I do. The execution just wasn’t quite up the the task.
Who knew I would be writing about HarperCollins twice in one week? It turns out HarperCollins London’s office is moving into a swanky new office. According to this article, there are conferences rooms named in honor of their authors, Hilary Mantel and George R.R. Martin. And it’s the Martin room that interests
me. This room has on display the original letter that Mr. Martin wrote to his agent about the plot of The Song of Ice and Fire. The final paragraph has been blacked out keeping the ending a mystery, for which I am glad about.
Some kind soul took pictures of the letter and posted it on Tumblr. I don’t think I have to say this but I will, Spoiler Alert. While many of Mr. Martin’s original ideas did not come to pass, some still might happen. Including the five characters who Mr. Martin originally intended on surviving the whole series. I give you a hint, all five are currently still alive though may not be for much longer. So, click at your own risk.
For those who found the letter to hard to read or too lazy to read it, MilfordAcademy summarized the letter on the blog Oh No They Didn’t. Again, don’t read unless you really want to know. You’ve been warned!
So what do you think? Who wishes some of what he originally planned had happened? There’s a few things I definitely do and other’s I’m very glad never happened but I guess there is still time.
Anyone who ever went to high school in the United States and maybe outside the US has read To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It’s considered an American Lit classic and despite it’s success it’s Miss Lee’s only book. That is until now. HarperCollins today announced that Miss Lee will publish her first her book in over 50 years Like OMG! This is amazing. Not only is it a new book but it’s a sequel. Go Set a Watchmen follows an Adult Scout as she comes cack to Maycomb, Alambama.
The book is set during the mid-1950s, some 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father Atticus and is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood
This is awesome! It turns out that Go Set a Watchmen is actually Miss Lee’s first book. When she showed it to her editor, the editor said she should write about a young Scout, so she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird instead. She thought the manuscript was other destroyed or lost. Surprise! It was not.
Well it might not be all good news. HarperCollins only has contact with Miss Lee through her Lawyer and Literary Agent so there are questions about whether Miss Lee has really signed off on this. It would be sad if that was true and I hope that it is not true. I’m not sure if this is good or not but for now I am going to be excited about the new release and will wait patiently for July 14.
The American Library Association announced the winners of the Newbery, Caldecott and Printz awards today. These honor the best on Children’s literature. Past winners, like Johnny Tremain, The Graveyard Book, and The Westing Game are now consider classics so it’s a big deal to win. Not to mention a boost in sales. No doubt tomorrow hundreds of parents went into bookstores all over the country asking for them.
There are a few stand outs. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson has already won the National Book Award for Young Adult, was honored with the Coretta Scott King Award and was also a Newbery Honoree. It’s Ms. Woodson’s memoir of growing up in the south and in New York, told mostly in verse. On a personal note, Ms. Woodson lives in the neighborhood that I work in and is a very nice woman. So I couldn’t be happier for her. I haven’t read it yet but it’s definitely on the to-read list.
Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith was named a Printz Award honoree. I have read this and let me tell you, it’s kinda of messed up. I became interested in it since it takes place in Iowa, my home state. It’s a story of Austin, a horny teenager who struggling with his feelings for both his girlfriend Shann and his best friend Robby. If that wasn’t enough problems for a teenage boy, he and Robby accidentally unleashed six foot praying mantis’ that will destroy the world. Yeah, I know. Weird. In one way, it was refreshing to have a novel take on bisexuality in such a head on way but on the other hand, the female lead Shann, is pretty one dimensional. So it’s progressive in one way and a step back in another way. It’s still worth a read though.
Have you read any of the other winners or honorees? If so, sound off in the comments below.
To distract us from the fact that there will be no new book in 2015, HBO has released the first trailer for upcoming season of Game of Thrones. I have so many feels about this. Is it April yet?
Scarlet by Marissa Meyer is on sale for $2.99 as an ebook at Barnes and Noble and the iTunes Store right now!
Thanks, Book Bub for letting us know!
I’m not normally the kind of reader (or person in general) that makes myself finish one thing before I start another thing. (Sometimes, I eat my dessert before finishing my peas.) I have no trouble starting a book right after I started a book. Back in the day, before there were ebooks and audiobooks that automatically downloaded to my fancy phone, this was easy to accomplish. I had the book on my bedside table and the book in my purse and the book in my backpack. I would read whatever was available. Now that I have ebooks and audio books (I still read physical books, though!) that will sync across platforms I don’t have the same excuse. So, now I just try to limit myself to one physical book, one ebook and one audio book at a time. Some days, it is really difficult, though.
I have the audio book of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Under Heaven checked out from the public library. I have re-checked it out once and I only have it for another 9 days and I’m more than half way done. I’m really enjoying it! Every time I think, “Meh, I can see where this is going.” I get a section from a different character’s perspective and my theories are blown! It is really good! But, I am very excited that Mime Order is out and every bone in my body wants to start listening to it. Right now. I especially want to listen to it because I know Beth has finished it and is dying to talk about it. Ah, the frustration!
Under Heaven is really good though. And, I imagine Mime Order won’t get stale waiting.
Do you read more than one book at a time? How do you manage it? Have you put a book aside to get to something exciting you’ve been waiting for?
Beth has started her series highlighting series that she’s enjoyed and that she feels have been neglected by the blogging community. After some discussion we’ve decided that my more or less regular series will be about non-fiction books. The world we live in is just so cool that I love to dip my toe into the realm of non-fiction (it’s a pretty huge realm) and learn all sorts of new things. No thing is safe from me reading!
For my first installment, I’m going to review/discuss a few self-help books. January is the time for resolutions and there are lots of things that you can read that will offer you advice on how to live better or healthier or smarter (whatever any of those things mean). In the past month, I’ve started two books meant to better inform me about how to be happy and healthy. In the past six months, I’ve read an additional book that I’ll be discussing on this list. In general I’m pretty skeptical about the usefulness of these volumes. It isn’t that they don’t offer interesting insight into theories and research about health and well-being. (Some of them do.) It’s more that there are no quick fixes to changing habits and your health. Regardless of the method you use, you still have to commit to a change and make that change work in your life. And, committing and working can be boring, slogging, grueling processes, not matter how exciting of novel your approach to them might be. But, I like the idea of taking stock of where you are and making a plan to move towards where you would like to be so I like the practice of making resolutions or goals. The first two books on this list are self-help designed to help you better manage your time and accomplish your goals. The first one focuses on your feelings and how you can get more desired feelings into your life and the second one focuses on time and how you can change how you think about time and the tasks you have to accomplish in order to get more done. The last book I’ll discuss is an overview of Chinese medicine and women’s health. At this point, I should probably say “spoilers ahead” (although, that’s probably a good thing since I’m panning at least one of these books.)
I borrowed this book from a friend, so I feel pretty bad that I’m about to pan it.
This book was so poorly written. It was like reading someone’s notes or inferring a deeper meaning from a series of pinterest posts. The book is divided into two parts. The first is theory. And, after I got past her opening (it was painful) we got to the epiphany: how do you want to feel? how can you focus on how you feel and meeting the needs revealed those feelings and then use that to reach your goals? I have sympathy for this idea. I can be pretty goal-oriented and fall into patterns of thinking that have me so focused on end results that I miss not only how unhappy I am in the present but I fail to realize how unfulfilled I will feel upon completing the goal. And, I doubt I’m alone in this. So, focusing on my emotional needs and seeing how to meet them more directly so that I’m in a more comfortable place sounded great. It also sounds pretty realistic. Life is about the journey, right? Which brings me to my major problem of the book: I have heard this before. I’ve heard this before and some of the ideas she presents seem, well, appropriative (passing Buddhist philosophy off as a magical part of her system) and like they might be taken out of their context. When we take big ideas out of context like this they often lose some if not all of their depth and resolution. So, passing Buddhist philosophy off as magic made me uncomfortable. And, then failing to engage in a deep and critical discussion of the philosophy (or anything really) made me feel unfulfilled and annoyed. I’m not looking for magic. This is a self-help book! I was looking for a little help!
The rest of my beef with the book was formatting. Books are not power point slides. They are not flash animated videos on the internet. Do not have multiple fonts on the page. Just don’t. After awhile I imagined that this was done to distract from a lack of deep engagement and discussion of the subject matter. I was not fooled. Honestly, I skipped a hundred pages because I couldn’t deal with it and I knew if I kept on I wouldn’t get to the workbook part and I wanted to see if there were useful things there. The worksheets and activities were useful in the workbook portion of the book. But, again, there wasn’t anything novel about it. I’ve seen mindfulness exercises that had similar formats. So, this book could be useful. But, it was not great and it annoyed me way more than it helped me.
This book was so very helpful. The Now Habit was mostly about time management and how to be more mindful of your time. It had you think about where you lose time in your day (where you go off the rails and end up watching TV or facebooking or reading that novel on your phone) and what you’re avoiding (and why). Then, it had you make a calendar and schedule where you were going to be places, when you would be traveling, when you’d be eating or cooking. This created a really nice visual of how much extra time I didn’t which made time-wasting not all that appealing. The author had you include recreational time in your week so that you weren’t all-work-all-the-time and that also was a nice feature. Putting things like knitting and reading on my schedule was like giving myself permission to relax and do those things. There was also an element of mindfulness in this approach but it wasn’t sold as magic but rather practice that can help you achieve your goals. I’ve incorporated a number of elements of this book into my life and it has been working pretty great.
I picked this up at a Half Price Books in its clearance section for two bucks. I think it was two bucks well spent. This book is a very general introduction to Chinese medicine focusing specifically on women’s health written by a doctor trained in both Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). After the opening chapter that discussed the Traditional Chinese system, each chapter takes a look at specific time-frames in a woman’s life. It begins with menarche and goes through menopause. I really liked all of the discussion on prevention. One of the things I learned from this book was that TCM is big on balance and preventative medicine. And, thinking of the body as a whole system where problems in one area can spill over into another area made a lot of sense to me. I also enjoyed the focus on how “healing” isn’t the same as “curing”. The author spent a lot of time highlighting how modern western medicine treats systems and doesn’t support patients. And, I’m sympathetic to that idea. If you’re not meeting your emotional and spiritual needs the physical can go way, way wrong. Striving for balance is a worthwhile goal. There were parts of the book that made me feel like I was being sold snake oil. She told some stories of women treated with Western Medicine who then found healing with TCM throughout the book. Some of these seemed a little over the top but the overall message of balance and trying your best to take care of all of your needs was good. I would have liked a more in-depth discussion of Traditional Chinese Medicine and all of working parts.
Have you read any Self-Help books in a lead up to Goal Setting for the New Year? What do you like (or hate!) about the genre? What are your goals for 2015?
2 Women, So Many Books 