July 2010 archive

July books read

52)  Not What I Was Planning:  Six Word Memoirs by eds. Smith Magazine –

53) The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde – hilarious romp through nursery crime

54) What the Dickens:  The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy by Gregory Maguire – loved it

55) God Has a Dream for Your Life by Sheila Walsh

56) The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (audio) by Stephenie Meyer – interesting to hear the other side

57) The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson – good detective story, will definitely read the others

58) The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan – awesome adventure with siblings Carter and Sadie.  Now I wish I knew more about Egyptian mythology

59) Paper Towns by John Green – It gave me lots to think about.  Love it when a book does that.

60) A Hopeful Heart by Kim Vogel Sawyer – predictable but enjoyable

61) The Passage by Justin Cronin – definitely lived up to my expectations, excellent read

62) Life of Pi by Yann Martel – not what I expected, but I liked it very much

63)  Resurrection Day by Brendan Dubois – an alternative history where the Cuban Missile Crisis became WWIII.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

I just finished listening to Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  It was not quite what I expected, but I enjoyed it.  Looking at the cover and reading the blurb on the back, I expected a fast-paced survival story about a shipwrecked boy stranded on a life boat with a tiger.  It is a story of survival, and Pi Patel does survive for 227 days at sea with the company of a Bengal tiger, but Pi is a reflective narrator who will not be rushed in telling his story.  Interspersed with the story of his life, Pi shares his knowledge of his two great passions:  zoology and religion.  It is his thoughtfulness, though, that enabled his survival at sea.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

As the summer started, the buzz began to build about this book.  I encountered comments in my email and on the blogs I read:   Justin Cronin’s The Passage was going to be the book that brought vampires into real literature, and for adults, no less.  Even my brother-in-law was reading it on vacation.  Finally, the library came through and let me know it was my turn to read it.

I was not disappointed.  Cronin weaves a complex, multi-layered story of hope and survival.  It starts with Special Agent Wolgast, who as been asked to pick up and deliver certain death row inmates to a secure facility for top secret military experiment.  It seems that humans can be infected with a virus that turns them into vampires.  The military wants to refine this virus to allow the infected humans to repair their injuries, but not be driven by the thirst for blood.  Wolgast is finally pushed too far when he picks up the last subject for the experiment, a six-year-old girl named Amy. 

Everything goes horribly wrong when the vampires break free of their cells and escape across the country.  They kill and infect the population, and nothing can stop them.  Society crumbles under the onslaught.  The story jumps foward a hundred years to survivors left inside a lit, walled compound.  Unfortunately, the batteries are slowly dying, and the lights that protect the residents of the compound will go out.  Where will you be when those lights go out?

A Hopeful Heart by Kim Vogel Sawyer

This was an unexpected read that showed up in my mailbox.  Evidently I clicked the wrong button on the Featured Selections for the book club and bought a book bu Kim Vogel Sawyer.  Oh well, I might as well read it, right?  I wasn’t disappointed.  It was a little predictable.  (I knew from reading the front flap who would fall in love with whom.)  But I enjoyed the journey and got to taste what life on the Kansas prairie might have been like for those early ranchers.

A Hopeful Heart is a historical fiction/romance/Christian fiction novel.  (How many genres can I label a book with?)  Tressa Neill, a cannot hope to find a husband or fit into the upper class society of her aunt and uncle without parents or a dowry.  So she comes to Kansas to the very first class of the Wyatt Herdsman School.  Aunt Hattie promises to teach the girls everything they need to know to be a good rancher’s wife and then supervise their courtin’.  Tressa doesn’t think she will ever fit in with the other girls or with any of the single ranchers until she glimpses Abel Samms.  But Abel was spurned by an Eastern girl and won’t have anything to do with Aunt Hattie’s girls.  All he is concerned with is keeping the ranch he inherited from his father.  What will happen when trouble crosses their paths?

Writing Roundup

Are you a writer wondering where to send your work?  Never fear, writer Alisa M. Libby has rounded up some of her favorite publications that publish teen writing.  Be brave!  Let your writing out into the big world.  Click here to find her list of links.

Now that you’ve decided to share your writing with the big, bad world, it’s time to find out who you write like.  This app has been all the rage on the web.  Click here, give a sample of your text, and see what famous writer is similar to your writing style.

You can win some amazing stuff from the Merry Sisters of Fate.  They are sponsoring a writing contest on their blog this week–all in the spirit of promoting free fiction on the Internet. Click on the link to check out the writing prompt of epic proportions and the great prizes.  I’m in.  Are you?

Paper Towns by John Green

Paper Towns by John Green gave me lots to think about.  I like it when a book does that. 

Quentin Jacobsen, known as Q to his friends, loves the magnificent Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar even though they have been neighbors since preschool.  Margo is everything Quentin is not–beautiful, popular, adventurous.  A month before graduation, Margo invites Quentin to join her on a night of mayhem, seeking revenge on those who have slighted Margo.  He reluctantly joins her.  The next morning, Margo disappears, leaving a trail of clues for Quentin to follow.  Margo’s clues range from Woodie Guthrie to Walt Whitman.  As Quentin follows the clues, he must come to terms with who he is and how he has chosen to see her for all these years.  He ends up skipping graduation to go on the ultimate road trip with his best friends Ben and Radar and Margo’s best friend Lacey. 

 This is a smart, funny book that will keep you thinking long after you turn the last page.  Life might not turn the way you always pictured it, but I like how Quentin says:  “‘But then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.’ Imagining isn’t perfect.  You can’t get all the way inside someone else…But imagining being some one else, or the world being something else, is the only way in.  It is the machine that kills facists.” 

If you like this book, I would try Wish You Were Here by Barbara Shoup.  Now, I need to dig out my copy of Walt Whitman and read “Leaves of Grass” again.

The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

I know many of you enjoyed the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan.  So did I.  Now it’s time for Percy, Anabeth and Glover to step aside and make room for Carter and Sadie in The Red Pyramid.  It turns out that the Greek gods are not the only ancient gods trying to survive the modern world.

Carter and Sadie have been kept seperated since their mother’s death six years ago.  Carter has traveled the world with his archeaologist father (specializing in ancient Egypt) while Sadie lived with their grandparents in London.  After a terrible accident on Christmas day releases the Egyptian gods from their banishment in the Duat (and imprisons their father), Carter and Sadie discover that they are from a long line of Egyptian magicians and the only ones who can make things right.  It won’t be easy.  The god Set (who brings chaos) is hunting them down with vicious monsters.  On the other side, the magicians of the House of Life are also hunting them down to kill them because they believe Carter and Sadie to be powerful and dangerous.  Will they succeed, or will chaos overtake the world?

I like how Riordan explores chaos as the opposite of good.  Carter and Sadie must also learn to see the good hidden within even the most unlikable characters.  Both of these ideas remind me of themes raised in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet, especially A Wind in the Door.  What can stop the seemingly random acts of violence that plague our world? 

After reading The Red Pyramid, I definitely want to learn more about Egyptian mythology.  Somehow I missed out on it during my childhood explorations of mythology.  Any good recommendations to get me started?

If you have already devoured everything Riordan has written, check out his recommendations based on his favorites and those of his sons here.

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