Some Books, Some TV

My usual reading time the past three days has been taken up by my other pass-the-time activity, Netflix. Husband and I watched I Am Legend, which we both enjoyed very much. If enjoy is the right word for a scary zombie movie. Maybe appreciate is a better word. Also thanks to Netflix, we can watch movies on the computer instantly. The collection of movies isn't huge, but 30 Rock was on the list, so we watched the first season over a couple of days. Although the last few episodes got a little less hilarious, for the most part I thought it was a very funny, clever, watchable show. Starring Tina Fey, it's about her attempts (mostly futile) to control her wayward writing staff and the temperamental actors on a sketch comedy show.

Well, despite watching all that TV, I managed to fit in a little reading. I finished Rash, by Pete Hautman, and I'm in the middle of Seeing Redd, the second Looking Glass War novel. I'll review Rash here.

Rash

Author: Pete Hautman
Reason for reading: YA Reading Challenge
Rating:3/5

This YA book by Pete Hautman is a look to a future where safety has been taken to such an extreme that contact sports are outlawed, track and field races require a full set of protective gear, and insulting someone is a jailable crime. 20% of the population of the USSA (United Safer States of America) are in prison as a result, doing the manual labor that runs the country. When Bo gets into a conflict with another boy in his class that results in half of his school coming down with a mysterious rash, he finds himself in prison, making pizzas in a factory in Canada. In prison, he winds up on a football team, where all of the safety rules he's known all of his life are irrelevant.

Perhaps I've read too many YA and/or scifi books lately, but this one didn't stick out to me. It reminded me too much of a mashup of House of the Scorpion (still a superior book) and that Adam Sandler flick where they play football in prison (The Longest Yard, I think?)

As the story unfolds in this book, the reader begins to see where the idea for the backdrop came from. Hautman is not the first, nor the last to observe America's obsession these days with safety. People used to be able to smoke cigarettes anywhere, you could buy mercury in the hardware store, and lead paint was used everywhere. Nowadays, everyone freaks out when there might be lead in a toy. What if in the future anything deemed unsafe was completely outlawed? French fries, alcohol, or even calling someone a name.

Hautman is a good writer, but the plot really wasn't that original. It wasn't a terrible book by any means, but just not a memorable one.

Just One More Page

Just one more reason to love the library.

The other day I popped by the library to pick up a book I had on reserve when I noticed a shelf with books on sale. I love two things:

1. Books
2. Deals

So I naturally had to browse. I was delighted to go home with The Handmaid's Tale and Brave New World for the big price of $1.

And to top it off, I got a card in the mail that a new second-hand book shop is opening in my city. This is big news for me since I live in one of those suburbs where you can find every sort of fancy chain restaurant and chain retail store you can possibly think of, where there are about 16 different chain gyms and trendy lifestyle shopping centers with stores so new the sawdust has barely settled. But sadly, unique little local shops and second-hand sellers don't exist here. So with a second hand book in my city, it's doubtful that I will continue my non-book-buying trend. I get a little crazy when paperbacks are $.50.

Just One More Page

Last week I was deep into Speaker for the Dead and 10 o 'clock rolled around. I usually go to bed around 10, 10:30ish, because I get to work at 8am. I wasn't quite ready to go to bed yet; the book was getting kind of interesting. So I told myself I'd just finish the chapter and continue to read the next day, after work. Reading might be my guilty pleasure, but I was in control, I'd finish the chapter, and that would be that.

You know what happened next. The siren call of the book lured me in and lowered my defenses. One chapter led to another. Led to another. Somewhere in the wee hours of the night I finally said "enough is enough! I have to work tomorrow! I am in control of this addiction!" Even though I was just a few pages from the end of the book, I finally managed, with herculean effort, to put down the book and stumble into bed.

I awoke the next day and three thoughts went through my brain.

1. Ouch it hurts to be awake
2. Oh this means I can read again.
3. Oh crap this also means I have to go to work.

I read furiously during my spare seconds before work, cursing the clock. Could I call in sick? Nah, no time off built up yet. Could I be late and blame it on traffic? Too iffy, the weather was perfect outside. I would just have to suck it up and appear normal at work. No one need know about my secret addiction. I covered up the bags under my eyes as best as I could, but my reflection in the mirror looked tired no matter how much makeup went on.

All day at work, my fuzzy brain would wander during the spare seconds to the book. 7 hours til I have that delicious pleasure of reading again. 6 hours til I have that delicious pleasure of reading again...

And so on. After I raced home and finished the next few pages, I conked out immediately on the couch. The rest of the week I spent trying to catch up from my late night.

I'd like to present this as if it was a one-time thing. A secret dalliance with my drug of choice. I'm really a casual reader, it never interferes with my social and/or mental health.

OKAY I admit it. I'm hooked. I've had problems putting the book down at night since I was a kid. Just one more page... lies I tell myself so that I can keep reading. The first step is admitting the problem, right? Alright, confession time's done. Okay, back to Brave New World. I've got some time before bed. Just one more page...

Books of History

I've asked my wonderful husband to be a guest blogger here on boldblueadventure, so he can occasionally review the books he reads. This is his very first guest post!

Books: Chosen and Infidel
Author: Ted Dekker

Chosen and Infidel are the first two of four books in the young adult series, Books of History.

The story line is a continuation of Dekker's Circle series. The setting is an alternate reality, thought to be thousands of years in the future from our time: post-Armageddon. In a land left ravaged by evil, with only seven sacred forests left a war wages between two races. The fighting forces are running low and the Supreme Commander of the Forest Guard is forced to lower the age of recruitment. Thus a young adult series is born.

We meet a group of young champions who are hand-picked among thousands of 16+ year olds to lead the Forest Guard in battle against the surmounting numbers of the Desert Hoard. However, there are other forces at work behind the scenes. These forces have different priorities and different plans for the chosen four. There is a prophecy surrounding one of the four chosen that he will be the hero to defeat the evil one. It is his journey that is central to the plot.

Some questions arise though. The plot is not as simple as it seems. This is where Dekker's brilliance shines through. Here we see the connection of the circle series with books such as Saint, Sinner and Skin. All of these books will be part of the "circle saga" where I think everything will come "full circle", so to speak. Now what remains to be seen is how will Dekker pull these separate stories together.

Chosen was an interesting hook into the series. It actually really reminded me of Terry Brooks Armageddon's Children. I liked the action and the plot development. Although not overly descriptive, Dekker does well to create a landscape for the book without sacrificing the energy of the piece. I'm eager to read Renegade and Chaos, but at this time it is only to satisfy my curiosity about the series. In reading Infidel, I had the same feeling that I did when I read White. The feeling was that Dekker wrote the book as a filler. Because he had a longer story to write, he needed to fill the gap between the beginning and the end. This is one draw-back to Dekker in my opinion. Whereas an author of the likes of Tolkien can write a series such as Lord of the Rings, without leaving the reader skimming the pages just to get through it, Dekker seems to slow the story down so much that it just doesn't keep me interested. It seems too that Dekker has one plot line that he simply inserts into different environments with different characters. This is perhaps the draw-back to having so many books and trying to bring them all together. I wonder if Dekker had an overall plan for what his circle saga would be, or if he thought of a clever way to bring them all together.

One element that I do find interesting about this series and the overall circle series is the central element of romance. Everything is ultimately centered around the "Great Romance" which is a religion of love. Dekker develops a view of romance that is post-modern, yet with sex-dependent roles. He keeps the older-fashioned ideal that men will pursue women. Although, throughout the series women seem to have more wisdom and clarity of thought then men. Women and men have needs that seem to be inherit to their sex, however they are very equal in capabilities.

Both books are light reads and a good enough of a story that I would recommend them. Just know that you will be in for the long haul; if you read one you must read them all!

Speaker For The Dead

Author: Orson Scott Card
Reason for Reading: YA Reading Challenge, Margaret A. Edwards Reading Challenge
Rating: 5/5

I read Ender's Game not too long ago, and I found it to be an enjoyable book. But when I put down Speaker for the Dead, I was completely in awe. Speaker for the Dead is more than a sequel, it is a sci-fi masterpiece in its own right.

Speaker for the Dead is set 3000 years after the events of Ender's Game. A new sentient species has been discovered on the planet Lusitania, and this time humanity, it seems, has learned its lessons from before. 3000 years ago, Ender Wiggins was used as an unwitting tool to wipe out the Buggers, a race of hive-mind aliens. This time, the Piggies (as the new species are called) are to be treated with respect and interfered with as little as possible. The scientists studying the Piggies are under strict restrictions not to tamper with their cultural development, but the Piggies are so foreign, so different. But when one of the scientists is murdered, there is one person qualified to discover the truth and prevent another Xenocide.

Thanks to the relativistic effects of space travel, Ender Wiggins is still alive. Although he was the originator of the destruction of the Buggers, after he discovered that the Buggers had not intended to harm humans, he wrote the true story of the Buggers and became the Speaker for the Dead. He's been wandering the galaxy for millennium, waiting for the opportunity to amend for the destruction of the Buggers. When he sets off for Lusitania, he sees it as his chance at last to make up for old mistakes. By the time he arrives, however, the Piggies have killed another scientist and the possibility of Piggie and human cultural understanding seems remote.

There aren't many science fiction novels where the writer manages to tackle both interesting philosophical issues and to write satisfying characters all at the same time. This book has a number of well-written, fascinating characters that grow and develop during the course of this book. The heart of this book is philosophical, though, asking what it means to be human. Any book that tries to take on a topic like that is almost certain to bite off more than it can chew, but somehow this book manages to live up to its premise. I can't recommend this one highly enough.

Booking Through Thursday

• When somebody mentions “literature,” what’s the first thing you think of? (Dickens? Tolstoy? Shakespeare?)
• Do you read “literature” (however you define it) for pleasure? Or is it something that you read only when you must?

My first thought is to shudder and remember my Spanish Lit. class. I like Spanish, and I do decently well with reading Spanish literature, but I had this professor who sucked all of the fun out of learning by making us memorize dates and facts instead of learning or speaking Spanish. In fact my extreme dislike for him made me switch colleges (he was the ONLY spanish prof in the college, if you can believe it).

Aside from Spanish lit, I never took any English, writing, or literature classes in college (which I regret deeply now). The last time I took an English class it was my senior year of high school, and we did a mix of literature, writing, and grammar. So the word "literature" also brings back memories of books and short stories that I read and analyzed in that class. I enjoyed some of them more than others, but for many of the readings, I didn't "get" the story until I had taken time to analyze it and pick it apart a little. Analyzing literature seemed so scary, but we had a great teacher, so I remember getting into the analysis. So when I think literature, I define it to myself as books that can stand up to being analyzed. Books I don't think of as being "literature" are ones that don't really hold up well to analysis (chick lit for example).

When I read a good book and I feel like there's more to be gotten out of it, I head over to sparknotes.com for an analysis. So we could also define "literature" this way: if its got an analysis on Sparknotes.com, then it's literature. Although that probably sounds silly to define literature by a tool that historically been a way for students to get out of reading literature, if it isn't being assigned by professors, it isn't on sparknotes.com.

With that as a broad definition (and I am one for making "literature" a broad term) I would say read plenty of literature. Sometimes it is pure pleasure reading, other times I need a little kick to read it. My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge, for example, has been an excellent kick in the pants for me to read books I wouldn't normally place high on the priority list.

I enjoy books on different levels. Sometimes I enjoy the fact I'm done with them (finally), sometimes I enjoy them on a cerebral, appreciate level (boy that was well-written and I feel so educated right now) and sometimes I enjoy a book so much I will stay up late reading it and I won't want to put it away for anything and I'll try to force my husband to read it immediately.

I've had "literature" reading experiences that fit into any of the three categories. So yes, I did enjoy Great Expectations, but there were times it was a drag to read. The Poisonwood Bible or Ender's Game, however, were of the "keeping me up at night" variety. As far as "literature" I avoid, maybe someday I will get around to picking up Don Quixote or The Old Man and the Sea, but it would probably take a literature course to make me do it.

Araby

Author: James Joyce
Reason For Reading: Short Story Challenge.

Young love is not all its cracked up to be. Too often it is unrequited, the object of desire hardly knowing that the desirer exists. In this story, the young narrator soars from the agony of watching the neighbor girl from afar, to the excitement of the opportunity to go to a bazaar and buy a trinket for her. But though he waits anxiously all day for his uncle to return and give him the money to go to the bazaar, once he arrives, he finds to his utter frustration that reality can never live up to the fantasy of love.

It is interesting what brings about the sudden crash to reality. The narrator is not treated cruelly by his unrequited love. She plays a very minor part in this story, only interacting with him when she casually mentions that she wishes she could go to the bazaar. It isn't until the young narrator has made it to the bazaar, late in the evening now, and sees that there is hardly anyone left. As they turn off the lights, and the young narrator sits there, alone, he feels suddenly that his dreams have been crushed.

In this little snippet of a story, Joyce brings us to a childhood experience that (admit it) most of us have experienced at some time or another.

BAFAB Week!!

In honor of Buy a Friend a Book Week, here are some great giveaways that are going on right now:

Nymeth, who is a fabulous blogger and an all-around nice person, is giving away five books here in honor of her one year blogiversary! So be sure to wish her a happy 1 year and enter to win her drawing.

Eva at A Striped Armchair has a wonderful collection of BAFAB giveaways here, including her own contest and giveaway. She's also got a hilarious post up about book-sluttishness. I completely cracked up when reading it.

Dewey at The Hidden Side of a Leaf is also celebrating her 1 year blogiversary, and in honor of that and BAFAB, she has got 2 $20 gift certificate to give away here! Happy blogiversary to Dewey as well!

Ravenous Reader is giving away a copy of Jackfish, The Vanishing Village on her blog here.