Suggestion Post!

Hey guys, no new books at the moment (I'm nearly done with Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which is both enjoyable but very dense) but I thought that, since I'm reading only new things this year, I'd give all two of you the chance to pummel me with suggestions.  So:

WHAT SHOULD I READ NEXT?

Sci-Fi All The Time

30.  Goliath, Scott Westerfeld
These books are excellent and I'm sad that I've finished them.  This third volume especially gets points for not overwhelming me with the romance story, for introducing Nikola Tesla in all his batshit glory, and for the best illustration of a loris wearing a fake mustache I've ever seen.  If you like steampunk, or alternate history, or war stories, or fun things, you should probably read these books posthaste.

I'm still kind of shocked that Westerfeld wrote both these and the Uglies books.  The level of quality of the writing, the characters, the world building, is so vastly different - Uglies not only isn't on the same level as Leviathan, they don't even occupy the same hemisphere of literature.

31.  Know No Fear, Dan Abnett
The reason to plow through Deliverance Lost is pretty much so you can read Know No Fear.  I was looking at the most current list of Horus Heresy books and their authors, and it's pretty clear that Games Workshop knows where to get the best quality work - of seventeen novel titles (not including short story compilations), four of them are by Abnett and five are by Graham McNeill (I recently finished The Outcast Dead by McNeill).  There are a few others who are definitely quality authors, and I look forward to seeing more of their work (Aaron Dembski-Bowden and James Swallow, particularly), but Abnett and McNeill pretty much have a monopoly on the best titles in this series.  That said, I wasn't fond of the pacing of about the first third of Know No Fear - Abnett writes the book it present tense, and the beginning is SO heavy with foreshadowing that it feels weighty and plodding, rather than tense.  But once the main battle started I was on the edge of my seat - it definitely packs the gut-punching emotional weight and heartbreak that I've come to expect from Abnett.

I'm Halfway Through My Project Goal And It's Not Even June Yet

27.  The Outcast Dead, Graham McNeill
I was tired of waiting for someone else to buy the Horus Heresy novels that came out after Prospero Burns, so I bought the next three (The Outcast Dead, Deliverance Lost, and Know No Fear) all at once.  My challenge then was not to read them all in one big sci-fi swallow - because I like spacing series out so that I don't overload myself on one kind of story, and because I don't know when the next volume is coming out and these books are like crack to me.  Seriously, I know the idea of books based off a game property sounds like the end products will be pulpy and bad, but if you're a fan AT ALL of space opera, politics, or robot suits, please read these books.  The Outcast Dead is a really interesting addition to the series, since it shows the reader the fall-out from a specific event that happened a couple of books ago (specifically, you get to see what the astropaths on Terra experience after Magnus pulls his shit in the Golden Throne room).  There's also a ballsy revelation that re-contextualizes large swathes of the whole 40K universe.  In short: shit gets SO REAL.  Also ILU Graham McNeill.

28.  Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir, Jenny Lawrence
The funniest book I have ever read.  No, seriously.  I couldn't read this book in public places because parts of it (especially the chapter on Jenny's adventures with exterminators who don't know what chupacabras are) had me HOWLING with laughter.  If you're a fan of her blog, thebloggess.com, this is a must-read.  If you're not, I don't even know you.

KNOCK KNOCK, MOTHERFUCKER

29.  Deliverance Lost, Gav Thorpe
Oh, Gav.  There's something undeniably cruel about putting a Thorpe book, the weakest of the 40K authors, in between McNeill and Dan Abnett, who are clearly the strongest.  It's a good way to get me to read the damn book, though, especially since the Raven Guard are not really a legion I have much interest in (WHEREFORE ART MY SALAMANDERS, GAMES WORKSHOP?).  But Deliverance Lost has some good story elements in it, and even when I was beating my head against the wall due to stilted dialogue and really bad pacing (it's really bad, you guys) there were still interesting revelations happening.  I'm not sure I really believe the plot point that the book is predicated on, but I have pretty much given up hope on completely logical plot choices in all of the Horus Heresy novels.  I get that there's already an event structure in place that the authors have to adhere to, I do.

(Deliverance Lost starts immediately after the Dropsite Massacre and chronicles Corax's efforts to rebuild his Raven Guard Legion, with a little help from the Emperor [AND NO HELP FROM YOU, ROGAL DORN, GOSH].  Also the Alpha Legion shows up for a while and I vomit a bit in my mouth.  There is some weird Chaos shit that happens, though, and I do love those bits.)

Booooooks

24. Graceling, Kristen Cashore
Some day I will read fantasy written for adults again, but honestly, right now the best stuff is getting written for the YA crowd.  Graceling is super fun high fantasy, without poorly written magic getting in the way - it takes place in a fictional kingdom, in a roughly medieval time setting, and the biggest fantasy conceit is that some people in this world are born with a "grace."  A grace is a natural talent that you do more naturally and better than anyone else, and if you've got one, your eyes are two different colors.  I thought Cashore did a good job showing how that talent discrepancy (between the "haves" and the "have-nots") affects the population, and how the gracelings are discriminated and basically made to be a lower class of citizen.  There's some interesting political stuff going on, and Katsa, the heroine, kicks so much ass I can barely stand it.  There's a strong romantic element (of course) but it contributes to rather than distracting from the story.  I enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to the sequel.

25. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
It took me a bit to get into The Book Thief; I would say until about halfway through.  It's a ballsy book of Zusak to have written, and I appreciate the risks he takes with style and storytelling.  I also deeply appreciate the fact that while this is a book about World War II, Zusak has some new things to say about it - the primary narrator of this story is Death, so even though Liesel, a young German girl, is the main character, we get her story in the context of all the horrible things happening in Germany in the early 1940's from a particularly poetic viewpoint.  The Book Thief is beautiful and stark and gut-wrenching, and ultimately worth the effort it took to get through it.

26. Revolver, Marcus Sedgwick
What a gloriously claustrophobic, tense little novel.  Revolver isn't very long, but it packs a big punch - it takes place in a cabin, isolated in the woods, in the middle of winter, in the Arctic circle.  Shortly after Sig's father dies (seriously, like an hour after they pull his body out of the ice) some huge dude barges into the cabin claiming the dad owes him a shitton of gold and he's going to start shooting people if he doesn't get it.  Interlaced with that fun time are flashbacks to Einar, the father, working in Alaska during the gold rush.  It's tight, exciting, and jumpy, and I recommend it.

Some books I read for class

21. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin
A charming fantasy adventure I read for my children's literature class.  A poor Chinese girl seeks out the Old Man in the Moon to ask for a change in fortune for her family - she meets a dragon who can't fly, a talking goldfish, and helps a king, all while collecting folktales from the people she meets.  A lovely chapter book for advanced grade school readers, and a nice diversion for me.  Plus I like dragons and spunky heroines.

22. Simon Bloom, the Gravity Keeper, Michael Riseman
Another class read, this one is also a fun little book but with fewer dragons and more messing around with physics.  When teachers or parents talk about a good "boy book" this is the kind of thing they mean - plot- rather than character-oriented, lots of action, lots of breaking rules (of physics).  The nice part about Gravity Keeper, though, is that the characters have to learn the formulas and the rules before they can break them, so there are actually some good teachable moments in here.  It was fun but not quite enough for me to want to read the rest of the series (it was way more juvenile than, say, Percy Jackson or Artemis Fowl, similarly flavored and for a similar age group but both of those are more complex stories).

23. When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead
Writers of adult sci-fi need to read this book, because THIS IS HOW TO WRITE ABOUT TIME TRAVEL.  This is EXTREMELY soft sci-fi, which I can only really call it because of the time travel ideas, but it's a lovely book about the connections we make as people and the impact our actions can have.  Especially good for kids, who tend to couch their relationships in very black and white terms - When You Reach Me vividly illustrates that not only is there more going on between people than we might perceive, but also that it's worth it to untangle the relationships you have with people.

More Books in March

18.  Pretties, Scott Westerfeld
I don't know, you guys.  My issues with Pretties are actually quite similar to the ones I had when I read Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins - in both cases it felt like the author was basically rehashing the first book in the series with some superficial plot changes.  I'm also struggling with the likability factor of the main character; I find Tally kind of...tiresome?  Plus Westerfeld is failing to really convince me that his dystopia is a terrible thing.  I mean, OBVIOUSLY the world has some problems, but they never seem...totally evil, I guess.  I also feel like the divisions between the novels are kind of arbitrary - like, Westerfeld sat down and wrote one EPICALLY LONG story and split it into four even pieces, and then tidied up the ends so they'd have their own individual story arcs (except they don't really).  IN SUMMARY: I AM NOT CONVINCED.

I'm taking a break from these for a while so I can read Behemoth.


19.  Moon Over Manifest, Clare Vanderpool
My Children's Literature class is doing historical fiction this week, and this was the last book I read for the unit - getting myself to read it was like pulling teeth for reasons I don't really understand.  I don't know why, but I was incredibly resistant to reading it (even though it's required reading) but once I started I packed it in pretty quick.  It's a fun, tangled knot of a book, about Abilene Tucker, a young girl, coming to the small town of Manifest, Iowa, to wait for her dad.  It takes place in (I believe) the early 1940's, and while Abilene is stranded in Manifest she starts unearthing the town's recent past.  The town, everyone who lives there, her father, a mysterious boy named Jinx that Abilene reads about in a handful of letters, and the town fortune teller, Miss Sadie, make up that knot I mentioned, and unraveling it with Abilene was more enjoyable than I anticipated.  It's a solid young YA or older children's novel.

20.  Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld
More fun alternate history lessons with Westerfeld.  It was weird to read a couple of the Uglies books in between Leviathan and this one, because the Leviathan books are SO MUCH BETTER.  Like, it was hard for me to hear Westerfeld's voice in Uglies.  I think the Uglies books came out before Leviathan?  I think that's right.  So maybe Westerfeld's just getting better the more that he writes.  But I'm itching to read Goliath now, and I honestly don't know if I care to bother with Specials and Extras.  But anyway:  Behemoth continues into World War I with our heroes from the previous novel.  There's a gigantic genetically engineered squid that eats ships, a Tesla cannon, some robot elephants, and a loris that imitates human speech.  Also an anarchist rebellion in Turkey.  Love it.

March, pt. 1

15.  The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
This book was rough, you guys.  But extremely well-written and well put together.  I think what I appreciated about it most was that nothing is easy, especially for the main character - Amir, a native of Afghanistan who is forced to emigrate to the United States with his father after the Russian occupation, is not a likable guy and he does some pretty awful things, especially to Hassan, the servant's son who grows up with Amir.  The bulk of the story is about Amir making things right and atoning for the sins of his childhood.  I admit to not knowing very much about Afghanistan, the horrible violence that happened (and continues to happen) there, and the politics of it all, and this novel deals with it in an emotional, sensitive, raw, and ultimately satisfying way.

16.  Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes, Chris Crutcher
We read Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher in my YA lit class last semester and it was a truly quality literary experience.  Then Crutcher spoke at a literary conference I went to about advocating for young adults' rights to choose what they read and to combat censorship and book banning.  And it was a deeply moving experience.  Crutcher worked for a long time as a child therapist, who worked mainly (I think only?) with children from broken and abusive homes.  He's seen almost every tragedy that can happen to a child, and brings the weight of that knowledge to his work.  His books are serious meditations on the lives of teenagers, on what they deal with that adults can't remember or imagine, and addresses real problems (Sarah Byrnes deals with everything from bullying, child abuse, religion in schools, parental pressure, and being on the swim team).  His books are illuminating and his dialogue is inspiring.  Please read, if not Sarah Byrnes, SOMETHING by this man.

17.  Uglies, Scott Westerfeld
The first of my Westerfeld party!  I REGRET NOTHING.  I read this one before Behemoth because it was in the library when Behemoth was not (I'm waiting for my interlibrary loan RIGHT NOW) and because you can't be involved in the YA lit scene and NOT have heard about the Uglies books.  It was...ok.  Leviathan is better written, and more interesting in my opinion - Uglies is pretty standard dystopian fare (Equilibrium + Brave New World x Libba Bray = Tally and Uglies).  There's a huge point of convenience at the end that I actually kind of hated, but it's the set-up for the sequel so maybe after I read Pretties I'll hate it less.

Still looking forward to Behemoth (and then Goliath), though.