Thoughts of LoWriter

July Books

The reading list is getting shorter. Ah, well, here they are anyway.

Johnny and the Dead by Pratchett: Well, it's not a good month unless I've read something by Pratchett. This is the second in the Johnny Maxwell trilogy. It's part of his juevenile lit (or young adult) books. The first one really reminded me of Ender's Game, so I wish that I had read Speaker for the Dead before I read this one. It is my theory that Pratchett is spoofing Orson Scott Card, but I can't be sure. It's a little serious for a spoof. Then again, I thought that the first book in the trilogy (Only You Can Save Mankind) was serious but much lighter in tone than Ender's Game. On the whole, it was a pretty good read. I enjoy the main character quite a bit. His family is going through a rough patch because his parents are getting a divorce, so he spends a lot of time with his friends. It's very typical sort of stuff for a young adult fiction novel, so it automatically has that Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn feel to it, but with a definite Pratchett spin on things. I loved it.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austin: I had never read this book before, so I was pretty stoked when it came my way via birthday gift. It has that definite Pride and Prejudice feel to it, but so does most of what Austin writes. I enjoyed studying her in Satire class, so I thought it would be a nice bit of candy reading, and it did not dissapoint. I enjoyed it. I always have to have at least one "chick" book a month, and this was it.

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The jury is still outo n this one. This version had pictures, so that was a definite plus point. And it's a classic work of sci-fi/horror, so I felt that if I was going to call myself a lover of such things, I would have to read this book. I was beginning to feel stupid when talking to the people who teach the sci-fi class around here. I can definitely see its literary value, being one of the first of its kind and all that jazz, but on the whole... eh... I still don't know what I think. It read really fast, but it has the issue that most early novels, which is that the writers want to add validity to the stories, so they invent characters whose sole purpose it is to validate the story by saying how they found it in a set of papers or it washed up in a bottle or some other such nonsense. This way, the author's credibility is spared because he/she is merely repeating a tale that some other individual repeated to him/her first. So, basically, I hated the introduction and the first 25 pages or so because, rather than leaping into the story, we had to have a lengthy discussion about how the narrator might never see his beloved sister again, and bla bla bla. I recognize that this is a literary technique, and that these sorts of novels are the birthplace of fiction as we know it, but it did make me long for something a little more modern. Once I got into the story, it read really fast, and I enjoyed bits. It's nothing like current sci-fi/horror/fantasy, but it is the roots of those genres today. On the whole, worth the read, but I will probably never read it again.

That's it for the books, kids. Feel free to share your own reads in the comments.

Posted by LoWriter at August 2, 2006 08:20 AM