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visualthinker11, a partial yet long-winded answer to your question.
Reading: Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. Reading this book ALWAYS makes me hungry. I want to live near that coffee shop! Also, Sunshine is a wonderful main character, and if she dies (or, more likely, given that the book is first person) gets eaten by/has sex with a vampire, I am going to be so, so sad.
Rereading: The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria. Yes, I am so geeky that I have an incredible intellectual crush on the guy who writes international relations columns for Newsweek. It's a great introduction to the history of democracy, if you're into that sort of thing.
Planning to Read: Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. Because I’m a terrible Austen fan and I haven’t read this yet. I also haven’t read Mansfield Park. Or seen most of the movie versions…okay, I need to work on my Austen fan-ness.
Reviewing: The Magic or Madness Trilogy, by Justine Larbelestier. The short version: I loved the first book (Magic or Madness) and enjoyed the sequels (Magic Lessons and Magic’s Child), and I would recommend them to anyone who appreciates magic doors and sparkly fun or the ethical difficulties of loving something that’s really, really bad for you, and might hurt others, too.
All three of the narrators of the trilogy are engaging and distinctive, which is a rarity—usually a book with multiple narrators will have one or two who are far and away more interesting than the others.
But the narrators here are all good, in part because they have very distinct thinking patterns—they see the world in terms of their talents. JT thinks of the world in terms of crowds, movement, people; Tom sees it in terms of clothes; and Reason, the math geek, thinks of the world in terms of numbers.
I love the fact that Larbelestier let numbers be intrinsically important to Reason. One of the reasons I loathed Good Will Hunting is the total lack of engagement with the idea of math as an end in itself.
Reason’s mathiness fades in the second and third books. The narrative voices become less distinct generally—they’re still obviously different, but not with the same clarity as in the first book. This is one of the reasons why the first is far and away the best.
These talents are strengthened by the magic that all three characters are blessed/cursed with the ability to use. Magic makes them very good at what they do, but it exerts an incredible cost; this magic system is as brutal as a heroin addiction.
At the beginning of the book, however, Reason doesn’t know she has this inherited heroin addiction (as it were). Her mother hated magic, and brought Reason up in the middle of the Australian outback to make sure Reason had nothing to do with it.
But now Reason’s mother is in an insane asylum, so Reason has to stay with her grandmother: Esmeralda the witch. She meets Esmeralda’s apprentice, Tom (although she doesn’t know he’s an apprentice), and then she goes through a magic door and meets JT.
I LOVE magic doorways.
This particular magic door takes Reason to New York City, not a parallel universe or alien planet, but her disorientation as she explores this strange, wonderful, frightening place is so palpable that it feels more alien than many magic door stories do. The strangeness of snow. Chestnuts in Central Park. And an excellent villain.
The villain and the culture shock are both still present, although less awesome, in the sequels. Reason goes places much more alien than New York but they’re much more thinly sketched, and the plotlines become more muddled. Also, there’s a completely random sex scene in the second book. It’s not explicit, just…completely random.
I should add, given how critical this all sounds, that I did like the second and third books. It’s just that the first is tremendously charming and fun, and they, while pleasant, don’t have the same incredible AWESOME.
Also, I need a book icon. Or a reading icon. Where do they keep all the book icons?
visualthinker11, a partial yet long-winded answer to your question. Reading: Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. Reading this book ALWAYS makes me hungry. I want to live near that coffee shop! Also, Sunshine is a wonderful main character, and if she dies (or, more likely, given that the book is first person) gets eaten by/has sex with a vampire, I am going to be so, so sad.
Rereading: The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria. Yes, I am so geeky that I have an incredible intellectual crush on the guy who writes international relations columns for Newsweek. It's a great introduction to the history of democracy, if you're into that sort of thing.
Planning to Read: Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. Because I’m a terrible Austen fan and I haven’t read this yet. I also haven’t read Mansfield Park. Or seen most of the movie versions…okay, I need to work on my Austen fan-ness.
Reviewing: The Magic or Madness Trilogy, by Justine Larbelestier. The short version: I loved the first book (Magic or Madness) and enjoyed the sequels (Magic Lessons and Magic’s Child), and I would recommend them to anyone who appreciates magic doors and sparkly fun or the ethical difficulties of loving something that’s really, really bad for you, and might hurt others, too.
All three of the narrators of the trilogy are engaging and distinctive, which is a rarity—usually a book with multiple narrators will have one or two who are far and away more interesting than the others.
But the narrators here are all good, in part because they have very distinct thinking patterns—they see the world in terms of their talents. JT thinks of the world in terms of crowds, movement, people; Tom sees it in terms of clothes; and Reason, the math geek, thinks of the world in terms of numbers.
I love the fact that Larbelestier let numbers be intrinsically important to Reason. One of the reasons I loathed Good Will Hunting is the total lack of engagement with the idea of math as an end in itself.
Reason’s mathiness fades in the second and third books. The narrative voices become less distinct generally—they’re still obviously different, but not with the same clarity as in the first book. This is one of the reasons why the first is far and away the best.
These talents are strengthened by the magic that all three characters are blessed/cursed with the ability to use. Magic makes them very good at what they do, but it exerts an incredible cost; this magic system is as brutal as a heroin addiction.
At the beginning of the book, however, Reason doesn’t know she has this inherited heroin addiction (as it were). Her mother hated magic, and brought Reason up in the middle of the Australian outback to make sure Reason had nothing to do with it.
But now Reason’s mother is in an insane asylum, so Reason has to stay with her grandmother: Esmeralda the witch. She meets Esmeralda’s apprentice, Tom (although she doesn’t know he’s an apprentice), and then she goes through a magic door and meets JT.
I LOVE magic doorways.
This particular magic door takes Reason to New York City, not a parallel universe or alien planet, but her disorientation as she explores this strange, wonderful, frightening place is so palpable that it feels more alien than many magic door stories do. The strangeness of snow. Chestnuts in Central Park. And an excellent villain.
The villain and the culture shock are both still present, although less awesome, in the sequels. Reason goes places much more alien than New York but they’re much more thinly sketched, and the plotlines become more muddled. Also, there’s a completely random sex scene in the second book. It’s not explicit, just…completely random.
I should add, given how critical this all sounds, that I did like the second and third books. It’s just that the first is tremendously charming and fun, and they, while pleasant, don’t have the same incredible AWESOME.
Also, I need a book icon. Or a reading icon. Where do they keep all the book icons?
