Posted by Adrienne on September 4, 2010 under Books | 
Up to 60 books at the beginning of September means I’m right on track for 100 by the end of the year! These most recent novels each featured interesting female protagonists, although the stories themselves are quite different.
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Flavia de Luce is 11, doesn’t remember her mother, loves chemistry and just found a dead body in the garden. How did it get there, and is it somehow related to the argument she overheard her father having the night before? Flavia is determined to find out!
Read more…
Posted by Adrienne on August 27, 2010 under Books |
The Collected What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been by Robert Cowley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve always been interested in history, and once I found the alternate history genre, it opened a whole new imaginative world for me. Thinking about how the quirks of history have caused things to turn out a certain way, and trying to figure out what would have happened if people had made different choices can be fun, harmless exercises. Sometimes they allow a greater understanding of the events in question. At least, that’s the premise behind the two volumes in What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. No longer is the counterfactual just material for history class daydreams; real historians sometimes use it to examine causes and effects.
Read more…
Posted by Adrienne on July 19, 2010 under Books |
My most recent books for the Book Count were the 5 books in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. I’ve read the first four before, but I wanted to have the story fresh in my mind as I read the last volume. My thoughts on the series as a whole and my review of the final book in the series are after the jump.
Read more…
Posted by Adrienne on July 16, 2010 under Books |
Yay! I’m half way to my goal of 100 books!
Incarceron by Catherine Fisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It was an excellent idea. A cure for society’s ills and the makings of an entirely new society. What could possibly go wrong? Just imagine: a place to put all of the criminals and the evildoers where they cannot get at everyone else – yes, a prison, but what a prison! – and govern them with a computer programmed to fill their needs and allow them to build a new society, a utopia! Incarceron would be the perfect civilization, the pinnacle of human achievement!
It’s never that easy, of course. Despite the philosophers and scholars who volunteered to enter the prison at its beginnings, and the ability of the computer to provide everything the inmates needed, Incarceron became a living hell, a mechanical cage that brought out the worst of everyone in it. Finn is no different than the others – he does what he has to survive, including stealing and killing – but he does have glimpses in his mind of Outside and the mysterious tattooed eagle on his wrist. No enters or exits Incarceron…but if that’s true, how can Finn remember the birthday cake?
Read more…
Posted by Adrienne on July 8, 2010 under Books |
After a few intense weeks of reading, I’m nearly halfway to my goal!
Elephant Run by Roland Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Blitz is raging, and Nick’s mother sends him away from the dangers of London to the relative safety of his father’s plantation in the midst of the Burmese jungle. Nick loves the plantation and has greatly missed it, his father and the elephants in the years that he lived with his mother and step-father. But Nick’s stay in Burma is anything but peaceful. The war has followed him to southeast Asia; the Japanese are taking over the continent, and many of the Burmese workers on the plantation are tired of British rule and agree with the Japanese slogan, “Asia for Asians.”
Nick’s father is desperate to get Nick out of the country, but the Japanese take both of them prisoner and send Nick’s father to a labor camp. How will Nick survive his captivity at the hands of the Japanese? Will his father die in the camp? And what about Nick’s Burmese friend Mya? She’s as much a prisoner as he is, and possibly in even more danger…
Read more…
