I read a LOT during the latter part of 2011. I'm not sure what caused it, but after I found goodreads.com, I read double my figured challenge (I said that I could read 20 books between September 1and December 31 and I read 40). I guess what really helped my numbers was finding a couple of vampire series that I love. The first isn't so much vampires, but everything supernatural (and by the way, awesome), and is The Dresden Files. It actually makes me sad that I didn't learn about this series until now, and I might not have read the first book so voraciously except that it was the weekend of Hurricane Irene (we had no power for 2.5 days) and I'd already read the two books I had--my dad was the first to order Dresden and I stole it off his pile.
The truth is, I didn't read much during my four years of university--whenever I had free time I had a tall stack of mail to answer, so books took a step back in importance. 'Course, my mail pile is huge now anyway because I've been going on some serious reading binges. I guess I need to learn some amount of time-management, but maybe that's not a good thing. I don't think I'd write a good letter if I wasn't really in the mood to do so. But I digress.
The Dresden Files are amazing and if you love supernatural books, you've probably already read them and are waiting for the next one--I'm just late to the party. However, I'm sitting here enjoying Dead Beat with like 5 more books ahead of me to enjoy next while you are stuck counting down the days, so maybe I don't care that I'm behind ;-P.
The second vampire series is The Morganville Vampires which are very teeny, but I like the main character. She really grows up each book, which is very good. I wasn't a fan of the vampires that attacked the teen shelf for the past five years or so, but I guess I was just annoyed by Twilight (which I still think is a terrible role model for our girls--I liked a meme I read which compared Bella to Ginny Weasley--When Edward broke up with Bella to save her life, she went into a coma for 4 months then tried to kill herself to hear his voice; When Harry broke up with Ginny to save her life, she helped organize an army and kicked ass. Claire definitely is more of a Ginny than a Bella, though I read some very poor reviews of the first book that I want to discuss here:
First, on ratings/reviews in general: you should never trust the ratings on books in a series to tell you about the series as a whole. This is because many people will read the first book, hate it for one reason or another, rate it badly, and will never read the second. All subsequant books will probably be skewed high because only people who liked the first book will read the second. I also will take the time to comment on the rating system of Goodreads--I don't like it. You have the choice of five stars, but they're all skewed upwards. If you look at what they say a star is worth, one is I hated it, two is It's okay, three is I liked it, four is I loved it, five is It was amazing! (or something like that). I like systems where three is neutral--so then it would be the "okay" option. My ratings are all fives with the occasional four or three--it's not because I think they were all amazing on the lines of Catch 22, but because when I made three just okay, a five is I really liked it.
Secondly, the frist book in Morganville Vampires does take a lot of removal from reality to believe and enjoy. I will admit that when I read a lot of the reviews after reading the book, I realized that I'd allowed a lot of plot "twinges" which I normally wouldn't. But I'm glad that I did because the later books explain better why it wasn't possible for Claire to call the police or her parents. Maybe Rachel Caine didn't even think twice about these problems when she wrote Glass Houses, but she fixed them after complaints were made, I don't really care. All I'm saying is that you should probably read the first 3 books as though they were the same book. Will I say that Rachel Caine is writing a soap opera so that people have to buy the next book immediatly after it's written? Hell's Yes. Does it make it a terrible series? No.
Let's see, what else have I read? I don't want to just run down my list of books from Goodreads--that's cheating and not very entertaining. Oh, I started Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series (he's the guy who wrote Dresden for those not in the know). I think it's okay--but it gets such a "low" rating from me not because it's not a great series, but because I"m not a fan of the way it's written. The characters are great, the plot is great, everything is great--I just hate books which have 3 or 4 different stories running around because the main characters are all in different places. Most of the Star Wars books do this, which is why I've only read the teen books (where the twins learn to use their powers) and The Courtship of Princess Leia. I want one or two main characters and when they're apart, only one gets to live the story in "live time"--the other people must fill in the rest of us about their activities.
Oh, I read a pair of hilarious teen books based on the premise of the only 'fair' godmother. In fact that's the name of the first book My Fair Godmother. A high school aged girl whose life apparently sucks (according to her) gets help from her Godmother, who is trying to get into Fairy Godmother University by doing some extra credit work--which she kinda sucks at. But if ever there was a story that accurately fits the trope Hilarity Ensues, this is it. They're the literal re-working of fairy tales (the girl gets sent back into the past to be Cinderella and realizes what a crummy gig it is) and I think they are just the books to hand to any teenage girl who thinks her life is crummy--she'll quickly learn that it can, in fact, get worse. I'm excited because the second book in the "series" hinted that there will be a third attempt for Chrissy to do her extra credit in a way that gets her into the University--yay!
I also started reading The Princess Diaries series. I'm not generally a fan of the "diary" way of writing a book, but it works. I'm currently trying to read the sequel to Wolf Tower and it's annoying me. I guess it's because it's too close to how I'd write a diary--I'd start out alluding to terrible things that are actually important before bothering to talk about the mundane things that led up to the ordeal. The Princess Diariesi doesn't do it that way, and now that I think about it, Beka Cooper doesn't either. So maybe I don't have a problem with the diary, just when it tries to build suspense by leaving too many questions open too soon?
I guess that's enough of a general overview to give. Maybe I'll do a better job of updating now, but who knows.
The truth is, I didn't read much during my four years of university--whenever I had free time I had a tall stack of mail to answer, so books took a step back in importance. 'Course, my mail pile is huge now anyway because I've been going on some serious reading binges. I guess I need to learn some amount of time-management, but maybe that's not a good thing. I don't think I'd write a good letter if I wasn't really in the mood to do so. But I digress.
The Dresden Files are amazing and if you love supernatural books, you've probably already read them and are waiting for the next one--I'm just late to the party. However, I'm sitting here enjoying Dead Beat with like 5 more books ahead of me to enjoy next while you are stuck counting down the days, so maybe I don't care that I'm behind ;-P.
The second vampire series is The Morganville Vampires which are very teeny, but I like the main character. She really grows up each book, which is very good. I wasn't a fan of the vampires that attacked the teen shelf for the past five years or so, but I guess I was just annoyed by Twilight (which I still think is a terrible role model for our girls--I liked a meme I read which compared Bella to Ginny Weasley--When Edward broke up with Bella to save her life, she went into a coma for 4 months then tried to kill herself to hear his voice; When Harry broke up with Ginny to save her life, she helped organize an army and kicked ass. Claire definitely is more of a Ginny than a Bella, though I read some very poor reviews of the first book that I want to discuss here:
First, on ratings/reviews in general: you should never trust the ratings on books in a series to tell you about the series as a whole. This is because many people will read the first book, hate it for one reason or another, rate it badly, and will never read the second. All subsequant books will probably be skewed high because only people who liked the first book will read the second. I also will take the time to comment on the rating system of Goodreads--I don't like it. You have the choice of five stars, but they're all skewed upwards. If you look at what they say a star is worth, one is I hated it, two is It's okay, three is I liked it, four is I loved it, five is It was amazing! (or something like that). I like systems where three is neutral--so then it would be the "okay" option. My ratings are all fives with the occasional four or three--it's not because I think they were all amazing on the lines of Catch 22, but because when I made three just okay, a five is I really liked it.
Secondly, the frist book in Morganville Vampires does take a lot of removal from reality to believe and enjoy. I will admit that when I read a lot of the reviews after reading the book, I realized that I'd allowed a lot of plot "twinges" which I normally wouldn't. But I'm glad that I did because the later books explain better why it wasn't possible for Claire to call the police or her parents. Maybe Rachel Caine didn't even think twice about these problems when she wrote Glass Houses, but she fixed them after complaints were made, I don't really care. All I'm saying is that you should probably read the first 3 books as though they were the same book. Will I say that Rachel Caine is writing a soap opera so that people have to buy the next book immediatly after it's written? Hell's Yes. Does it make it a terrible series? No.
Let's see, what else have I read? I don't want to just run down my list of books from Goodreads--that's cheating and not very entertaining. Oh, I started Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series (he's the guy who wrote Dresden for those not in the know). I think it's okay--but it gets such a "low" rating from me not because it's not a great series, but because I"m not a fan of the way it's written. The characters are great, the plot is great, everything is great--I just hate books which have 3 or 4 different stories running around because the main characters are all in different places. Most of the Star Wars books do this, which is why I've only read the teen books (where the twins learn to use their powers) and The Courtship of Princess Leia. I want one or two main characters and when they're apart, only one gets to live the story in "live time"--the other people must fill in the rest of us about their activities.
Oh, I read a pair of hilarious teen books based on the premise of the only 'fair' godmother. In fact that's the name of the first book My Fair Godmother. A high school aged girl whose life apparently sucks (according to her) gets help from her Godmother, who is trying to get into Fairy Godmother University by doing some extra credit work--which she kinda sucks at. But if ever there was a story that accurately fits the trope Hilarity Ensues, this is it. They're the literal re-working of fairy tales (the girl gets sent back into the past to be Cinderella and realizes what a crummy gig it is) and I think they are just the books to hand to any teenage girl who thinks her life is crummy--she'll quickly learn that it can, in fact, get worse. I'm excited because the second book in the "series" hinted that there will be a third attempt for Chrissy to do her extra credit in a way that gets her into the University--yay!
I also started reading The Princess Diaries series. I'm not generally a fan of the "diary" way of writing a book, but it works. I'm currently trying to read the sequel to Wolf Tower and it's annoying me. I guess it's because it's too close to how I'd write a diary--I'd start out alluding to terrible things that are actually important before bothering to talk about the mundane things that led up to the ordeal. The Princess Diariesi doesn't do it that way, and now that I think about it, Beka Cooper doesn't either. So maybe I don't have a problem with the diary, just when it tries to build suspense by leaving too many questions open too soon?
I guess that's enough of a general overview to give. Maybe I'll do a better job of updating now, but who knows.
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