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Whalley posted:I wound up reading a total of 58 books last year, so gently caress it I'm going for 60 this time around and I'm going to make sure I write a review on goodreads for each one, I only reviewed the second half of last year I'm setting my target at 52, and, as usual, only books I haven't read before count. Last year and the year before I ended up putting it up, but setting the target high at the beginning of the year just feels like unfun pressure. Here's my Goodreads profile.
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Jan 2, 2014 14:54
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I decided to start this year with a web serial rather than an actual published novel - it had an entry on goodreads, so I figured it counted. It's called Worm, and the author is called wildbow. It's about a girl named Taylor who is being bullied at school and has the power to control bugs. With heroic self-restraint, she doesn't go Carrie on everyone with a horde of brown recluse spiders. Instead, she sets out to become a superhero. After her first fight goes wrong, though, she's helped out by a gang of teenaged supervillains called the Undersiders who mistake her for another up-and-coming bad guy. (It's understandable. Her superpower is bugs.) They offer her a spot in their team, and Taylor decides to sign up as a mole. Things escalate, and then escalate more; loyalties and allegiances shift every which way; a kaiju attacks the city and a million people die; things continue escalating. The prose is a bit clunky at the moment, but it's a web serial that came out over two years, so I'm assuming that will improve. The worldbuilding is fantastic, and the author's creative with the superpowers. The main characters are all unique, and while there's a number of the standard flying bricks, they're all distinguished somewhat in how their powers work exactly and what their specialisation is. There's a difference between the flying brick who's a brick because of their near-impenetrable forcefield and the one who grows backup internal organs when you blow their torso open. The action only very rarely slows down even for a minute. The characterisation is the real strength, though; there's nobody that's purely good or evil, whether they're the city's greatest superhero or the appropriately-named Bitch. What I love most, though, is that Taylor's smart. Compared to the guy who turns more and more into a dragon as a fight goes on, or one of the flying bricks, she's not exactly a powerhouse, but she still thinks of clever tricks to pull out a victory. The trouble is, I didn't know before I started reading it that it was 1,500,000 words long. Imagine stacking up fifteen copies of the Hobbit. I'm still about a third of the way in. I'm not going to stop reading it, though. I don't think I can. Last night I stayed up until three in the morning because I thought, I'll just get to the end of the kaiju arc so I know if any characters I like died, and then more terrible things happened, so it was just like, Oh my God. One more chapter. ... Oh my God. There is not a point in the first ten arcs that I haven't been terrified for a character I like or, suddenly and unexpectedly, one I really, really hate.
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Jan 4, 2014 15:36
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1) Worm - wildbow. Well, that took a long time. This is going to sound weird, but it reminded me very slightly of Arthurian mythology. The impossibility of living up to a heroic ideal, the inevitability of failure. Le Morte De Taylor? (Le Not-Quite-Morte De Taylor? It seems the tiniest bit like wildbow just couldn't bring himself to kill her off, but I don't think I could have either.)
attackbunny fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Jan 13, 2014 |
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Jan 13, 2014 22:51
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2) Twelve Years a Slave - Solomon Northup, David Wilson. Goodreads review here. It's all in the subtitle, really: Narrative of Solomon Northup, citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana. 3) The Girl Who Would Be King - Kelly Thompson. Goodreads review here. This is a book about two girls who are destined to fight each other, and since they've both got superpowers it's going to be a hell of a fight. One's good, one's evil. Their names are Bonnie Braverman and Lola LeFever. Guess which one is which.
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Jan 21, 2014 14:17
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4) Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times - Lucy Lethbridge. Exactly what it says on the tin. Goodreads review. 5) No Way Down: Life and Death on K2 - Graham Bowley. Nonfiction about the August 2008 K2 disaster. Goodreads review. 6) Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief - Laurence Wright. I found it interesting, though in light of what Fremry said, I should specify that I knew very little about Scientology other than the Xenu story and that they like being dicks to children on boats. Goodreads review. 7) The Replacement - Brenna Yovanoff. YA fiction about a changeling. Mackie's crush's younger sister is stolen away by the fairies, and after 65% of the book he decides to go and get her back. It was alright. Goodreads review.
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Feb 1, 2014 18:28
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8) The Hounds of the Morrigan - Pat O'Shea. A children's fantasy book based in Irish mythology, where two kids try to get hold of a bloodstained pebble to prevent the Morrigan from just royally loving up everyone's poo poo. It was cute, if a bit lacking in tension. Goodreads review. 9) The Gallows Curse - Karen Maitland. Set in 1210/11, while England was under an interdict because of stupid church crap and all religious services were put on hiatus. A guy dies without giving confession or getting the last rites and everyone freaks out and decides the best plan is to magically transfer all his sins (and there's a lot of them) onto this random girl who sadly has a brain like a chunk of wood. Goodreads review.
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Feb 10, 2014 21:30
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10) The Dream Of Rome - Boris Johnson. The noted classical scholar on how Rome united Europe into an empire and why the European Union has failed to do the same. I can't say I agree with his assessment, though. I think he's underestimated the significance of the fact that Rome owned the greatest existing machine for loving up everybody's poo poo. Goodreads review here. 11) The Girl Who Was On Fire: Your Favourite Authors on Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy - many. Title's fairly self-explanatory. False advertising, though, Terry Pratchett's not in here. Goodreads review here. 12) I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai. You've definitely heard of her, she's the girl who got shot by the Taliban a couple of years ago. Good book. Goodreads review here. 13) Eleanor of Aquitaine - Alison Weir. Biography of the medieval heiress who was queen of France and then England in rapid succession. It's weakened by a long period when Eleanor's discreetly imprisoned by her husband and therefore not being written about, but I've always liked Weir's style. Goodreads review here. 14) Operation Fortitude - Joshua Levine. A pop history book about deception operations in WW2. It covers most of the shenanigans running out of the UK, really, not just Fortitude, which was the plan to convince the Germans the D-Day landings would be in a totally different place. Amazingly, with the aid of a giant fake army, they managed to keep that running even after the real armies landed in Normandy. Goodreads review here.
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Mar 11, 2014 21:20
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Two books about the plague, because I saw the second one recommended after finishing the first. Both of them had pretty unsatisfying endings. 15) Company of Liars - Karen Maitland. Inspired by the Canterbury Tales. A motley group of lying assholes treks cross-country to escape the Black Death, but considering one of their party is quite blatantly a psychotic witch, they'd probably have been better off with the plague Goodreads review. 16) Year of Wonders - Geraldine Brooks. Loosely based on real events; the self-imposed quarantine of Eyam, a Derbyshire village, in 1665 after a resident accidentally shipped themselves some plague from London. Beautifully written, but unfortunately turns into a soap opera in the last fifty pages. Goodreads review here. Nine nonfiction. Seven fiction. 25% Morrigan saturation rate.
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Mar 27, 2014 15:17
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17) Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn. Nick Dunne's clever and beautiful wife disappears from their home on the morning of their fifth anniversary. Nick's definitely a lovely person, but is he a killer? Goodreads review. 18) Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn. After two little girls disappear in the little Illinois town of Wind Gap, a serial killer is suspected. Wind Gap escapee turned journalist, Camille, returns to cover the story but finds her dysfunctional family sucking her back in like a black hole. Goodreads review. 19) Dark Places - In 1985, small-town Kansas boy Ben Day apparently murdered his whole family in a sacrifice to Satan. His baby sister Libby was the sole survivor, and her testimony put him in jail. Twenty-five years later, a society of ghoulish true-crime fans is willing to pay Libby to reinvestigate the killings. She takes the offer. Goodreads review. 20) Fever - Mary Beth Keane. A retelling of the story of Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary. Goodreads review. 21) Blackout - Connie Willis. Three historians travel back in time to WW2 to observe the evacuation, Dunkirk and the Blitz, and then find themselves unable to return home. 22) All Clear - Connie Willis. The sequel to Blackout. I didn't like these two much; they felt bloated and the characters weren't distinct. Goodreads review. 23) The Magicians - Lev Grossman. Really didn't like this one. Goodreads review. Why do I find it so much easier to review books I didn't like? Is it because I'm secretly an awful person? Right now, I'm reading 'Wearing the Cape' by Marion G. Harman. It's about a girl who gets an overpass dropped on her head by a terrorist and then turns into Supergirl, which puts her well ahead of the game because usually when people get overpasses to the head they turn into a pancake. The terrorist just showed up in her bedroom in the middle of the night looking like a sad angel; I'm terribly worried that he's going to be the romantic interest. ETA: No, my mistake, the eighteen-year-old heroine's assigned romantic interest is her twenty-seven-year-old divorced teacher. I think I'd have preferred the terrorist. attackbunny fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 15:00
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24) Wearing the Cape - Marion G. Harmon. Hope Corrigan's driving into town for her first day of college when suddenly some timetravelling rear end in a top hat blows up an overpass on top of her car. Normally that would make for a very short book, but in this case Hope develops superpowers and joins the local league of costumed heroes instead. Goodreads review. 'Corrigan' is only one letter away from 'Morrigan'. gently caress. She's getting sneakier. 25) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini. A wealthy Afghan boy completely fucks over his sole childhood friend and later feels really bad about it. Personally, I thought A Thousand Splendid Suns was a lot better. Goodreads review. 26) Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilisation - Richard Miles. A history of Carthage, duh, from its origins as a Tyrian colony to its afterlife in Roman thought both as Rome's greatest victory and harbinger of its inevitable fall. There's also a lot of interesting stuff about the propaganda war waged over ownership of the syncretic god Hercules-Melqart. Goodreads review. 27) Enemies at Home - Lindsay Davis. The second in Davis' sequel series to the Falco books, and a big improvement on the first. Goodreads review. 28) The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone - Seamus Heaney. This is gorgeously written, but then what else would you expect from Heaney? Goodreads review. 29) The Curse of Chalion - Lois McMaster Bujold. Ex-slave and ex-courtier Cazaril goes looking for a quiet job with his old master's widow and instead ends up tutor to the Princess Iselle and knee-deep in curses and conspiracies. Reminded me rather of Guy Gavriel Kay; it's the same model of otherworld fantasy based on real historical events, with a focus on the interpersonal relationships and conspiracies. Excellent worldbuilding, too. Goodreads review. Next up is a YA novel by Jonathan Stroud, called The Screaming Staircase. The premise is that Victorian England's been afflicted for the last fifty years by a terrifying plague of ghosts. No word on whether the rest of the planet is similarly troubled, but since there's been no mass exodus I assume not. We can be rather xenophobic, but not to that extent. Only children have the psychic ability to see ghosts, so ghostbusting agencies staffed by preteens and their grown-up ex-agent supervisors have sprung up all over the country. Lucy Carlyle has lately joined a minor agency, Lockwood and Co., but when a mission goes terribly wrong, the team's only shot at staying afloat involves spending the night in the most haunted house in England. I loved the Bartimaeus series and I love ghost stories, so this should be pretty drat good.
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Jul 13, 2014 15:08
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30) The Screaming Staircase (Lockwood & Co #1) - Jonathan Stroud. Not a good book. The characters are unpleasant and irritating, they do stupid things for no other reason to maintain tension and there's one of those scenes where a two-dimensional antagonist picks on the main characters and is immediately smacked down by the authorial hand of God. Extensive grumbling here. 31) The Iron King (The Accursed Kings #1) - Maurice Druon. The first in a series of historical novels covering the fall of the French Capetian kings, with a few fictionalised elements like curses and witches to add drama. Interesting subject, but pretty awkwardly written in places. Goodreads review. 32) Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier. Really good. A modernisation and deconstruction of the Gothic romance, with great characterisation and atmosphere and some beautiful prose. It takes a lot of inspiration from Jane Eyre, except that this time the hero's mad first wife lives in the heroine's attic. Goodreads review. 33) We Have Always Lived In The Castle - Shirley Jackson. SO good. It's phenomenally atmospheric, the protagonist is insanely compelling (emphasis on insanely) and the prose is gorgeous. You know what, I'm actually embarrassed to talk about this book because whenever I do I seem to just collapse into this little pile of moron that occasionally yells SO GOOD or PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY like a misfiring See 'n Say. Definitely recommend. Goodreads review. 34) A Very British Murder: The Story of a National Obsession - Lucy Worsley. A history of the British obsession with murder. The first part covers media coverage of and popular responses to a variety of real-life killings through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is pretty interesting. The second half charts trends in mystery fiction while giving away the endings of half the books mentioned because apparently Worsley completely missed the point of the genre. Goodreads review. 35) Operation Mincemeat - Ben Macintyre. A history of one of the madder deception plans of WW2, in which a dead man was dressed up as a major and tossed into the sea off Spain with a briefcase of fake letters chained to his belt. Well-written and easy to follow despite the huge number of players, and comes with like fifteen pages of bibliography and annotations. Goodreads review.
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Aug 31, 2014 11:51
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