j wren pennington

i have said this before, but i mean it this time...i will not read anymore YA series. this is ridiculous. i realize writing one long story and publishing it as 8 books in a series is probably easier and ludicrously more lucrative than crafting a story within the confines of a page limit, but it is heartily disappointing.

these aren't really books, they are serials. they are comics without the artwork. many times they are sloppy and poorly edited overall, which makes them more like reading someone's journal. what makes this truly frustrating is that often the concepts and ideas are really interesting and sometimes even unique. this is the case with leviathan.

really neat ideas shaped to it's detriment to make money. boo.

like the majority of horror stories, let me in is a discussion of what makes a monster. is an alcoholic dad more terrifying than the vampire next door? the juxtaposition of good and evil is played out in almost every character interaction and none of the characters are all good or all evil. There are big evil things like rape, and then there are small evil things like not sharing your deceased parents stamp collection with your sibling. For this, this story has a certain realism.
BUT:
be warned!!....there is a great deal more violence in this book than there was in the movie. and i'm not talking about just blood and guts. there is a whole lot of emotional violence, and an equal amount of sexual violence. the inner monologues of lindqvist's significantly better developed characters stomps right over the line that divides unsettling and downright disturbing. Having said that, I will also say that little if any of said violence is gratuitous, it makes sense in the context provided.

it's a good read if you like that kind of thing.

i think i might want to rate this higher, but i admit that i am a little lost. i suppose i need to read the other two...which i find kind of irritating. unless, i figure out that all of the clues where there and i just missed them. i don't know...stay tuned.

fantastic writing and character development though. great of POV.

good stuff.

i like the timeless quality...there are only a few gender related issues that date this book to the seventies.

thank you peter carey for making it necessary for me to reread great expectations.

i was thinking the title was going to be figurative. this is not the case.

if you follow baratunde on twitter and like his stuff, you'll probably like it.

this is a horrible book.

page turner...

this gets 4 stars not because it's so superbly written, but because it is dishy about presidents and their wives and kids. it's like a people magazine of the white house...or at least part of it is. it does have this other agenda regarding spending cuts in the secret service and how someone could easily kill the president because the system kind of sucks. the dishy part is better. stylistically, it's journalism/ethnography, so the only real gems are direct quotes from agents, and they are gems for precisely that reason.

it's a quick read that reveals that on a personal level, president's are first and foremost people and what you think of their policies and platforms may not play out exactly as you would expect on a personal level.

not bad for this type of thing....writing is actually pretty decent, though i could have done without the love triangle.

not what i was expecting. to explain, after the election my interests took a dive into the macabre. this sounded melodramatically appealing.

interesting concept. the writing isn't bad, might even be good for what it's supposed to be, but felt clunky and haphazard as an experience (which may be the point, in which case, bravo!)

i know some high school kids who will squeal over this one.

i'm excited about this one...

ok, done. so i'm left with an overall feeling of “meh,” but when i think about specific bits of writing and/or story devices i am impressed by them individually. the whole just doesn't seem to represent the sum of the parts potentials.

so the book is a sci-fi noir detective dystopia, which has happened very successfully in the past. i think part of it is the weakness of the mystery, it's pretty easy to pick out the what really happened in the first 50 pages. also, some of the plot serves to put ticks in the sci-fi column and in the dystopia column, but does little else. there is nothing to sew the things together and as a result the story feels very shallow and disconnected.

the writing on the other hand is really nicely done. this guy has got a way with words, i wonder if he's written anything else...

do you like your fiction to be as educational as nonfiction? i do!
do you have an interest in the global economy, economics in general, on-line gaming, unionization, social justice, and/or sticking it to the man? i do!

even if you're not sure about whether you really require these things when selecting a book, you should read For The Win anyway. it's top asset is the novelty of subject matter. this not your standard YA fare and i would challenge anyone to name a novel with this kind of sophisticated global economic awareness. and though it is YA, i daresay that every adult i know apart from maybe my financial adviser and my college mentor will learn something from it. it's employ of metaphors and some pretty plain language to describe global financial transactions and macroeconomic principles borders on brilliant.

on top of that, the story is smartly written, well paced, and stay-up-till-3-to-finish-it compelling.

great read if you like music and girls, or being a girl. sometimes maybe a little more detailed than entirely necessary, but you can't say marcus isn't thorough. i think this quote kind of sums up a lot this book:

“More to the point: When you're a teenage girl who's trying with all your might not to hate yourself, trying not to get harassed or raped, trying not to let bikini blondes in beer ads crush your self-image, trying not to be discouraged from joining a sports team or math club or shop class or the school newspaper, trying not to let your family's crippling dysfunction (and the confounding irony of enduring domestic cruelty in an age of Family Values) make you want to fucking die, a feminist movement that's mostly about electing new senators might not be all that compelling to you.”

one more:

“The thrill! It could happen! It didn't even have to be hard! The universe was full of songs, just waiting for you to get some friends together and write them. And then you weren't just a fan anymore; you were a member of the fellowship of people who made things.”

go get it.

turns out it's not what i'm looking for.

i probably read a third of it, skipping around. i wanted to read it because daniel dennett is often quoted in steven pinker's and richard dawkins' books, but i think the quotes used by those two learned scholars is really all i need to know. dennett is a philosopher in the abstract, and that's fun and all but what i'm looking for is tangibility and concrete manifestation of these ideas in our physical environment. if i had nothing else to read, i would read it all and probably enjoy it, but i have a lot of other books that i am eager to get to.

if i taught linguistics I would assign this book. it's pretty fantastic.

get in started is a little rough, but keep going, it's worth it.

this is really cute book, nothing spectacular but unique in that it is one of the minority that tells of the sweet, first love high school romance between two girls. i liked it's treatment of the subject ans wish there had been books like this when i was that age.

i was hoping for a technical manual but it's really more like a long magazine article. if you have seen the documentary, you don't really need to see the book, unless you are interested in the recipes, which i am, so i'm only a little disappointed.
having said the above, i will say this; like any other book/movie/program about health and what we eat, there is something of a belief system involved. the fact is that very few “foods” are going to kill you on the spot and the evidence for the danger of our american diet that seems most compelling (meta analysis of other cultures) are too confounded by other cultural factors to be considered causal. couple that with the knowledge that a significant minority of people react badly to certain statistically healthy diets and you are left in the same boat in which you began. soooo....there is a certain amount of this that i think is very likely true and there is some of it that is probably pushing truth a bit. but, as it not harmful in any way and it fits nicely with my other beliefs re: not eating animals and humanity's evolutionarily derived talent for digesting whole foods efficiently, i'm into it.

that was not great. call it a deep sense of YA nihilism, but damn this plot has been played.

okay wait....i know how this looks, but it's actually pretty good. it's not winning the booker prize or anything, but the writing is decent and the story is fairly original and compelling, and above all it's pretty entertaining.

it's a little embarrassing to admit this, but i liked it. decent story, enough random victorian fictional characters to make easter egg hunting fun. writing is solid...

i should have waited until october though...i don't feel as bad reading guilty pleasure goth horror in october.

if i had known there were going to be 90 of these, i would never have started this..,.

oaky this rare. i rarely choose really liked a book, especially when it's a youth novel. but this book is really cool. the writing is a step above what i have come to expect from a young adult novel; as i have said before, it's not book thief or borges, but it is all grammatically correct and there is a mastery there that allows some fun word play.

it's the story that really works so well here. everlost is the place between life and “wherever you are going.” you get there by being young and bumped off your path on the way to the white light at the end of the tunnel. shusterman does a smashing job of creating a whole afterlife without making any specific comments about religion or morality. he also does a great job of creating morally ambiguous characters, but you love them because of their faults and weaknesses.

i'm not going to go too far into it, but this book makes some pretty sophisticated statements about cognitive development, intentions, and emotional needs.

i was impressed and entertained.

aaaahhhh this is awesome except it is too short!!

annabel scheme is a well thought out, creative, and somewhat unique story that takes all of the fun stuff of life and puts it in the same pot.

so first thing, as sloan does so well in penumbra, the real function and ability of computers. it is frustrating how dependent on technology our culture is and how little the people understand about how it works. making a server a character is a pretty ingenious way to humanize something we typically dismiss because we cannot relate to it. also with this is california tech culture. lots of people don't get that either.

thing two is urban fantasy that manages not to be fantasy that someone has written before, and manages to rise above the glut of vampire/werewolf/zombie tide.

totally enjoyable. i realllllllly hope there is more.

grit. it's worth it.

i really need a book club discussion of this trilogy. i feel like there are some things i did not get.