Favorite Quotes

"Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope."
--Jim Butcher, Death Masks

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
--Robert Frost

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
--Oscar Wilde

"Insanity is doing the same thing, overandover again, but expecting different results."
--Albert Einstein

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
--Mark Twain

"There's more magic in a baby's first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up, and don't let anyone tell you any different."
--Jim Butcher, Fool Moon

"Bow ties are cool."
--Steven Moffat

"Every now and then I like to do as I'm told, just to confuse people."
--Tamora Pierce, Melting Stones

Dresden Files by Jim Butcher and Religion

I love Jim Butcher's religious arguments. They're well thought out and pretty seemless in where they fit in the rest of the story without feeling oppressive and pushy for one way or another. It's like the religious debates that happen online--it's the Atheists and Agnostics who know, and reference, the most Bible verses and history.

Taming the Scotsman by Kinley MacGregor

This series is pretty good (Brotherhood/MacAlister), though it's pretty clear what kind of man Kinley MacGregor, also known as Sherilyn Kenyon, likes--tall, generally dark, and brooding. She's just as good as Jim Butcher when it comes to beating down the cutie. My only problem is that I'm worried that her brooding guys will lose some of their personality when they're tamed by the lady--will they be just as fierce 5 years later? But anyway.

I'm sitting here laughing my butt off because the big, bad, and sexy hero just handed his sword off to the chatterbox heroine who it turns out is quite the swordswoman so that she can fight the girl who helped kidnap them--while he's just standing there watching the fight with the 4 men who round out the kidnappers instead of beating them up easily while the only 2 swords available are occupied by the women.

For the most part I've been enjoying the books by this author and her real name (series is "Dark-Hunter"). They're fun romances where there's actually an enemy besides poor communication skills (which just annoys me and is why I've avoided romances like the plague before) which is right up my alley. The problem is that you can tell when an author writes romances and when they write epics that just happen to have romance in them--Kenyon's fight scenes are greatly lacking. It was very smart of her to invent a conviently blind character for one of the books. 'Course, I'm the first to say that a fight scene goes into too much detail--we really don't need to have 3 pages of battle for a great book. Butcher's background in martial arts means that he knows exactly what he's talking about when he describes, for instance how one man can take on 12 men singlehandedly. I did a year of Aikido with a friend teaching and I picked up enough to know how beautiful this fighting style is--using the weight of your opponent to throw them across the room. Kenyon glances over these fights, letting other characters talk while the fighting "just happens." I mean, if these women are as good with a sword as she claims, then why don't her hero and heroine ever practice against each other? I'm reading The Warrior now and I think that Cat and Lochlan should have an epic sword fight that ends up with them rolling on the ground kissing for the first time. They have such an antagonistic relationship the fireworks should be quite entertaining.

She also has the problem of the seriously anti-climatic resolution. I mean sure, sometimes the long, overly complicated conclusion is unncessary--sometimes you just need to push the big baddie into the convient fiery pit or shoot the missle into the 2 meter wide hole in the otherwise indestructible Death Star. But sometimes you want more than "I'm a goddess, see me just will you to death, even though I decided not to, and or for some other reason couldn't, for the past 300 pages" though granted, I'm now thinking that she has some overarching plan in mind...or at least I hope. I mean, Butcher is very good at leaving lose ends that come to bite Dresden on the ass three books later.

But all in all Kenyon is a very smart writer. I read the first two books and decided that even though the climaxes were dull, I had to find out more about the bad-ass leader "Acheron", so I decided that I'd read the series until his story got told. Well, one trip to goodreads.com told me that that would not be the 4th or 5th book, as I thought, but rather the 15th--I probably will read all the series because I found some really intreguing spoilers (I've found that sometimes spoilers make for better reading because I know what to look for and forward to).

Books, Books, and More Books

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.