Book post: Summer reading edition
Sep. 17th, 2009 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
froggy_dearI don't do much reading these days. I've been very committed to my knitting of late. And the Sims... But I did manage to finish three books this summer.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. Let's preface this by saying that I have never read Pride and Prejudice in its original form, nor any other Austen book. Nor have I, to my best recollection, seen a film adaptation, with the possible exception of an episode of Wishbone. So it was all new to me; I didn't have a Jane Austen point of comparison. So... it was cute. I mean, I've now, kind of, read Jane Austen. I didn't love it. There were zombies and some minor ass kicking, but it was all sort of gimicky and shallow. I kept wondering, and trying to reconstruct, what the various zombie episodes translated to in the original. I would say it is good for light summer reading.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I am going through a phase where, if the work is situated during or after some kind of apocalypse, I am interested. And I kind of had an idea that this was a book I should read. So I brought home my brother's copy from Wisconsin and read it. I finished this book in just a few evenings. I stayed up until 1:30 on a school night to finish it. This book is a compelling story and it made me cry. The post apocalyptic thing is just incidental, you know? The story is about people, and survival, and commitment to being human. And I am very interested to see the movie - the latest trailer strikes the entirely wrong tone. The book feels very grey. Very quiet, and very grey. The way it's written and stylized - at first I thought it would annoy me, but then I came to appreciate the way it really contributed to the atmosphere of the book. I would recommend this to anyone.
The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson. This is action packed pulp sci fi. For the last two thirds of the books it's pretty much a continuous action sequence. It begins with a prologue which is pretty much just a neat little short story appended to the front of the book - It doubles as exposition. When I got to the story, I was annoyed that I had just read that neat little story and here I was with someone graduating from (the equivalent) of Star Fleet Academy. And he goes about, succeeding through nepotism. Then I got confused; it was 40 pages in and the story was about Star Fleet boy and the three adventurers the back cover touted had not yet been met. But then the author hit his stride and the prose moved from painful to pulp classic, which some recklessly awesome descriptions of stuff. I don't know if it's worth reading, but it was kind of fun to read once I realized that the guy writing the blurb on the back cover hadn't read the book.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. Let's preface this by saying that I have never read Pride and Prejudice in its original form, nor any other Austen book. Nor have I, to my best recollection, seen a film adaptation, with the possible exception of an episode of Wishbone. So it was all new to me; I didn't have a Jane Austen point of comparison. So... it was cute. I mean, I've now, kind of, read Jane Austen. I didn't love it. There were zombies and some minor ass kicking, but it was all sort of gimicky and shallow. I kept wondering, and trying to reconstruct, what the various zombie episodes translated to in the original. I would say it is good for light summer reading.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I am going through a phase where, if the work is situated during or after some kind of apocalypse, I am interested. And I kind of had an idea that this was a book I should read. So I brought home my brother's copy from Wisconsin and read it. I finished this book in just a few evenings. I stayed up until 1:30 on a school night to finish it. This book is a compelling story and it made me cry. The post apocalyptic thing is just incidental, you know? The story is about people, and survival, and commitment to being human. And I am very interested to see the movie - the latest trailer strikes the entirely wrong tone. The book feels very grey. Very quiet, and very grey. The way it's written and stylized - at first I thought it would annoy me, but then I came to appreciate the way it really contributed to the atmosphere of the book. I would recommend this to anyone.
The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson. This is action packed pulp sci fi. For the last two thirds of the books it's pretty much a continuous action sequence. It begins with a prologue which is pretty much just a neat little short story appended to the front of the book - It doubles as exposition. When I got to the story, I was annoyed that I had just read that neat little story and here I was with someone graduating from (the equivalent) of Star Fleet Academy. And he goes about, succeeding through nepotism. Then I got confused; it was 40 pages in and the story was about Star Fleet boy and the three adventurers the back cover touted had not yet been met. But then the author hit his stride and the prose moved from painful to pulp classic, which some recklessly awesome descriptions of stuff. I don't know if it's worth reading, but it was kind of fun to read once I realized that the guy writing the blurb on the back cover hadn't read the book.
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Date: 2009-09-21 02:45 am (UTC)http://www.amazon.com/Sense-Sensibility-Monsters-Jane-Austen/dp/1594744424/ref=pd_ys_qtk_rnr_t?pf_rd_p=236216601&pf_rd_s=center-5&pf_rd_t=1501&pf_rd_i=home&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0749KSTGD51Y4NX93VCH