supercheesegirl | Entries tagged with books2016

Wow, what a delight this was. So much fun. I'll look forward to introducing my daughter to this series in 6-8 years or so.

Reread: August/September 2016
Surprisingly compelling! Disappointed that Elvish culture is borrowed almost whole-hog from Tolkien, but entertained that the Elves are totally Buddhist and practice ashtanga yoga. The chapter that could've been titled "Eragon Deals with Racism" was a little heavy-handed. Otherwise, I'm entertained and going back for more. I appreciated that, although Eragon is dealing well with literally all the hopes of his people resting on his shoulders, he's still totally an inept 16-year-old when it comes to romance.

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First read: October 2005 on Long Beach Island

I first read this over ten years ago (long enough ago that I wasn't keeping track of my reading, and that all the books in the series weren't out yet). I remember thinking how the threads of what Paolini had read - Lord of the Rings, Pern - were showing through pretty obviously, but that it was still a good story, and pretty fantastic work for someone the age he was when he wrote it. After this reading, I still feel that way. Eragon as a character is pretty annoying, and the world-building stuck out to me more this time - it's as if Paolini made this world so huge and empty specifically so that it would take Eragon a long time to get anywhere, giving Paolini time to do a training montage to make this kid into a swordsman. But you can get past that, mostly, because of the themes that Paolini builds in, that Eragon is a free agent in a world of black and white lines, and that makes his choices interesting. Looking forward to rereading book 2 (I remember being so disappointed at the end that I couldn't roll right on to book 3) and finishing the series.

Really enjoyed this one: edge of your seat action and some rare happy moments.

I really enjoyed this. The story was a little slow after the initial kickoff (how many more towns can they slowly travel to?), and the politics felt a little simple to me after having read, for example, A Game of Thrones, but it was a really enjoyable book.

Five stars. Just so good, all the way through this series. ( Read more... )

I'm kind of glad I read these in the order I did: #1, #3, and then #2. After reading the first chapter of Fire at the end of Graceling, I was kind of turned off on continuing with the series, but Bitterblue was just SO good that I had to go back and read Fire, and I really enjoyed it. Leck was much more of a side character here; the focus was on Fire herself and her evolution as a character. Worth reading.

original review from March 2015:

I'm not sure if I can read this book. I read the prologue/first chapter - basically the beginning of King Leck's origin story - at the back of my copy of Graceling, and it upset me really deeply. ( Read more... ) I don't know if I'll go on to read more in this series, first because for personal reasons I don't want to read more about a child who does the things that the child Leck does; more importantly, I don't know that I want to spend time in a series with such a one-dimensional villain, especially since he remains the villain even into the third book.

This was fun enough, but I don't get why the Wizard is always referred to as "the Little Wizard". I don't remember him being super-little in any of the other books.

This one was OK. Jack and Annie solve not just real world problems, but issues from mythology! And I didn't buy it about the frost giant. But Annie's scarf was a nice touch at the end.

Some recent Magic Tree House books:

Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Tree House, #17): I really liked this one. Appropriately sad.

Buffalo Before Breakfast (Magic Tree House, #18): My daughter liked this one. I liked it right up until Annie (the little white girl) was magically rescued by a Native American goddess who never appears to anyone in the local tribe, but up until then Osbourne didn't seem to be doing too bad a job of writing about Native culture while White.

Tigers at Twilight (Magic Tree House, #19): A big favorite with my kiddo. She liked the monkeys, elephants, and tiger; I liked the hermit at the end.

Dingoes at Dinnertime (Magic Tree House, #20): She loved this one SO MUCH. Kangaroos FTW.

Civil War on Sunday (Magic Tree House, #21): Go, Clara Barton! Also, points to Annie for being pretty awesome and fearless here.

Revolutionary War on Wednesday (Magic Tree House, #22): I feel like I missed a lot of this one (we listen to the audiobooks in the car). I know George Washington crossing the Delaware was involved and I think Jack and Annie met their own ancestor (which might've happened in the Civil War one too). Overall, I suspect these two war books were a bit over my daughter's head (she's four).

(I have no memory of #23 or #24 - I think they might have been listened to while I was on a business trip.)

Stage Fright on a Summer Night (Magic Tree House, #25): Jack and Annie help Shakespeare save the day! The book the word-nerd parents have been waiting for the entire series! Though there was a bit with a bear that I wasn't into.

Good Morning, Gorillas (Magic Tree House, #26): Eh, Jack is boring and animals don't like him. We've heard that roughly 26 times now. But Annie got to cuddle baby gorillas so my daughter was into it.

Thanksgiving on Thursday (Magic Tree House, #27): I don't understand why, after traveling to almost 30 different moments in time and speaking easily to people who speak a different language from them and also have entirely different cultural norms, Jack and Annie and the Pilgrims get hung up on slang. They didn't have this problem with the people who lived during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, or with Shakespeare, so what's the deal? So awkward! But this one is probably worth it because Jack falls in the ocean trying to catch eels.

Full title: The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don't Have with People You Don't Like Doing Things You Don't Want to Do. This was a LOT of fun. I enjoyed reading it. Not sure how many of Knight's "life-changing" lessons I'll end up adopting, but I'm giving it a try. Going through the exercise of making the lists really brought home to me, though, how much stuff I've actually cut out of my life or not signed up for in the first place. For example, I have thus far not given a f*ck about the parents' committee at my daughter's daycare, and have therefore not allowed myself to be guilted into volunteering. And I never have the problem of spending excess time with friends, like Knight seems to; I have to actively champion for spending time with friends doing things I want to do to have it happen at all. The area where I think this could be useful is work, so fingers crossed.

This was really fun to read, but I felt like the ending wasn't thought through well enough. ( Read more... )Three stars anyway, though.

Poirot! Always a pleasure.

Inevitably, we explore the high faery court here, having explored the summer/winter courts in book 1 and the dark court in book 2. There were some activities I didn't think were really in character, but it's an urban fantasy about faeries so what do I know. It's a fun book. I may take a break before reading the next one.

This just wasn't as good as either book 1 (The Wizard) or book 3 (Ozma). I feel like there was a lot of filler dialogue, and the Woggle-Bug is the most Thoroughly Annoying character in Oz, partly because of the way he seems to inspire filler dialogue from those around him. Also I keep trying to calculate the timeline, because ( Read more... )

What a pleasure this was. I never read any of the Oz books as a kid, but my daughter loves them and so we seem to be working our way through the whole series. The reaction when I told her that there were other stories after The Wizard of Oz and that we could get them all from the library! (I get no wifi at the library, so this was the next book we read after Wizard - we only skipped one in the series.)

She loved (as I did) the part with the princess who kept swapping heads (although I have a disturbing memory of this from a movie whose tone decidedly did not match the whimsical tone of the book) and the scene of searching for the family who'd been turned to decorative ornaments. And she **loved** Billina the chicken.

I enjoyed a lot about this, and I think Poehler has some really interesting stuff to say about women and work and being funny and getting older. But there were a lot of pieces here that were just basically "Look, I worked with all these really cool people! Check out the neat stuff I did! Did I mention my famous friends?" And that got old to me, partly because I'm so far out of the loop these days that I don't know who anyone is anymore and so I couldn't picture the antics described. I'm still giving it three stars, but I didn't finish it.

A lot of really good stuff here. I especially enjoyed: "The Case of Death and Honey" (the Sherlock story), "Nothing O'Clock" (the Doctor story), and "Black Dog" (the Shadow story), but there were a lot of things here that crawled under my skin and creeped me out. "The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains" was one I'd read before, a long time ago, but it bothered me a lot more this time.

I just can't quit you, Cassandra Clare.

I really liked this. There were a few things that didn't make sense (if the LA Institute is one of the largest, and Julian was having to draw up patrol schedules for people who were presumably non-Diana adults, then why are there no other responsible Shadowhunters who could possibly have helped with the Blackthorn situation? Where does this Cameron Ashdown come from and aren't there more Ashdowns there? etc.). But now that I've got that out of my system, I really enjoyed this. Emma kicks ass, Julian is terrifyingly competent, I even liked Perfect Diego. And now Emma's going to make some really really bad decisions to fuel the rest of the trilogy! And for the record, I called it on the epilogue.

I'm of the generation for whom The Dark Crystal was a formative moment in development, a movie we watched again and again, and in that sense, it was so exciting to return to that world in this book and to learn more about gelfing culture. ( Read more... )I'm glad to see that this is the first in the series and will absolutely keep reading.