Abandon ship

New year, hopefully new life, and new blog: here. I'll be turning this one off in a week or so. But keeping it around so I can use photos.

Toodles!

Book 15, SRP 5: Dead Reckoning

I'm really starting to think Charlaine Harris needs to let this series die a respectable death instead of letting them get worse and worse as time passes. The last couple of books have been disjointed with   none of the sweet and saucy humor of the earlier books. It's like she tosses together some sort of conflict between the supernaturals, some sex, a gory battle of some sort, and a few scenes at the diner. Meh.

Book 14, SRP 4: Crazy Aunt Purl's Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair

Funny and sad at the same time. I could relate to Perry's tale of how knitting brought her back from the brink of crazy after her husband left her to go find his creativity (do men really think we believe that shit?). After I lost two close family members within a week of one another last year, I pretty much ate, slept, went to work, and knitted while watching zombie movies (favorite: Norwegian Nazi zombies) for 3 months, and my first forays out of the house for socialization were to the local SnB. Perry does a great job of discussing how she came back to life.

Book 13, SRP 3: Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

This is actually a re-read for me, but I'm counting it anyway as it's been at least 10 years since I first read it. Described by one reviewer as the book of Revelations as done by Monty Python, Good Omens is incredibly irreverent and not for the extremely zealous. It tells what happens when a confused Satanic nun delivers the anti-Christ to the wrong family, featuring a cast of characters that includes a gang of English schoolchildren, an angel and devil who really aren't into the whole Apocalypse thing, the Four Bikers of the Apocalypse, a hellhound named Dog, a witch and the book of prophecies pass down from an ancestor burned at the stake centuries ago, and a Witchfinder General who you can just hear screaming  "Get off my lawn," if he had a lawn.

This go-round it wasn't the humor that caught my notice so much as the sweet philosophy of it. The anti-Christ just wants to clean up the world so there are whales and trees and places to play. The collision course to the Apocalypse almost happens not because anyone really wants war but because that's what someone told them had to happen. It's good stuff all around.

Book 12, SRP 2L Deadline, by Mira Grant

Gonna be vague here so as not to spoil: Like this book just as much as I did Feed, albeit for different reasons. The first book incorporated political intrigue in such a way that the book wasn't really about zombies at all; the real monsters were those manipulating events to their own ends no matter who stood in their way. In Deadline, the book focuses on Shaun Mason and his grief for sister Georgia (truth be told, I found Shaun rather annoying in Feed. Deadline is more of a psychological study, both in terms of Shaun and company's personal pain and of group behavior -- the culture of fear that has developed and what organizations are willing to do in the interest of the greater good when left unchecked. The only problem will be waiting for the next one to see how it all ends.

Book 11, SRP 1: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Not much I can add to the stacks and stacks of reviews about this book: It's a classic of American literature and of fiction representing war and its aftermath. Hard to follow at times because of the disjointed text, but I think it depicts perfectly the way one thing can take your mind to a whole different place and time. If you haven't read it yet, you need to.

Get ready, get set, READ!

This weekend marks the beginning of another Summer Reading Program, led this year by my friend Muffin the YA Librarian. I'll be posting reviews here through Labor Day weekend. My goal: finish 10 books by the end, to include audiobooks. (Since I'm planning to get my butt back in the gym at work, I will have plenty of time on the elliptical to listen to the exploits of Gypsy Rose Lee and whatever the other audiobook I downloaded from Overdrive was.

Book 10: The Zombie Autopsies

Written by a Harvard psychiatry professor, this book has a different spin than most in the zombie genre. It's not so much a thriller, with bands of refugees racing through the streets trying to stay alive and find a safe haven, as it is a fictional discourse on science and ethics. Told through the diaries of a neuroanatomist on an isolated research facility in the Indian Ocean, the story focuses on autopsies undertaken to determine just what pathogens are involved in the disease. Schlozman adds a dose of reality by making one of the underlying mechanisms a prion-based disease. (You want some real horror, study up on those.) Along the way we get a picture of the biological changes that one might see in zombies. But in the end, the book is about humanity: what makes us human, ethics of experimentation on humans or, in this case, humanoids (the autopsies are all performed while the subject is still "animated"), and the horrible things humans do to one another and the planet (though we never find out exactly who create the virus and set it loose, it is obvious early on to the researchers that this was a man-made pathogen). A fun book for those who like some science with their zombies.

Book 9: Jane, April Lindner

As Jane Eyre is probably my favorite book of all time, I was more than a little twitchy when I heard that an modernized version based on the novel had published. For the most part, my concerns were not realized. Lindner does a fairly good job at updating the storyline while not losing the essence of it. Miss Eyre becomes Jane Moore, who must drop out of college after her parents die and leave all their assets to her abusive, self-involved siblings. Her Rochester is Nico Rathburn, rock star with a wild past trying to make a comeback. Bianca is now a photographer documenting rehearsals for the new tour. The story transitions well to the modern era IMHO, although today's Jane seems more lacking in self-esteem than being honest about her flaws. Also, in the modern era the age difference between 19-year-old Jane and 40ish Nico seems a bit creepy,  though it never bothered me in the original. But altogether it's a worthwhile read for fans of the original, and those not predisposed to 19th century Gothics would likely find it accessible.