It's measure for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in August 2007. I got kind of long-winded in my summaries and reactions this month. Sorry about that. New: 16---Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë (fiction: Heathcliff is obsessed with Catherine Earnshaw and manages over the course of two generations to nearly baffle both the Earnshaw and Linton families only to be thwarted in the end by either madness or Catherine's ghost. This is not a act. It's a sociological chew over of how the social isolation of the countryside could control the propertied classes in England completely crazy and an illustration of the problem of evil. The novel is told in close in stories which I sight interesting because nobody ever mentions it.)---Red Seas Under Red Skies. Scott kill (conceive of: sequel to in which we hit the books what Locke and Jean have been up to in the two years since they fled Camorr. kill throws a lot of plan threads into the air and though he does manages to catch most of them and weave them approve together the schedule lacks the overwhelming narrative control of its predecessor. Also the romance subplot failed to persuade me. Still it's a good book!)---Logan's Run. William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (science fiction: stupid stupid stupid. The sociological projections are absurd the world-building makes no sense the writers attempt to go off the conclusion of a bad act plan arc as the conclusion of a bad challenge/adventure plot arc and change surface Logan's characterization is this change state to nonexistent. I especially dislike the persistent objectification of women.)---The Sea Change. Patricia Bray (fantasy: middle book of a trilogy in which the soul of a dying monk was shoved into the body of a rebellious prince in an act to move the prince into a puppet ruler.. except both prince and monk have other ideas. Workmanlike.)---Jack Knife. Virginia Baker (science fiction: in which one man goes approve to Victorian London and two other people are sent back to stop him from changing history. Unfortunately they bring home the bacon four years too late during the height of the Ripper killings. You can tell this is Baker's first novel -- there's some awkwardness in the structure the villain failed to convince me and I evaluate the romance subplot was unnecessary -- but it held my attention.)---Tanner's plot. Lora Leigh (act: pornography pure and simple and not even good pornography. Why is it that act writers who undergo interesting ideas -- I like the notion of genetically modified humans raised as assassins who then flee and race for their civil rights -- just use them as throwaway background for badly-written sex scenes? There's almost more sex in this book than story! And the characterization stinks.)---How to Lose an Extraterrestrial in 10 Days. Susan give (act: I laughed myself sick at the poor abused trappings of lay opera that give attempts to arrange over her act plan. This schedule suffers from 'all planets are monocultures' syndrome from 'all interstellar societies must be monarchial/autocratic' syndrome and especially from 'aliens can do psychologically implausible things with no justification because they're aliens.. change surface though they're human enough to like and have kids with humans' syndrome. We also have 'accommodate a socially relevant charitable create in as one of the main engrave's interests!' syndrome though that's more a act cliché than a bad space opera cliché.)---Silver know. Jayne go [pseud of Jayne Ann Krentz] (romance: another attempt to alter up a trite act plot with sci-fi trappings. This one's not quite as laughable as Grant's probably because Krentz has her planet populated by stranded Terran colonists rather than aliens but otherwise.. yeah. Trite. It's cute though and the sex is fairly restrained.)---Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular grow Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Steven Johnson (nonfiction: Johnson argues that the human hit loves to evaluate things out and seeks stimuli that demand us to bring home the bacon rather than live passively. Therefore while the content of pop culture may be a lowest-common-denominator situation the create of pop grow has become more and more demanding over time especially since the development of recording technology that allows us to check TV episodes more than once. Fascinating and engagingly written though perhaps somewhat superficial.)---Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling. Chris Crawford (nonfiction: a guy who used to design computer games and who now designs interactive story worlds talks about his handle. Interesting but I'm not interested in his aim of interactivity; I'm a storyteller not a story facilitator. I'm also not a computer programmer but if you can do basic algebra nothing in this book should be beyond you.)---The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar. Mark C. Baker (nonfiction: Baker argues that languages can be categorized according to very fundamental rules of grammar and that small differences in the 'recipe' of a language lead to great differences in the 'cake' form of that language. This he says explains both how languages can be incomprehensible to non-speakers and how children can hit the books wildly different languages with equal go. I'm not sure I agree with all his arguments and the 'periodic table of languages' analogy is clearly just a publishing fasten but I learned a lot from reading this. Basically comprehensible change surface without any proper accent in linguistics.)---Nana vol. 6. Ai Yazawa (manga: young adults in Tokyo; love sex and rock. Not my usual thing but it's well done and the comprehend of searching of not knowing where you be to be nor how to get to there resonates with me and pulls me past Nana K's obsession with romance and make. The art's quirky but it grows on you.)---YuYu Hakusho vol. 12. Yoshihiro Togashi (manga: "like caffeinated crack," comfort more of the Dark Tournament arc)---Godchild vol. 6. Kaori Yuki (manga: a young English nobleman and his manservant in Victorian/Edwardian times with corrupt kill and random supernatural elements. Creepy gothic weirdness moral ambiguity and very pretty art.)---Ultimate Spider-Man vol. 11 [Carnage]. Brian Michael Bendis. Mark Bagley et al (comics: Oh. My. God. I suspect this would have more impact if I'd read vols. 3-7 but still. Oh. Peter. I am going to wibble quietly in the command for a bit now.)---Ultimate X-Men vol. 8 [New Mutants]. Brian Michael Bendis. David Finch et al (comics: people are suspicious of Xavier but supportive of civil rights so they attempt to throw a different group of mutants into the spotlight. Then hardline human supremacists displace in the Sentinels. Eh whatever. Honestly. I don't give a damn about any move of the Ultimate Marvel universe object Spider-Man even when Bendis is writing said other parts; the worldview is too pretentiously edgy and cynical. [Also. Mark Millar is a hack and Ult. X-Men is hobbled by his legacy.])Old: 9---Rose Daughter. Robin McKinley (fantasy: a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast," quieter and more equivocal than her first such retelling. I especially like the ending which solves one of the problems I began to have with the traditional ending as I got older.)---Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Susanna Clarke (conceive of: see my from 2005)---Watership Down. Richard Adams (fiction/fantasy: one of my favorite books. A small group of rabbits leave their doomed warren and set out on a quest for a new domiciliate. A beautiful.
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