I really should do this when the month ends, it’s so much easier to keep track that way. I didn’t read much during these two months, unfortunately, mostly because of finals but also because I just wasn’t finding anything very good and so I have a lot of half-read things I gave up on. There seems to be a particularly huge influx of very bad speculative fiction and I picked up a good fair share of it. Luckily most of it was from the library so I don’t feel like I wasted my book budget too badly. If you’ve read something you’d recommend, tell me! I’ll add it to my list!

April:

I’ll admit, I wanted to read the story that inspired the movie with Will Smith (which I haven’t seen), but judging from the trailers alone, they changed a lot from the book — for starters, the main character is white and the dog has a very brief part in the story. However, the story was fascinating, it kind of reminded me of Dracula, simply because it had that…atmosphere, I guess. The vampire as grotesque. The book is a bunch of short stories with I am Legend, which is a novella. It also is a pretty slow starter because a lot of the story is how he goes through day-to-day survival. The ending, though, is worth it. It’s a real thinker. The other stories in the collection are okay but nothing to write home about (there is a pretty creepy one about a killer doll *shudders*). While I am Legend can still be considered pretty contemporary, the short stories give away their age. Some of them show some racial stereotypes (like the black professor who, of course, knows voodoo as well and a voodoo ceremony must have sex in some way), but nothing too bad. I didn’t read all of them but picked and chose as the mood hit me.

Yes, I lap up Terry Pratchett books like milk and honey. The ones with Moist von Lipwig are funny and easy to get into the Discworld series (so I recommend them this one you haven’t tried Terry Pratchett yet ). Oh yeah, and the woman in here can smoke on par with Tammy McMillan from my story.

May:

You know, while looking for the link on Amazon.com I found that a lot of Joey W. Hill’s books feature guys’ butts and backs on the cover…not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, of course. I like reading erotica, especially if it’s good (none of that “treasure trove” stuff — next someone will mention “secret tunnel” and how am I supposed to take anything seriously after that?) and EJ was nice enough to recommend this one. It was definitely good. Don’t expect much plot, this book seems to serve more as an introduction for the characters and the world, but it has plenty of HOT SEX (yes, with capital letters) so somehow I didn’t really notice the lack of plot…

I like Shirow Masamune’s vision of the future, at least as far as technology goes, and his ideas of the internet are interesting. Unfortunately, we seem to have tapped into the same wavelength because there were a few things that were perilously close to his world in the first draft of “Morgan” (I hate it when that happens! ) and it was in fact that reason that John said I should read some Shirow Masamune. We lucked out and found the old, out-of-print copies of the graphic novels for Appleseed at Bookman’s, although it looks like they’ve reprinted them with new covers! Anyway, Appleseed is a little tougher for me to read than his other work, Ghost in the Shell, because of his world building (technology and politics in particular) are really difficult to follow, especially in graphic novel form. I wonder if he had devoted a paragraph or two of text to explain it properly would I have gotten it better? However, putting that aside, as long as I’m willing to skip back to a page before and re-read it, I usually get it in the end (I think) . And besides, the female heroine is totally kick-ass.

12:09 am | Category: Books, Reviews | |

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