Sailor Soldier of Love and Justice

I wanted to read a book by Dawkins before the Reason Rally because he's very popular in atheist circles and was going to speak and I really don't know much about him.

The God Delusion is always mentioned as their favorite by people who escaped religion so I decided that would be a good one to try.

Honestly I found it terribly dull. I knew all the arguments already. There was very little he wrote that I hadn't heard somewhere before. Probably because people are using his arguments, but still, I was bored.

I suspect it would be far more interesting for someone who is religious and didn't know these arguments. So I probably shouldn't have chosen a book that former religious people liked. Perhaps another book would have been better. But if his other books are all along the same line, probably not.

On a side note, my library refused to let me renew this book at all. I found that terribly rude. Someone else had requested the book, so I'm only allowed to have it two weeks? What if I had a reading disability? I ended up keeping the book for an additional week and paying a fine. Whatever.

The final book in the Ember series. I liked it about as much as I liked the second one.

The ending seemed to indicate that there will be no more. I hope that's wrong. I feel like there are plenty of more stories to tell about that world.

( Spoiling stuff )

The premise of this book was irresistible to me. A woman befriends a group of intelligent, speaking dogs who arrived in NYC after escaping from their mad scientists creators.

I have often wished my dogs could talk to me. They are my best friends. So this book was a healthy dose of lifelong wish plus a little Frankenstein monster thrown in for plot.

The story was rather good. My only complaint was the abruptness of the ending. ( Spoilers )It was a completely unsatisfying ending. But aside from that, it was an enjoyable book.

I have been trying to read more books outside my usual preferences in order to broaden my horizons. I found a list of 100 Best 20th Century Novels, which I am using to guide me on what to read.

This one was a big miss. I found the book to be terribly dull and the characters completely unlike-able.

The story creeps along, heavily buried in descriptive overkill. I frequently felt myself thinking, "Get on with it already!" It would be one thing if the story was compelling, but it wasn't. I was bored with the story and impatient with the writing style.

And then there were the characters. Perhaps it's because I cannot imagine being a middle-aged man, but I just found no way to relate to any of the characters.

YARR! Thar be spoilers below! (Totally not worth cutting.)

The protagonist was Ed, who is a bored middle-aged man who works in advertising and has a man-crush on his best friend Lewis.

Lewis is a bored middle-aged landlord who is convinced the world is ending and needs to build up as many survival skills as possible before the time comes. The trip down the river is his idea - part of some test to himself before the river is dammed.

Along for the ride are Bobby and Drew. Drew is a bored middle-aged musician who rocks out with a hillbilly idiot savant. Bobby is a bored middle-aged salesman who isn't really into the whole wilderness thing and eventually gets raped by a hillbilly. I found it interesting that the man least interested in the "magic" of the river is the one who gets raped. And horrifically, his friends seem him as tainted and want him to just get over it.

So yeah, this was not a story for me. On the plus side, it was rather short in terms of page count. But the thing took me a month to read. I was miserable. I feel like I am failing in my endeavor to expose myself to new things. But at least I forced myself to read it all the way to the end. That counts for something, right?

Not sure how I feel about this one. It was well-written, but I didn't like the story much. Although nothing illegal happens, the relationship between Polly (a very young girl) and Tom (an adult man) was just too creepy for me to enjoy the book.

I did find the whole divorce plot interesting though. I've been lucky enough to have no firsthand knowledge of what a divorce could be like, so Polly's parents' divorce was an interesting point of view.

Overall, I give this one a resounding Meh. But if you're interested in old folk tales like Tam Lin or Thomas the Rhymer, you'd probably enjoy it more. According to the internet, this story is essentially a modern retelling of those stories.

A couple months ago I asked ben for a reading recommendation. He suggested Anathem. He neglected to warn me that the book was over 900 pages long and heavy enough to kill a child.

Despite the back pain, I stuck with it. It was a very difficult book to read. And a bit hard to explain.

Anathem is set on a planet (Abre) similar but not to Earth. On Abre, high intellectual thought is cloistered away into monasteries called Maths. In the maths, nearly all modern technology is banned. Telescopes seemed to be the most advanced tools they had to work with. The maths are then broken up into 1 year, 10 year, 100 year, and 1000 year sections, indicating the number a years between when the gates open to let people (and ideas) in and out. The rest of society is very similar to ours, complete with cell phones (jeejahs), movies (speelies), and the internet (the reticulum). They are suspicious of those that live behind the walls of the maths.

The first part of the book follows the life of a young man in a 10 year math around the time the gates are to open. It's a bit long and slow at times, but it sets a good foundation of how things are done on Abre before the second part of the book changes everything.

The second part of the book is about 450 pages of quantum physics lessons broken up by brief interludes of daring escapes. Basically everything you learned in part one gets thrown out the window. And every chapter is filled with thick discussions on quantum many worlds theories that hurt my head.

A woman on the train stopped me while I was reading. She said she had never seen someone reading with such focus before and wanted to know what the book was. I can only wonder hat sort of face I was making while reading to stir such curiosity in her.

While I am sure I only understood maybe 10% of the theory of the book, I can proudly say that I was able to follow 100% of the plot. I was even able to predict a few surprise turns here and there. So if the plot seems interesting to you, don't be scared off by the science. The story itself carries without a problem.

And it has a happy ending. Everything that bothered me about Abre at the start of the book was resolved by the end. So I guess ben recommended a good one. I would recommend it as well, assuming you don't intend on carrying it around with you.

Zombies terrify me. I ended up reading this book in two weeks. As fast as I could. To get through it the way you get through the pain of removing a bandaid.

Despite the zombies, it was a really good book. I thought it was rather well written. I did think it was a touch ethnocentric, but other than that, I really enjoyed it.

The book is a collection of stories told by survivors of the zombie uprising. It's starts at the beginning with the doctor who saw the first case of the infection and follows through with survivors across the globe (and even one from space). The way people reacted as the infection spread seemed very realistic to me and caused me a great number of nightmares since I started reading it. In the end, humanity survives, (Otherwise there'd be no one to tell the stories, right?) but the world greatly changes.

I am going to read the zombie survival guide next. It's by the same author. And perhaps will help me get over the nightmares that this book has caused.

An enjoyable read, but nothing really noteworthy to mention. It's a good fluffy kids book.

However, my new library is in a very inconvenient part of town AND has so few books I am forced to request everything I want to read, so who knows when I'll finish this series. Plus the inconvenience of returning the book means I now have a late fee. Bah.

Wicked is what happens when you take everything delightful about the land of Oz and flip it around to make it dark and sad. Not to say the book wasn't good. But far too depressing for my tastes. That said, it was a very loving bastardization of the Oz universe. Maguire clearly knew his source material very well.

Wicked, as the subtitle says, is about the life of the wicked witch of the west, Elphaba. (Her name is made from the initials of L Frank Baum! I GOT that! Go me!) It was a long serious of bad decisions because of her impulsive nature. She becomes "wicked" out of misunderstanding and bad PR. For example, her demand for her sister's shoes was not out of greed. The shoes had been handmade by their father, enchanted by her best friend, and had been promised to her when her sister died. (Also, she knew the shoes were powerful and didn't want the tyrannical wizard to have them.)

The early chapters of the book were good, with Elphaba going to school and meeting Galinda (Glinda, the good witch). It got a bit dull around the center when Elphaba quits school to become an Animal rights activist in the emerald city. But the story picks up again once she heads out west to meet the family of her former lover. Of course, it had to end with her death - no way around that. It was very sad because the entire story makes her out to be a very sympathetic character.

I bought the book as part of an extremely attractive bound set that also contains the sequel Son of a Witch. Not too be too spoilertastic, but Elphaba has a son in Wicked. So I'm going to read his story next since it's bound in the same volume.

But at least now I am ready to see Wicked the musical! Yay! I heard they make it happier. I REALLY hope they do.

I am rather ashamed to admit that I did not notice that stars were different colors until this book pointed it out to me. Now that I do know, I am amazed that I could have been completely oblivious my entire life.

I also learned how to spot constellations beyond orion and the big dipper. I'm still not very good at it, but the book offered a lot of good info on reading star charts to find things. It included several tours of the skies at different points of the year, which were really helpful. I used the charts in the book to follow the tours since I was reading this while waiting for buses and trains and not late at night.

The biggest flaw in the book was that it was old. It was published in the 1980s. It helpfully included charts and info alllllll the way to 1996. For the star chapters, that wasn't a big deal since stars are relatively stable. The moon chapter was good too, although I thought they should have put some sort of guide lines on the moon charts to figure out where they were talking about in their tours. But the planets go off and do their own thing. I know they have a pattern, but as a novice I can't really take advantage of that and plot out their course for this year. And then the comet charts were totally useless. Thankfully the internet exists.

Ben and I were given a super fancy telescope for our wedding, but up until we bought the house, we didn't have clear dark skies to use it. I hope I can set it up this summer and use what I learned in this book. I want to see a nebula! And Mars! And all the fancy craters on the moon!