Anki

I liked this book well enough, but in the end there wasn't really anything that grabbed me about it.

While the story is well written and the premise is an interesting one, I had real difficulty relating with the protagonists, as I found a number of their decisions and actions to be rather abhorrent. I can appreciate the literary skill of the author, but I don't know that I will read anything else by him.

I enjoyed reading this book, in much the same way I will enjoy eating inexpensive candy. Sweet, yes, and diverting, but hardly something I want my literary diet to consist of in the main. I think I would have preferred a longer story (things wrap up incredibly quickly at the end there—too quickly, really) with less reliance on excessive adjectives and tropes and a greater focus on developing more complex characters.

I really enjoyed the Summer Wars movie, so when I saw the manga adaptation at the book store I knew I wanted to check it out. This volume does not disappoint: it has the same slightly odd and wacky slice-of-life feel as the film, but with a bit more of focus on the relationship between Kenji and Natsuki. I'm definitely looking forward to the second volume when it gets released.

This was an interesting read that raised some complex questions regarding identity, but there were quite a few frustrating aspects to it as well. Things like “we're going to continue keeping secrets even though that is obviously not the best course of action and has led to the majority of the problems we've encountered to this point” and some scientific aspects as well. Specifically, cloning and how it would work. Even identical twins--the closest thing we have to human clones--are not 100% the same as each other, so why should Bethany be so similar to Elizabeth, down to favourite foods and hobbies and physical abilities and all the rest? It just doesn't seem feasible to me, even if we are looking at a science fiction story.

Still, all told it is a fun, fast-paced read, and for the intended audience it should be pretty engaging.

First, the positives...there were a lot of fun one liners in this book, a reasonable number of interesting characters, and essentially non-stop action. This made for a fairly quick read.

Unfortunately, for me the negatives rather outweigh the positives. Strike one, it's written in first person present tense. Mostly from the viewpoint of a single character (Durango), but there are some others thrown in there “when necessary”. I find first person present tense to be very tricky to pull off properly in fiction. It isn't bad here, but there are a few rough spots and it is hard to get a full sense of the passage of time (not withstanding the date/time stamps at the start of each chapter).

Strike two, starting in medias res combined with throwing a whole lot of unfamiliar terms and story elements at the reader with no explanations given whatsoever. While I am no real fan of the extended info-dump (it usually bogs down a story something fierce), having to piece together what things are and how they work with no confirmation as to whether or not I am doing it correctly isn't particularly fun either. There has to be a balance, and that balance wasn't present here. Having lots of flashy action only carries things so far.

Strike three, there's a definite sense of “story soup” going on here. I could see elements that track to Firefly, Star Wars, Star Trek, Ender's Game, and samurai films. The tech seems very much subject to hand-wavium, and seems applied inconsistently throughout the story. I found it hard to get a real sense of time and place as a result. Particularly when you have a few characters in a far-distant, semi-dystopian future still quoting heavily from 19th century literature and 20th century culture (and people get the references without problems). Oh, and the mishmash of languages being dropped (untranslated, mind you) here and there, apparently for the purposes of flavour and world-building? Didn't work for me. There were too many of them, they weren't consistently applied, and it just came across as sloppy.

The story is also quite violent. This is to be expected as Durango and company are mercenary soldiers, but still. There were a number of places where it was really hard to follow the action, and on more than one occasion I found myself wondering just how things were supposed to work from a physics perspective. If I'm thinking more about the physics and logistics of a fight than the tension it is supposed to be building in the story, then I'd say something isn't working properly with the story.

I got this book through the B&N Nook Free Friday program.

This sequel to [b:Tuesdays at the Castle 10508431 Tuesdays at the Castle (Castle Glower #1) Jessica Day George http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1331678412s/10508431.jpg 15414344] is a delightful continuation of the story of Celie and the Castle. I definitely hope there are more books to come; I want to learn more about these characters.

So I might have stayed up really late last night finishing this book. Devouring it whole is probably a fairly apt descriptor. And now I want to read it again. Reread the whole series, really.

The marketing of this series fascinates me. I know I need to check the children's section of my local bookshops if I want to find them. They are classified as juvenile fiction, or maybe sometimes as YA (I can't say as I have ever found them shelved in the YA/teen section, however). When the series starts, Will and his friends are fifteen years old, but by this last book they are, at an absolute minimum, in their mid-30s. That's a huge range of ages for a series of books aimed at children, but somehow it works.

My reactions to this book are...mixed (hence the average rating). First, the short stories. All three of them were excellent, expanding the story universe and giving more insight into the characters and their motivations. They laid the groundwork for some things that come up later in the series (and in the follow-up series) without bogging down the main narrative. The short stories were the reason I picked up this book in the first place.

Second, the interviews with the various campers and the other Camp Half Blood related stuff. I found these mildly entertaining, but not much beyond that. They do give some insight/information into the characters and how the camp works, but in general they feel pretty light.

Third, the puzzles and games. Again, mildly interesting, but also rather simplistic. This is completely understandable, given the target audience for the book, but I wouldn't have been fussed had they been left out entirely. I'm not a huge fan of puzzles in books anyway, since they can create issues if you lend/borrow the book.

Finally, the character depictions...no. Just no. They don't match up with my mental pictures at all. Too cartoony for my tastes, with exaggerated proportions and garish colours. And there's just something off about the eyes in nearly every picture.

The Redwall series has been one of my favourites for about twenty years. I can't recall exactly how I first learned about the books, but I do remember clearly my mother getting me out of school one day so she could take me to meet Brian Jacques when he came to the area to do a book signing. That was a truly delightful treat.

Despite my love for the series, it had been years since I last read Redwall, and the last time I tried I discovered I wasn't in the mood for that particular book, so I set it aside. Since it had been years, however, I decided to give it another try. I borrowed the audiobook from my local library to listen to during my commute. The full cast audio is delightful, and I really enjoyed listening to this story.

Thing is...I realise now that Redwall is probably my least favourite entry in the series, and in listening to it I've been able to pinpoint a few of the reasons why this is. Redwall is the first book in the series, and on the world-building front it just doesn't mesh cleanly with the later books. The various groups and tribes of creatures are still largely undeveloped. There are mentions of large animals like horses, pigs, and stags, all of which are completely absent in later books. In Redwall there seems to be some implication that the Abbey mice and various woodland creatures are living alongside humans (see the aforementioned farm animals, plus mentions of towns), even though humans are never actually mentioned in the story. Reading Redwall after reading other books in the series winds up being jarring for me, simply because it's a literary step backward.

I still like the book, and I'm sure I'll read (or listen to) it again. Knowing why it isn't my favourite helps me appreciate it for what it is: the foundation and starting point for an amazing series of books that I absolutely love.

I discovered Friends With Boys online one day, shortly after Faith Erin Hicks started posting the pages to her website in webcomic form as a promotion for the upcoming print release. It quickly became one of my favourite comics, and I made sure to pre-order the print copy, knowing I wanted to have it in my personal library (particularly since after the end of February 2012 only the first sixteen pages of the book will be available for viewing online).

The print version is lovely. It is more or less trade paper size, so it sits very nicely in hand, and I love the cover flap detailing that creates the sense of it having a dust jacket. My only real complaint is a minor one: as with many, many other graphic novels, Friends With Boys has a few points where the edges of some of the panels get a bit lost in the spine of the book. It comes with the nature of the print medium, and there really is not any way to “fix” it and maintain the integrity of the art.

Bottom line: If you enjoy fun characters and slice-of-life type stories (with or without supernatural twists) definitely check this comic out.

The Enchanted Inc/Katie Chandler novels are easily some of my favourite books. They have just the right blend of elements to make me inordinately happy when I read them, and I'm nearly always in the mood to reread them. I felt the fourth book ended well, but I still wanted to read more about Katie and Owen and Merlin and Rod and all the rest.

So I was extremely happy when I found out Shanna Swendson would be publishing the fifth book in the series as an ebook. I carefully marked the release date on my calendar so I could be sure to purchase a copy (and I really hope there will also be a print edition at some point in the future, because I do so like my books to match in format where possible).

This book did not disappoint in the slightest. I was torn between wanting to savour it slowly and wanting to gobble it up in big chunks of delightful storytelling. It had been a few months since I read the previous books in the series, but I was able to slide right back into the story and connect with the characters once more. The pacing was excellent and I think this book would provide a pretty good entry point to the series (though you will definitely get more out of it by reading the previous books first).

At the very end of the book was a teaser for the sixth book, which is slated to come out in ebook format on 1 October 2012. I already have the date on my calendar, and am eager to see what will happen next.

Overall I enjoyed this collection of short comics following around the cast and characters of Avatar: The Last Airbender. However, the broad range of art styles made for a somewhat disconnected feel. I most enjoyed the stories where the art closely mimicked the original animation, or where the art was a bit more realistic. Thankfully, those entries made up most of the volume.

I am pretty much always up for more Avatar, so getting this graphic novel was a welcome treat. This serves as a bridge (or the start of one, at any rate) between the first series and the upcoming Legend of Korra series.

My only real complaint is the length of the book, or lack thereof. The second volume doesn't come out until May, which is a frustrating wait.

As is often the case with collections of short fiction, I enjoyed some parts of this book better than others.A Beautiful Friendship (David Weber)I really liked this story, which chronicles the first meeting between humans and treecats. David Weber later expanded this story into a YA novel with the same title, and as soon as I finished reading this version I went onto the Baen website to purchase and download the novel so I could read it too. I liked seeing more of the treecats as full-fledged characters.A Grand Tour (David Drake)This was my least favourite portion of the anthology. It wasn't badly written, but it seemed only tangentially connected to the rest of the Honor Harrington universe. It really seemed like it could have easily been dropped into another science fiction universe simply by changing the names of a few places and groups of people.A Whiff of Grapeshot (S.M. Stirling)This short story fills in background for an event that was mentioned more or less in passing in the book [b:In Enemy Hands 77740 In Enemy Hands (Honor Harrington, #7) David Weber http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1321561738s/77740.jpg 2684782]. I liked this one a lot, and the events it covered really work best in short story format rather than as part of a novel as a whole.The Universe of Honor Harrington (David Weber)And this one read like a history book. Which, to be fair, is more or less what it is, so it fulfils its purpose in that regard. I enjoyed it for the background information it provides, but it isn't really a story. It was a slow read, and probably not strictly necessary, but for people who will read through all the appendix information and footnotes in various books because they find them fascinating this is an excellent addition. I do like how well everything hangs together.Out of the collection as a whole, my favourite part was definitely A Beautiful Friendship.

Tuesdays at the Castle struck just the right note with me as I was reading it. Celie is an intelligent, spunky, delightful eleven-year-old, and is a delight to follow around. The writing is smart and crisp, and the pacing is excellent.

Travel to Tomorrow is the first book in the Fifties Chix series, and it is a time-travel (or at least dimension-hopping/alternate reality) themed story. This was definitely a book devoted heavily to setting up the premise and introducing the characters, but that is fairly typical for first books in series like this. A lot of questions were raised, but very few of them were actually answered.

A glossary of terms and people is included at the back of the book, which was helpful, but the tone of the entries often felt like the author was trying too hard to use modern slang to define the 50s slang, and the result was less than successful, at least from my perspective. Of course, I am also not precisely in the target audience for the book, so it is entirely possible that I am out of touch. I'll have to show it to my sister and see what she thinks.

Girl Genius is one of my favourite comic series, and this omnibus release of the first three volumes is absolutely gorgeous. It's a bit smaller (dimensions-wise) than the individual volumes released by Studio Foglio, but I prefer the hardcover format overall. It is sturdier, and you can open it fully without breaking the spine.

I really hope Tor continues releasing the series in these omnibus editions. I will cheerfully go out and buy them all.

This is only the second Louisa May Alcott book I've read, but I enjoyed it quite a bit more than [b:Little Women 1934 Little Women (Little Women, #1) Louisa May Alcott http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309282614s/1934.jpg 3244642]. I definitely want to read the sequel.

This is an excellent reference work for those who want or need to design something, but who do not have the luxury of going to design school. The information is presented clearly and concisely, and there are many examples of the principles being discussed found throughout the book.

I first got this book for one of my college editing courses, and I still reference it regularly. It's helped to give me more tools to use in explaining why something does or doesn't work from a design standpoint.

The Dreamer is one of my favourite webcomics and one of my favourite works of historical fiction. It has really sparked my interest in the history of the Revolutionary War, and Lora Innes really brings the individual people to life. I was so glad when IDW released this second volume because, as much as I love being able to read the story online, everything about the story is better in print format. This volume picks up right where the first one left off, and Bea is struggling to balance herself across two worlds: her present-day life and her life in 1776, accessed through her dreams.

I am eagerly awaiting the release of the next volume, though I have a feeling it will probably be awhile before it comes out.

The VIZBIG editions of the Inuyasha manga are an excellent and affordable way to collect the series in English, plus the content is unflipped (and bigger than the original English publications to boot).

In this volume they seem to have ditched most of the dialect attempts (Jakken is no longer painful to read, for which I am profoundly grateful), but there continue to be occasional confusing bits that I can only attribute to small translation errors. All in all, a very satisfying volume.

The concept and premise of this book are both of interest to me, and overall I enjoyed the story. But it definitely feels like a “set up the series” novel, which led to a few pacing issues, and there were times when word choices threw me out of the story.

This book provides an overview and introduction to beekeeping without delving too deeply into technical specifics. In tone and design it seems intended for people who are curious about or have a casual interest in the subject of beekeeping. Since that is the category into which I fall, it was an excellent choice for me.

One design element I particularly appreciated was that all images in the book were line drawings. It helped to maintain a cohesive aspect to the book's design that a mixture of line drawings and photographs would not have accomplished.

This is another one of those “childhood classics” that I managed to miss reading when I was actually a child. I'm still trying to decide whether or not this is a good thing. I think that, had I tried reading it as a child, I would have been just a bit bored by the story overall. But as an adult reader, I find I am probably less forgiving of things I perceive as flaws in the writing.

Coming to it as an adult reader, I can see why it is viewed as a classic, and I enjoyed reading it, but I also don't think it would really be publishable today. The pacing is somewhat uneven–it seemed that just when things would start to pick up a good pace we would be treated to another “now gentle reader” moment, highlighting the moral lessons we should be learning from the story, and also bringing the forward momentum of the story to a halt.

I had problems with Beth as a character, mostly because I don't feel she really was a character. Of the main characters, she is the only one whose viewpoint we don't really see. We are told she is sweet and perfect and wonderful and beloved, but the only real evidence we have of these things is circumstantial at best: Beth is wonderful because we are told she is wonderful. Consequently, the major plot points that hinge on Beth all struck me as a little bit fake, which was rather unfortunate.

I liked John and Laurie and Professor Bhaer, and I enjoyed the romances that came with them (though again, it seemed like we got an awful lot of preaching and moralising whenever something interesting was about to happen).

I'm glad I read it, and I may very well read it again at some point, but probably not for several years.

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Some edition-specific notes:

The Barnes & Noble Classics ebook edition is, for the most part, quite good. It comes with quite a bit of supplementary material in the form of a biography of the author; historical background of both when the book was written and the time period in which it was set; and approximately twenty pages of endnotes and footnotes, all hyper-linked within the book itself.

I would have preferred to see the information about the author and her history placed at the end of the text rather than the beginning. Ditto with the introduction, which, like most such introductions, assumes the reader is already familiar with the text.

The proofreading of the ebook text is...spotty. As far as I can tell it was typeset by scanning an existing print copy of the book, using OCR technology to render the text. On the whole, this works perfectly well, but there are a number of places where words are split oddly (e.g. “beg inning” instead of “beginning”), or specific letters were not translated correctly, leading to spelling errors (e.g. “tor” instead of “for”).