Anna Dressed in Blood

Apr8 by Anna

By Kendare Blake

This book title jumped out at me in the library months ago (for obvious reasons), but then we started the marathon of reading Atlas Shrugged, so I back-burned it for a while, knowing it was going to be my palette cleanser after Rand. At the worst parts of Atlas Shrugged, I just pictured Anna Dressed in Blood waiting for me. And I couldn’t have asked for a better palette cleanser!

It is cheesy and spooky and just awesome! It reminds me a bit of Twilight, actually, if a better writer had written the characters and situations in a way that makes more sense in a rational world. Also with some gender turnaround: Cas moves to a small town in Ontario with his single mother, starting a new school in his senior year and is immediately popular. Sound familiar? He’s also brooding and rude and immediately drawn to the titular female character. He’s kind of both Bella and Edward, but everything he says and does actually makes sense.

Cas is a ghost hunter, a talent and career that he inherited from his now-deceased father. He and his mother travel to new towns that have killer ghosts, settle there long enough for Cas to draw out and dispatch the ghost, and then move on to the next town. He is immediately popular at his new school because he makes an effort to be; he needs access to the gossip mill as quickly as possible in order to do his job. He knows that by being brooding and a little rude, he’ll be considered even more attractive, so he does that on purpose as well. I just love rational characters who have a goal and then follow logical steps toward it!

I felt like the plot got a bit scattered toward the end; I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the pacing just felt kind of odd to me. Even with that, though, this was a very satisfying book with which to recover from Atlas Shrugged. I would be somewhat cautious about recommending it for young readers: there was a fair amount of violence, and I can’t attest to fear factor because I have already described how I completely unfrightening I find ghosts.

—Anna

As You Wish and Sisters Red

Apr2 by Kinsey

I’ve been reading a stack of non-fiction lately–books that are interesting, but not necessarily things I want to blog about. That is, unless folks are interested in a giant autobiography/oral history about the Mob hitman who killed Jimmy Hoffa? But I broke up all the history with a couple of lovely young adult fairytale retellings that seem like they might fit well into the YA vibe we generally have going here. Jackson Pearce clearly has the knack for reframing classic stories into modern young adult stories–she’s got a whole catalog of them. The two I read were As You Wish and Sisters Red and both were totally charming, easy reads.

As You Wish is the story of a depressed teenage girl who accidentally conjures a jinn (or genie) who has to stick around until she makes three wishes. But she doesn’t really want to fix her life with wishes, and he ends up getting interested enough to want to stay. The book is pretty short–almost spare–but it does a wonderful job creating a back story for the jinn with a minimum of information. In fact, the whole book gets across a lot of information and plot while staying very simple and not getting overly flowery. Sisters Red is a more complex story, wrapping together werewolves and the Little Red Riding Hood story, but adding in a relationship between sisters that really touches on the kind of layers that love and obligation create.

This might be making a fine distinction, but I found both these to be more like YA books plus a little fantasy, rather than fantasy books aimed at younger readers. There are no elaborate maps of fantasy kingdoms or complicated world building, but both books present a nuanced picture of teenagers and the serious issues they face, magic and mundane.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: ABCFamily-esque modern fables

You might also like: Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver or Robin McKinley’s Beauty and the Beast retellings.

Codex Seraphinianus

Apr1 by Rebecca

Codex Seraphinianus
By Franco Maria Ricci
1981

In honor of April Fool’s Day, I am reviewing the Codex Seraphinianus. No, this is not a prank or a lie, at least not on my part. The book exists. Just, well… it’s more like it’s a prank or a lie on the author’s part.

The Codex is an incredibly beautiful and extremely peculiar biology/sociology text in a foreign language. Yeah. Think on that for a bit.

Also, I recommend it.

Regardless of what languages you may be fluent in, this book is in a language foreign to you. It’s actually an alien language constructed as either a code or simply a very detailed doodle by the author, such that the written text is just as much an illustration as any of the actual color illustrations.

The color illustrations, of which there are many, are beautifully done, likely with oil pastels or some such.

The subject of the book is the biology and sociology of an alien world… an extremely peculiar alien world, with a very complex biology. In some ways it reminds me of a steam-punk universe with cyborgs/implants/etc., except that such mechanical additions are intrinsic to the biology of the plants and animals rather than intentional additions later. (Sort of like WTF-Evolution’s even crazier, acid-tripping brother.)

In other ways it reminds me of the biology from Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep or Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead. Except more so than either Vinge or Card went.

It also reminds me a great deal of the Voynich Manuscript, a document that I have yet to actually see a good copy of, but which is another biology text written in an unknown language. But the Voynich Manuscript has had professional and amateur codebreakers trying to break it for nearly a century at this point and variously manage to “prove” is (a) a complex code that we just don’t have the key to yet, (b) a brand new language that would need to be translated rather than uncoded, or (c) complete gibberish that contains no meaning and can thus be neither uncoded nor translated. Its provenance is also deeply questionable. It has the potential to be (a) a secret alchemical manuscript from the 1200s, (b) a forgery created in the late 1500s and sold to Emperor Rudolf II as a secret alchemical manuscript from the 1200s, or (c) a forgery created in the early 1900s perpetrated either by or on the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich.

But back to the Codex Seraphinianus, it is vibrant and gorgeous and inspiring and confusing.

If you can get your hands on a copy, it’s a lot of fun.

Or, for a more easily accessible book, check out Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, and try to figure out what the plots are of those stories.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

Mar24 by Rebecca

Redshirts
by John Scalzi
2012

First off, this is an extremely meta novel. It doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as it goes right up to fourth wall, run tests on its density and permeability, and then proceed to report the results to the reader.

The story is set in a quasi-Star Trek universe, from the point of view of one of the ubiquitous “Red Shirts,” wondering why there’s such a high fatality rate among his compatriots and such a low fatality rate, given the exact same circumstances, among the command staff. Anyone who watched the original Star Trek series will understand why this premise made me giggle. Plus, I’d read The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi before, and it was awesomely, ludicrously hilarious.

I intended to read this as a bit of a palate cleanser to my Atlas Shrugged marathon as well as a less controversial book to take with me and read in waiting rooms. It worked beautifully for the second intent, but turned out not to be nearly as light-heartedly fluffy as I had been expecting for the first intent.

It does start out fluffy and funny. The first half was straight up silly. Then it begins to really break the fourth wall and the plot is resolved by three-fourths of the way through the book. Then the final quarter deals with the fall out. Most books have, at most, a short epilog summarizing the foreseeable future. This book, on the other hand, spends a significant amount of time confronting issues of self-agency and choice and worth.

While it’s nowhere near a perfect match, in some ways it makes an interesting compliment to the movie Inception.

It was a good book and I do recommend it, but go in realizing that it’s going to wind up more serious than it starts.

Hounded

Mar20 by Kinsey

Well, I think it’s time to get Atlas Shrugged off the top of the blog once and for all! I hope that Anna and Rebecca are both off somewhere reading fluffy things and not thinking about political philosophy. And if they want a fun new fantasy series to read now that they’re free to read fun things, I’ve got a good one for them.

Hounded is the first book in Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid series. I think there are five books out right now, and after reading this one I am going to hunt down all the rest. The story centers on Atticus, a 2000-year-old Druid who is peacefully running an occult bookstore in Arizona when a Celtic god from his past shows up to settle an old grudge. There are also witches, and vampires, and werewolves–Hearne does a great job of introducing a fully-populated universe of mystical characters who I suspect will play roles in future books, while still keeping this story moving right along. Thor doesn’t actually show up in this book, but all the characters who’ve met him think he’s a dick, so I’m really hoping he shows up eventually. Oh, and Atticus has maybe the best talking dog in the history of talking dogs.

The thing that really charmed me about this book is that it’s funny. Fantasy books can b so dark sometime, and certainly there is some death and destruction here, but there’s limited angst and lots of humor. I really enjoyed the whole thing and am looking forward to downloading the next few to keep me happily distracted on some long plane flights I have coming up.

Also, I don’t do audiobooks because I don’t have the attention span to follow fiction read out loud, but the friend who recommended this one to me said that voices in the audio version were absolutely awesome. So if you are a books-on-iPod person, you might want to check it out.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Snarky, modern-day fairytale.

You might also like: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, or any of Christopher Moore’s books.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Mar18 by Rebecca

Atlas Shrugged
By Ayn Rand
1957

This is a difficult book to sum up. I have 89 pages of single-spaced, typed notes, made over the course of nine-weeks of reading. The one real strength to this book is that it makes me think. It presents a lot of ideas and a lot of arguments and it was the rare conversation in the last two months that did not involve the phrase, “that makes me think of how, in Atlas Shrugged, …”

In live-blogging our process through this book, Anna and I had a lot of thoughts.

Part I: Non-Contradiction
I.      The Theme
II.     The Chain
III.    The Top and the Bottom
IV.    The Immovable Movers
V.     The Climax of the D’Anconias
(extra bit: first impressions)
VI.    The Non-Commercial
VII. The Exploiters and the Exploited
(extra bit: VII. The Exploiters and the Exploited)
VIII. The John Galt Line
(extra bit: Atlas Shrugged theme)
IX.    The Sacred and the Profane
X.      Wyatt’s Torch
(extra bit: Kurt Vonnegut short stories)

Part II: Either-Or
I.       The Man Who Belonged on Earth
II.     The Aristocracy of Pull
III.    White Blackmail
(extra bit: Atlas Shrugged in the news)
IV.    The Sanction of the Victim
(extra bit from President Obama)
(extra bit on John Galt)
(extra bit on Greek Mythology)
V.      Account Overdrawn
VI.    Miracle Metal
VII. The Moratorium on Brains
VIII. By Our Love
IX.    The Face Without Pain or Fear or Guilt
(extra musings)
X.     The Sign of the Dollar

Part III: A is A
I.      Atlantis
II.    The Utopia of Greed
III.   Anti-Greed
IV.   Anti-Life
V.    Their Brothers’ Keepers
VI.   The Concerto of Deliverance
VII. “This is John Galt Speaking”
VIII. The Egoist
IX.    The Generator
X.      In the Name of the Best Within Us

It would make a really fabulous book club book or the subject of a college seminar.

That said, it is also a book in desperate need of an editor to smooth out some of the rough patches and it showcases a conflict between two sets of irrational idiots: spoiled children on one side and vengeful true-believers on the other side. For the most part, I didn’t like or respect any of the characters. Both sides would come out with statements, some of which I agreed with, most of which I disagreed with, but would then back them up with the wrong arguments. Continue reading →

Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapters 8-10)

Mar17 by Anna

By Ayn Rand

Chapter 7 broke me, people. I only got through it with a generous bribe of Starbucks. I would go into the Starbucks, get my mocha, and force myself to sit there and read Chapter 7 until I’d finished at least 15 pages. You are lucky that Rebecca recapped that section because my idea was to just post:

Atlas Shrugged (Part 3, Chapter 7): tl;dr

Anyway, I’ve gathered the shards of my broken psyche together enough to just get through the final three chapters for you, dear readers. They were actually pretty fast-paced and action-filled, and I would have enjoyed them a lot more before my aforementioned breakdown. Continue reading →

Atlas Shrugged, part 3, chapter 7

Mar12 by Rebecca

Section 3, Chapter 7: “This is John Galt Speaking”

Writing up this chapter gave me a sharp reminder that this blog is a book-review blog rather than a philosophy forum. Anna has had to hold me back from writing a 500-page response rebutting this chapter, line by line. Reading this chapter was an exercise in patience, allowing a mixture of irrationality, hypocrisy, and lies to just pass on by me.

Continue reading →

Atlas Shrugged, part 3, chapter 6

Mar8 by Rebecca

Section 3, Chapter 6: The Concerto of Deliverance

This chapter is a lot more palatable than the last one. The bad guys are just as irrationally hypocritical as the good guys, but they are acknowledged as bad guys, and someone finally addresses their logical flaws directly, verbally, and to their faces. Thank you! Reading this book and being inundated by irrational philosophy from all sides has really increased my argumentativeness (rarely in short supply to begin with.) This chapter, though, successfully refutes a lot of the proposed idiocy by itself without needing me to do so. For the first time in the whole book, there is a serious demonstration of someone promoting rationality and logic. I approve.

I think the first two-thirds of this chapter go up there with the scenes of the first train ride on the John Galt line and of Dagny’s aerial chase as being parts of this book that I actively enjoyed.

So, without further ado:

A summary of the events of the chapter, and then some brief discussion of a few specific points.

Continue reading →

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

Mar6 by Kinsey

Oh, you guys, this is the best book. If all the Atlas Shrugged has been crushing your faith in books and humanity, I recommend that you read Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan as a palate cleanser.

The main character, Clay, is San Francisco Web designer who gets downsized out of his job after the economy tanks and ends up working at a bookstore. As if the idea of a store selling actual paper books isn’t weird enough these days, this store is open 24 hours a day and seems to have a very odd clientele. Clay starts investigating and, with the help of his friends, figures out that there is quite a bit more going on in this bookstore. I don’t want to give much more away, but the story involves Google, and hipsters, and medieval mysteries, and is just completely charming.

I’ve raved on this site about The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and in a lot of ways this book feels similar–it’s very much of the present-day, with lots of pop culture references and discussions of Gen X issues about the meaning of life and career and purpose and such. But The Magicians, and a lot of books like it, are so dark. I loved The Magicians, but reading it was a wrenching experience. This book manages to address of a lot of the same issues without being heavy or depressing. It’s a quick read that will leave you feeling good about people and books and the world in general. Who doesn’t need that occasionally?

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Fun, modern mystery.

You might also like: PopCo, or Neverwhere, or even So You Want to Be a Wizard, although Mr. Penumbra is lighter than any of those.