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February 05
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Greg R.
marked as to-read:
Any Which Wall (Hardcover)
by
Laurel Snyder
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my rating:
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January 31
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May 10, 2008
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Greg R.
gave  to:
Stuck in the 70's (Hardcover)
by
Debra Garfinkle (Goodreads author)
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my rating:
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Greg said:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
In the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Grey are a typical California couple having marital difficulties to which their children, 17-year-old Tyler and 15-year-old Heather, remain willfully blind. Mr. Grey has become absorbed in his work and isolated from his family, while Mrs. Grey is unfulfilled to the point where she cries herself to sleep at night. A crisis point is reached when Mrs. Grey takes a job at, yes, a cafeteria, just like Mrs. Roper. But instead of being prodded to her act of rebellion by a pair of spunky 20-something tenants named Janet and Chrissy, Mrs. Grey finds her encouragement from Shay Saunders, a time-traveling teen from the early 21st Century.
The story of women's lib and marital strife is really just a subplot of Trapped in the 70's, with the main story being a boy-meets-girl drama in which the boy is a 1978 native while the girl is an unwilling visitor from 2006 who appears one night, naked and unconscious in the family bathtub--which, come to think of it, is similar to how Jack Tripper ended up living with Janet and Chrissy in "Three's Company." The narrative of the book shifts back and forth between Tyler and Shay, with margin tags and alternate fonts to help readers tell which protagonist is speaking.
As a disclaimer, Debra Garfinkle is a friend, so I am greatly biased in favor of her book. I'm likewise biased in favor of books about time travel, and ones in which beautiful naked girls suddenly appear in random bathtubs on page one.
Four observations:
1. Star Wars was still in the theater at this time of this book, mostly because teens like Tyler and his friend Evie kept going back for multiple viewings. Younger kids like me did as well--I was seven and probably went to at least a dozen showings. Evie especially is obsessed with the character-themed collectibles. I understand trademark sensitivities when writing a book like Stuck in the 70's, but in real life Tyler would have relentlessly pumped Shay for every tiny detail about the next five movies. Also in the real world, Shay would have called up George Lucas and warned him not to create Jar-Jar Binks.
2. Strange that Tyler doesn't mention (or doesn't realize) that Shay didn't come from the future entirely by herself. She also brought with her a bathtubful of 2006 water. If only somebody had thought to save a sample, it could have been analyzed against water that hadn't travelled back 28 years in time. Perhaps it would have been different on a subatomic level, or would have shown quantum entanglement with the 1978 version of its molecules. Great mysteries of the universe might have been solved by even a tiny drop.
3. It was interesting that Tyler's and Shay's school, which each of them attended in their respective eras, did not seem to have changed much in 28 years while the local mall underwent a major transformation. Shay instantly masters the politics of popularity in the 1978 cafeteria, but she is nearly crippled by the lack of a Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, or frozen yogurt stand. I've had a similar experience. The mall my family shopped at when I was a kid has since expanded from two anchor stores to four, added a food court, tacked on a second level, and most recently popped out an entire new wing of upscale trendy shops and restaurants. Meanwhile my old high school, essentially unchanged since it first opened in 1973, is now considered inadequate and obsolete. A new $200 million school is currently under construction to replace it.
4. From the setup--modern teen travels back in time by, more or less, a single human generation within the town of his or her own birth--I expected Stuck in the 70's to be more in the mold of Back to the Future. One of the things I took for granted was that Shay would run into her mother as a teenager, or the parents of friends from her own time. She does run into her future housekeeper but that's really not a substitute for Marty McFly trying to set his future father up with his future mother.
I also expected that there would be a "closing of the circle" that time-travel stories are known for. One way or another, Shay is going back to 2006--either by some sort of time machine or by living through those 28 years and aging accordingly. She could even die before 2006 and still "close the circle" by sending a message to her mother on the day after her disappearance. I maintained the expectation of a closed circle until the very last page because I couldn't help thinking of this book as primarily a time-travel story, but it's not. The essence of the book, when the setup and setting are boiled away, is all about identity and percpetion.
Mrs. Grey is only one of several characters in the book who, through the chain of events begun by Shay's slip through time, come to realize that they are not being true to their inner selves. Mrs. Grey develops a life outside the home, Mr. Grey starts to appreciate his family more, Shay develops some much needed self-esteem, Evie learns to express herself, and Tyler gets a new haircut and bitchin' surfer duds.
This is what separates novels like Stuck in the 70's from sitcoms like "Three's Company," in which characters are not allowed to learn and grow from their experiences. At the end of the episode I described above, Mrs. Roper simply quits her job and Mr. Roper gives her a raise in her allowance--enough so that she'll now be able to buy the maple syrup he likes when she does the weekly shopping. The episode ends with the status quo restored, which is the golden rule of 70s sitcoms.
Would I, as a teen in the mid-1980s, have picked Stuck in the 70's off the shelf to read? Actually, I can avoid answering that because this book, as a time-travel story with teen protagonists that also includes underage drinking, sex, and drug use, would not have existed in the mid-1980s. But if a copy had somehow fallen through a temporal wormhole from 2007 and landed on my desk in 1986, I think I would have been disappointed by not seeing that circle closed at the end. Which is why I'm proposing an alternate ending as my latest episode of Book Review Theater!
<BOOK-REVIEW-THEATER>
Exterior, night, outside Jake Robbins's house in 2006. Three adults in their mid-forties sneak up the front walkway and hide in the bushes. They are TYLER, EVIE, and SHAY.
TYLER (nodding at an illuminated window above): So you're up there?
SHAY: Yeah.
TYLER: Right now?
SHAY: Yeah.
TYLER: Having sex with...Jack?
SHAY: Jake. And it's not me, you know that. It's my seventeen-year-old former self from the future.
EVIE: Except the future is now the present.
TYLER: I should go in there and break that up.
SHAY (grabs his arm): Don't you dare!
EVIE: We can't afford to mess this up, Tyler. We only get one shot and the entire space-time continuum depends on making things happen the way they're destined to.
SHAY: But I do appreciate your overprotective nature...Dad.
TYLER (blushes): I only had that one-night stand with your mother in 1987 because the paternity test said I had to, or else Shay wouldn't exist. You know Evie's my one true love.
EVIE: Thanks, babe. Hey, here comes Mariel!
MARIEL steps up the walkway and glances into the bushes. Shay flashes her a thumbs-up signal. Mariel nods and begins pressing the doorbell over and over again. A crude dragonfly tatoo can be seen on her wrist.
SHAY (winces): I told her not to get that tatoo.
EVIE: She had to, so things could happen exactly the way you remember. That's why Mariel had to take a job as your family's housekeeper and pretend to only speak broken English. I bet that's been almost as hard for her as it's been for me to get any work done without my best lab assistant.
TYLER: But you did get the time machine done, right?
EVIE: You bet! Funded by the enormous fortune we've amassed using Shay's knowledge of stock results and sports scores for the past 28 years, and using my obsessive investigations into quantum mechanics and the secret files Tyler obtained as Albert Einstein's official biographer, I've wired up Jake's Jacuzzi to a working flux capacitor...in theory.
SHAY AND TYLER: In theory?!!
EVIE: I had no chance for a test run. 1.21 gigawatts of electricity doesn't grow on trees.
TYLER (as Mariel is finally let into the house by a towel-wearing Jake Robbins): She's in. Now we just listen and wait for the signal.
SHAY (listening to a portable radio receiver): She's reaming teen-me out in Spanish. That really takes me back. I don't know how Mariel ever put up with-- Oh, there's the code word!
EVIE presses a button on a remote control device. The street lights dim, then come back up. The trio anxiously watch the window above them.
MARIEL's voice from Shay's receiver: What you do with her? Where she go? Where you hide her?
JAKE's voice from Shay's receiver: I don't know! I didn't do nothing! Please don't call the cops--I don't want to go to jail!
TYLER, SHAY, and EVIE break down laughing.
SHAY: Mariel's getting her revenge. Poor Jake--I almost feel sorry for him.
TYLER: I'll give her another ten minutes, then Jake's getting a visit from Shay's father.
EVIE: Go get him, babe!
Caption across the screen: AND WITH THAT THE CIRCLE WAS CLOSED, THE END.
</BOOK-REVIEW-THEATER>(less)
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March 24, 2008
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Greg R.
gave to:
The Penguins of Doom (From the Desk of Septina Nash)
by
Greg R. Fishbone (Goodreads author)
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my rating:
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Greg R.
gave  to:
Curious George and the Rocket (Board book)
by
Margret Rey, H.A. Rey
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my rating:
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recommended for: Baby scientists, explorers, or historians
read in March, 2008
Greg said:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Curious George and the Rocket is a shortened version of the 1957 classic, Curious George Gets a Medal, reduced to board-book size for wee-little baby-children like mine. Lost are classic scenes of George getting himself into mischief with an ink blotter, a mess of soap bubbles, some farm animals, and various museum exhibits. What remains is George's mission training, successful rocket trip into space, safe return by parachute, and subsequently recognized status as the first monkey in space. As a result, George seems uncharacteristically serious in this book and doesn't get into the kind of trouble we might normally expect.
George's space mission is coordinated by a Professor Wiseman, whose academic credentials are never given, under the sponsorship of the Museum of Science, possibly as a publicity stunt although the scientific rationale would have been compelling and significant. There doesn't seem to be an animal behaviorist on staff, unless the Man in the Yellow Hat is being employed as such, which would be a good idea because Professor Wiseman is apparently under the misapprehension that monkeys can read and write.
The book is sparse on details, which is a shame because the scenario presents an excellent opportunity to teach children about the early days of manned (and monkeyed) rocketry. For example, George's bravery and the Man in the Yellow Hat's anxiety could have been highlighted by a brief recap of missions that had gone before...
The first six monkeys loaded into rockets were all named Albert, and all of them suffered horribly in the name of science. Albert I was launched into the sky in June of 1948, went 39 miles up, and suffocated to death before reaching the edge of space. A year later, Albert II successfully made it into space but died on impact when his rocket crashed back to Earth. Albert III died when his rocket accidentally exploded at an altitude of about 35,000 feet. Albert IV, like Albert II, also died on impact. Albert V died in 1951 when his parachute failed to deploy. Finally, Albert VI actually returned alive from space, but died of his injuries two hours after landing.
In 1952, when somebody finally realized that Albert was a terribly unlucky name for monkey astronauts, a pair of cynomolgus monkeys named Patricia and Mike made it safely up and back--except that they didn't fly quite high enough to actually reach space.
This was the state of monkey rocketry in 1957, when Curious George Gets a Medal was originally published. The visionary author-illustrator team of H. A. Rey and Margaret Rey (here uncredited) apparently imagined that the first successful monkey mission would come from the academic and institutional realm, since the military hadn't had much luck to that point and NASA hadn't yet been founded. Thus enter Professor Wiseman and his backers at the museum.
Professor Wiseman can be lauded for including a video camera on George's flight, allowing the crew to view and track him in real time. He also provides George with a protective space suit that might have saved one or two of the Alberts if it had been in earlier usage. However, some other of Professor Wiseman's mission parameters seem a little sketchy--the use of a launch platform made of flammable-looking wood, the close proximity of the ground crew while the rocket is firing, the seeming lack of sensors to monitor George's vital signs during the trip, the idea to attach a parachute to George rather than to the rocket capsule, and the reliance on George to activate his own escape sequence from the rocket after reentry--but despite the potential for disaster, the trip is an overwhelming success and George ends the book with a shiny gold medal.
It wasn't until 1959 that a real-life monkey matched George's fictional space accomplishment. A rhesus monkey named Mr. Able and a spider monkey named Miss Baker were the first living beings to safely make it into space and back again--although Mr. Able died four days later from a bad reaction to an anesthetic during surgery to remove an infected medical electrode. Miss Baker lived out a very long spider monkey lifetime and is buried on the grounds of the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Had George's trip actually occurred in 1957, he really would have earned that medal, as well as the thanks of a grateful planet. Lessons learned from American space monkeys and Soviet space dogs made it possible for human beings to reach orbital and suborbital space in 1961.
Bottom Line: The newly-shortened version of the book is recommended for its depiction of space travel but does very little to showcase Curious George's famous personality, his trademark penchant for getting himself into and out of trouble, and his carefree attitude toward life. We see nothing of George's curiosity in the pages that remain from the larger work, so the protagonist comes off as regrettably generic. I enjoyed reading this to my daughter because I could go off on tangents about space travel, but I felt apologetic on George's behalf, as if I needed to explain that he really is a fun and clever monkey when he's not all serious and scientific.
<book review theater>
ME (using Man in the Yellow Hat voice): Look, George, you got a letter from Professor Wise Man!
ME (using Professor Wiseman voice): It's pronounced WEISS-man!
ME (using Man in the Yellow Hat voice): Professor Wise Man wants you to fly to space in his rocket!
ME (using Professor Wiseman voice): WEISS-man, WEISS-man, WEISS-man!!!
ME (using Man in the Yellow Hat voice): Professor Wise Man sure is a nice guy, isn't he?
ME (using Professor Wiseman voice): Aaaaaaaargh!!!
</book review theater>(less)
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March 22, 2008
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Greg R.
gave  to:
The Wall and the Wing (Paperback)
by
Laura Ruby
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my rating:
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read in March, 2008
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Greg R.
gave to:
Grimpow: The Invisible Road (Hardcover)
by
Rafael Abalos
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my rating:
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read in March, 2008
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Greg R.
gave to:
Children of the Mind (Ender's Saga, Book 4)
by
Orson Scott Card
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my rating:
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read in March, 2008
Greg said:
"I know several readers, myself included, who were blown away by Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. They then found the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, to be equally as riveting and eagerly reached for Xenocide, book three in the series, with the highest...more
I know several readers, myself included, who were blown away by Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. They then found the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, to be equally as riveting and eagerly reached for Xenocide, book three in the series, with the highest of expectations--only to be slammed with disappointment. This otherwise serviceable book, with an original premise and interesting characters, crashes to an unsatisfying and confusing ending that combines the worst attributes of deus ex machina and sequel hooking. Back in the mid-90s, it seemed that only the most devoted of Ender fans dared to approach the fourth book, Children of the Mind. The rest of us avoided it like the descolada virus itself.
This situation may have changed over the ensuing decade as Card has published a number of prequel and sequel books in the Ender universe including a notable series about the life and times of Ender Wiggin's schoolmate, Bean. As the story world has expanded, characters have been fleshed out, political systems have been better defined, and the original quadrology has been reframed into a new context. Xenocide-burned readers may finally be ready to take tentative steps toward CotM--or at least that's my theory, after receiving an endorsement of the book from a friend who described it as "not as bad as everyone thought it would have to be."
So I read the book and it was, indeed, not as bad as everyone thought it would have to be--but it's no Ender's Game, either.
It helps to know that Xenocide and CotM were originally conceived as a single volume, which was divided in half when the page count climbed higher than the publisher was willing to accommodate. CotM's confusing and disjointed opening takes place only moments after Xenocide's confusing and disjointed ending, and neither book feels complete on its own. I'm sure the author did the best he could but the result still reads like a botched operation to separate conjoined twins.
CoTM starts in the middle of the action with no easy recap for those of us who haven't read the previous book in a while, so a better transition would have been appreciated. Perhaps something like I've done in this episode of Book Review Theater...
<book review theater>
EXTERIOR - EXTRASOLAR PLANET WITH THREE MOONS IN AN ORANGE SKY, WHERE PEOPLE STROLL ALONG A BOARDWALK THAT SEPARATES A BEACH ON ONE SIDE FROM URBAN BLIGHT ON THE OTHER - LATE EVENING
A cardboard box appears from nowhere. Peter Wiggin and Si Wang-mu emerge, look around in confusion for a moment, and confront the first man passing by.
PETER: Excuse me, sir?
MAN: Yeah? Whatta you want?
PETER: I'm an extra-universally created simulation of Peter Wiggin, the late Hegemon of the Free People of Earth, under the spiritual control of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin who is and will remain, until his imminent death of old age, reviled and celebrated, respectively, as Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead.
WANG-MU: And I am Wang-mu, a former slave with artificially-enhanced intellectual capacity, ironically named after a Chinese goddess. Also ironically, the so-called free people of my society were in fact enslaved to outside powers by virtue of their genetically-crafted OCD tendencies while peasants and slaves like myself remained actually free.
PETER: With the aid of Jane, a unique artificial intelligence originally created by an alien race that's falsely presumed to be extinct at the hands of my apparent younger brother and puppetmaster, we are travelling from Wang-Mu's home world--
WANG-MU: The Planet Where Everyone Is Chinese.
PETER: Right. From Wang-Mu's home world, The Planet Where Everyone is Chinese, we were meant to find The Planet Where Everyone Is A Pacific Islander by way of The Planet Where Everyone is Japanese.
WANG-MU (looks around): With my advanced intellect, I've determined that this is not any of those worlds.
MAN: Nah. This is The Planet Where Everyone Is From New Jersey. Got a problem with that?
PETER: Not at all, my hairy knuckle-dragging friend. It would seem that Jane is playing a practical joke on us, or perhaps manipulating our journey in the same way that everyone around us seems to be constantly manipulating everyone else in some way or other.
WANG-MU: Including ourselves.
PETER: I'm sorry for taking up your time, but we really must be going. A fleet is approaching The Planet Where Everyone is Brazilian with the intention of blowing the whole thing up, not knowing yet that a cure to the dreaded species-scrambling descolada virus has been found, or that their actions would mean genocide for the last remaining Buggers as well as the native Piggies and Jane herself--who is unique enough to be considered her own species. Did I mention that Jane has the ability to pop people in and out of the universe, allowing them to create impossible objects, bring people back from the dead, and cure brain damage or deformities of the body?
WANG-MU: Which is why we must prevent Congress from shutting Jane down by persuading some influential philosophers that the events of World War II back on Earth are still relevant in space so many thousands of years later.
Peter and Wang-mu step back into the cardboard box, which promptly vanishes.
MAN: What a couple of self-important jerks!
</book review theater>
Something like that would have helped a lot, although the premise does seem rather silly and far-fetched when you try to boil it down to a few short paragraphs of exposition. It also reveals a major weakness of the story world: the assumption that Earth would colonize new worlds on a nation-by-nation basis and that the resulting planetary cultures would not change or evolve noticeably from their progenitors. This detail seems glaringly unrealistic in light of Card's obsession with such anthropological details as food, architecture, and language.
Ender himself hardly appears in this book, and perhaps the most memorable character from Xenocide, OCD-laden genius Han Qing-jao, is missing entirely--only represented in CotM by tantalizing excerpts from her philosophical writings, which serve as thematic chapter headers. But Qing-jao's presence would perhaps have been redundant since she is far from the series's only deep-thinking philosopher and author of impactful works that have changed the lives of billions or trillions of people. In addition to Quing-jao, this would include Ender (author of a trilogy that has stayed continuously in print for over three thousand years), Valentine and Peter (who manipulated world governments through their pseudonymous writings as Demosthenes and Locke), Aimaina Hikari (whose works inspired attempted xenocide), Grace (whose writings inspired Hikari), Malu (whose works inspired Grace), and Plikt (who, as the speaker for Ender's death, has a lock on a future bestseller as well).
Only Ender's stepdaughter, Quara, seems to lack the bug for philosophizing and authorship, so of course the other characters use her as a punching bag for their verbal abuse--which highlights another annoyance I experienced with this book. Every scene is either a dramafest of angst and confrontation or an excuse for long philosophical soliloquies that usually include at least one Shakespeare quotation. Or often, both. Almost without exception, every philosophical theory presented in the book is then subsequently picked apart and discarded as childish and simplistic compared to the unexpressed deeper thoughts that all of our genius characters are keeping to themselves. This makes for one long, emotionally draining, and often pompous book.
Bottom Line: Every reader of thought-provoking science fiction, age 10 through 110, should pick up copies of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. My prior warning to avoid Xenocide is tempered somewhat, but anyone who continues onward in the series should read Xenocide and Children of the Mind together and be prepared for an exhausting and confusing ride.(less)
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Greg R.
gave to:
Tehanu (The Earthsea Cycle, Book 4)
by
Ursula K. Le Guin
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my rating:
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read in February, 2008
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