Cory Day’s
Comments
(group member since Aug 18, 2012)
Cory Day’s
comments
from the Reading with Style group.
Showing 981-1,000 of 1,205
10.9 QuirkyThe Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket (1010 Lexile)
Review: As the title suggests, the first of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events starts badly – and as the narrator warns, it does not end happily. It is not, however, a downer of a book – it features kids and is written for kids, so there is plenty of whimsy. It’s pretty on the nose about most of its lessons – from what certain unfamiliar words mean to how bad the world can sometimes be – but since it never takes itself too seriously, it doesn’t really matter. I’m a little old to be the target audience, and am not going running to the library for the next one, but I’ll probably get around to the rest of the books eventually – they’re quick reads.
+10 Task (#65 on innovative list)
+10 Review
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 1010
15.9 – F3 - Chinese/Japanese/Vietnamese/KoreanAtlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Qizhang Dong
+30 Task (translated from Chinese)
Task Total: 30
Grand Total: 990
15.8 – B2 - 1976-2000Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey
+20 Task (pub 1987)
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 960 (includes +5 combo for 10.5 in post 547)
Kate S wrote: "From Post 547Cory (Bigler) '00-'05 wrote: "10.6 Day of the Dead
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (Lexile 810)
Review: When I was around ten maybe, I read a passage from A Tree Grows in..."
I mean, not to argue with extra points for me, but I get the 496 page version as the most popular one...
Rebekah wrote: "Cory (Bigler) '00-'05 wrote: "10.6 Day of the DeadA Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (Lexile 810)
Review: When I was around ten maybe, I read a passage from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and t..."
Good catch, thanks!
20.8 Stephen KingAffliction by Laurell K. Hamilton
Review: There’s really hardly a point to reviewing this book. It’s the 22nd book in a series that’s been going seriously downhill around book 8. I’m really not sure why I still read them, except maybe that it’s habit. In this installment, a couple of the complaints about the series have been fixed – Anita only has sex maybe three times, and there is actually some semblance of a plot. However, the rest of the problems remain, the most egregious of which is an almost complete lack of editing. The dialogue is clunky, the writing ‘tells’ much more than it ‘shows’, we learn far more about every single character’s hair than we ever needed to know, and even well into the book there were large info dumps from previous stories. Hamilton has built a world and some characters that still have things going for them, but it’s all just too much, and her success seems to have led to a point where she doesn’t have anyone she trusts who can reign her in.
+20 Task (Vampires and wereanimals and zombies, oh my!)
+10 Review
+5 Jumbo (570 pages)
Task Total: 35
Grand Total: 935
10.1 Square PegLife After Life by Kate Atkinson
Review: When Ursula Todd is first born in 1910, she dies after taking only a single breath. The next time she’s born she lives a little longer, and so, like her mother always tells her, “practice makes perfect” – in the next few tries, she’s able to live a little longer into her childhood every time. Eventually, the book settles into a sort of time travel novel, although the actual circumstances aren’t ever exactly clear, and the mechanics really don’t hold up to the scrutiny some genre readers would use for such things. Sometimes, especially later in the novel, Ursula is more aware of the feedback loop that seems to be her life and death. When Ursula attempts to effect change upon the larger world, both she and the novel seem to stray. Spanning a period of time that is one of the most significant in recent history, Ursula, and the book overall, are much more successful when focusing on the smaller events in her life and family.
+10 Task
+10 Review
+5 Jumbo (544 pages)
Task Total: 25
Grand Total: 900
10.6 Day of the DeadA Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (Lexile 810)
Review: When I was around ten maybe, I read a passage from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and told my mom I wanted to read it, but she said I was too young. It became something of an obsession, although by the time I read it I must not have cared that much because upon listening to it now I remembered very little outside the part with the Christmas tree, which was probably the passage that originally got me interested in the book. Whenever it was, I was too old to care much anymore but too young to really understand it. Now, I got so frustrated at the injustices, especially in the educational system – that’s what will stick out in my mind now. It is a coming-of-age story, but it’s also a story of poverty, of determination, of a way of life that in many ways is gone but also remains (although not as much in Brooklyn).
+10 Task (lived 1896-1972)
+10 Combo (10.2, 20.2)
+10 Review
Task Total: 30
Grand Total: 875
10.7 Ex-PatsKaterina's Wish by Jeannie Mobley (Lexile 780)
+10 Task (14 year old Katerina has moved to the United States from Bavaria)
Task Total: 10
Grand Total: 845
20.2 Alive 1909-1922Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (930 Lexile)
Review: I can’t really believe I never read this as a kid – I had every ballet book I could find – but I’d never heard of it until Meg Ryan’s character in You’ve Got Mail recommends it in tears. In the end, it turned out to be much less about ballet than the theater, but had there been more theater books on my shelves as a kid I think they’d have been favorites too. It’s really your basic kids book in a lot of ways – orphans doing something most kids could only dream of by living in an English boarding house full of fun interesting adults, getting free admission into a performing arts’ school, and end up with fantastic careers before the age of 16! Why not? I think I’m going to get my hands on as many of the ‘Shoe Books’ as possible. I think they’ll end up as books that, assuming I have (probably female) children, I’ll put on their shelves in the hopes they pick them up (because if my potential future children are anything like me they won’t want to read anything I actually recommend to them).
+20 Task (Streatfeild lived from 1895-1986)
+5 Combo (10.6)
+10 Review
Task Total: 35
Grand Total: 815
20.6 Influenced by ProustThe Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
Review: I really have a hard time with adolescent (or 20-something) male coming-of-age stories. And that’s really what this one is. Art has just graduated from college and is having his last summer of doing practically nothing before trying to carve a path in a respectable profession, breaking free of the family business like his father has always planned (his dad is a Jewish mobster). Art spends the summer with new friends, exploring his sexuality, drinking a lot of Rolling Rock, and being a dude in his early 20s. In the first half, the only thing that was keeping me interested was the fact that it’s set in my hometown, but by the end I actually found myself caring where Art ended up. I didn’t love the ending, but there was probably no satisfying way that the book could have ended while maintaining its realism. This one surprised me.
+20 Task (approved in help thread, and he mentioned Proust’s influence in the afterward to the book)
+5 (20.7 - http://michaelchabon.com/about/ talks about his Bar Mitzvah)
+10 Review
Task Total: 35
Grand Total: 780
20.3 Belle EpoqueThe Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Review: I’ve been trying to tackle some of the great science fiction classics, since I came to the genre late and feel like I missed out on a lot. This is actually the first thing I ever read by H.G. Wells, and while it was interesting I have to say I prefer more modern time travel explorations. There really isn’t much science in this, and in fact the whole thing revolves around a man telling a story to a group of people, all of whom (including the Time Traveler himself) question whether or not it’s all in his head. There is a distance that begins from that narrative device, and continues inside the story within the story. The Time Traveler goes so very far into the future that the people he meets really aren’t people at all, but are two types of creatures that barely hold onto any form of humanity. He hypothesizes that he’s seeing an extreme result of the dichotomy between upper and lower classes – an upper class of beautiful leisurely creatures and a lower class of underground monsters. It’s an issue is as relevant today as it was when Wells wrote this, but I would have rather read it directly than as allegory.
+20 Task (#18 on list)
+10 Combo (10.6, 20.2)
+10 Canon
+10 Review
Task Total: 50
Grand Total: 745
20.7 JewishChildren of God by Mary Doria Russell
Review: Children of God picks up just days after the end of The Sparrow, but has a different focus. While both books in many ways revolve around Emilio Sandos, this one delves more deeply into the alien species the humans encountered, and investigates the impacts the visitors’ have had on the planet. In a recent event I attended, Russell described this project as an attempt to recreate a discovery of a new world from a more modern perspective – would we do better than Columbus? She seems to be answering with a resounding “NO!” The thing I like most about her books is that she portrays people (and aliens) as real – with faults and traumas and doubt and all the mess that goes along with sentience – but she does it with empathy. In this sequel, she shows the perspectives of the villains from The Sparrow, shows the ugliness of what can happen when justice turns to revenge, and faces the idea that a person may have good motivations but treat someone with great cruelty. There seems to be a trend in which authors use the worst parts of humanity to create reality – no one is safe, anyone can die, no one is all good – they find the bad parts of everyone and make the reader hate the heroes. I wish more of them could do what Mary Doria Russell does and find the good, make the reader love the villains – because creating empathy is one of the best things fiction can do.
+20 Task
+5 Combo (many characters, including narrators, are from alien species)
+10 Review
Task Total: 35
Grand Total: 695
15.6 – C4 – 250-350 pgHen of the Baskervilles by Donna Andrews (320 pgs)
+20 Task
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 660
15.5 – B1 – 2001-2013 To Sir Phillip, With Love by Julia Quinn
+20 Task
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 640
20.1 FrenchAlex by Pierre Lemaitre
Review: I’d heard about this book from at least two podcasts – billed as something for fans of Gone Girl, but even more twisted. Gone Girl wasn’t my favorite book of all time, but this sounded interesting, so when the English translation came into the library I picked it up. I’m not sure what I was expecting – with everything’s being billed as the next Gone Girl, this could be anything. Anyway, the basic plot line is that a woman named Alex is kidnapped at the very beginning of the book, and the majority of the book then alternates viewpoints between the investigating police officer and Alex herself. It’s definitely like Gone Girl in that it is difficult to talk about it without spoiling, and it’s not a traditional good-guy/bad-guy thriller. About a third of the way in I started finally getting into it – up until then, I just didn’t care. I wonder if it’s the translation, but the writing threw me off. It used simplistic descriptions such as ‘fat’, ‘old’, or ‘unattractive’, and the point of view was not entirely consistent within the chapters. The plot itself, once it took off, did keep me going, but it’s not a rave for me.
+20 Task (Pierre Lemaitre was born in Paris, France and the book was originally published in France)
+10 Review
Task Total: 30
Grand Total: 620
10.5 Labor DayCrown Duel by Sherwood Smith (880 Lexile)
Review: When Meliara’s father dies, she and her brother are forced into their destinies as Count and Countess of their desperately neglected province. I was horrified when, in the first couple chapters, it was revealed that a) she was a teenager who had only learned to read and write in the last year, and b) her father had burned the library that had served the town for generations to the ground, leaving only a handful of books accessible to even the most privileged people. Mel leads her people into an idealistic revolt against the king, eventually realizing just how sheltered, naïve, and ignorant she is. Ultimately, the plot served more as a device for Mel’s character development, which was unsatisfying, but at least there WAS character development. This was a short novel, and I regret not having bought the volume that includes the sequel – I have a feeling they’re really best read together.
+10 Task
+10 Review
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 590
20.8 Stephen KingRitual Magic by Eileen Wilks
Review: This is the tenth novel in the World of the Lupi series, and would not be a good entry point into the series. In this volume, Lily and Rule are up against their normal foe and her minions, plus an added bonus bad guy and HIS minions! They are pulled into the case when Lily’s mother, on her 57th birthday, mysteriously loses all memories past her 12th birthday, and this within weeks of Lily and Rule’s wedding, which her mom is basically planning. Since Lily and her mom have an overall antagonistic relationship, the parts where Lily has to deal with her mother’s being, in essence, a pre-teen girl are really interesting. However, as the case heats up those parts fall away, as do most of the interactions between Lily and Rule. These books are best when they maintain a balance between action and relationships, and I found this one a little too heavy on the action. Not my favorite, but I’ll definitely pick up the next one.
+20 Task (Rule is a lupi, which is another name for a werewolf, and many other characters are non-human)
+10 Review
Task Total: 30
Grand Total: 570
20.8 Stephen KingSaga, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan
+20 Task (none of the characters are human – they are warring alien races)
Graphic novel – no style points
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 535
