Comments | balloonhat: Brief Book Reviews

balloonhat

Brief Book Reviews

Jul 15, 2011 12:32

My year of free 2-day shipping from Amazon ended. They're offering me 50% off the annual cost of the service ($40USD/reg $80USD), but I don't think I buy enough stuff from to justify the cost. Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.

Finished Reads (since this post):

All ratings are out of 5 stars.

( 7 books read. )

public post, reviews: books, personal

Comments 14

katden July 15 2011, 13:48:16 UTC

Why has it ended? Did they stop giving free shipping to college students? I certainly hope not because I've got to order an ass load of textbooks soon.

By the way, have you read Of Bees and Mists yet?

balloonhat July 15 2011, 13:54:19 UTC

I dunno, I joined it last year when they were giving away a year free to students. :( Sad face. Is shipping always free for students?

katden July 15 2011, 13:55:35 UTC

That's what I was told quite some time ago -- if your account is set up with a student email, shipping is free.

balloonhat July 15 2011, 14:01:08 UTC

That's odd. To get into the 1-yr free thing I had to validate my .edu email, so presumably Amazon would realize what that means... >.> I'll see if I can poke Amazon to see if I can somehow make it give me free shipping again. Mmm, free shipping...

mermaidbia July 15 2011, 14:16:16 UTC

Nice to see someone who shares my feelings on "He can do no wrong" Neil Gaiman. I've got a personal dislike for the guy's novels that I can never really pin down besides a general "meh" followed by "Tad Williams does it better..." You should SO read The War of The Flowers, btw...

balloonhat July 15 2011, 22:55:24 UTC

Once I finish my current batch of library books, I'll reserve that. :)

covenmouse July 15 2011, 15:53:26 UTC

Midnight Robber -- I have been wanting to read this for awhile! Thank you for the trigger warning, though. No other review I've seen mentioned that as being in there, and I...prefer to know these things before going into them. X3

As for Lackey...Well, she has always tended to do quick wrap-ups on everything, but at the same time I feel like her books have been suffering the past few years in general. I haven't even tried that series in particular, though I've been told there's some oddities concerning trans* issues and racism here lately. (Which is, to me, really out of place for Lackey as her books have always seemed to be about tolerance and open-mindedness, but...)

balloonhat July 15 2011, 22:54:49 UTC

There wasn't even much build-up for some of the Elemental Masters books. Just... "whoops, well, their plan didn't work and so the villains died" within two pages or less. I didn't read the books closely enough to notice problems with depictions of transpersons (or maybe it's in one of the books I haven't read yet), since the stories themselves were often baffling. Lackey is not a terrible writer, and she does TRY, but her books aren't very inspired. There are Satanists in her Sleeping Beauty retelling, for example. Of the Elemental Masters books I've read, I think the Cinderella one has been the most successful (it's set during WWI), and even then, it wasn't VERY successful (2.5 stars ( ... )

shipwreck_light July 16 2011, 02:35:32 UTC

Midnight Robber sounds very interesting! I *heart* dialect too ^^.

I am continue to be disappointed by modern Snow Queens. I'd try to do one myself, but that's a big barrel to jump into with a lot of crap in it.

sailorem July 16 2011, 12:20:53 UTC

Random question, but do you like/have you watched the anime Sailor Moon?

balloonhat July 16 2011, 21:40:28 UTC

I was both looking forward to, and fearing, Disney's take on The Snow Queen. But I think that's going to be shelved forever so I guess I'll never know what they planned for it. (It was reshelved after The Princess and the Frog's disappointing box office returns.)

I did like Kelly Link's short story "Travels with the Snow Queen" a lot (can be read here if you haven't read it before). I know Catherynne Valente had a Snow Queen novel(ette?) available online at some point, but I think it's been taken down to be made into a for-realz book. I never got to read that, but I look forward to it too (I'm terrible with reading long fiction online).

But yeah, The Snow Queen is a story a lot of folks mess up.

sailorem July 16 2011, 12:16:44 UTC

I've never heard of any of these books o.O But I do own a couple of Gaiman novels. What do you think of them in general? I find them very hard to follow because of his writing style, but I can see that he is brilliant (plus, I saw him live when he did this reading at the Syd Opera House last year to a string quartet and there was a slideshow of images behind him to accompany the story... That was my favourite of his. It was so chilly and creepy and frightening! AND THE VIOLIN WAS SO SCARY!).

I just think I'll save re-reading them for a couple of years. When I'm smarter and more worldly... lol. But what do you think of his books?

balloonhat July 16 2011, 21:31:55 UTC

His novels are, as I said, more miss than hit for me. (This is not about his work on The Sandman, which I overall liked a lot.) Gaiman has flashes of brilliant inspiration, because there are almost always scenes or details in his books that I really like. His writing tends to be plain and steady, with occasional attempts (sometimes successful) to be dryly witty. It's just that his major characters often bore me, or behave inexplicably. The main guy from Neverwhere, main guy from Stardust and main guy in Anansi Boys are all the same type of guy. It is a story about how a dull man becomes more slightly more interesting because of the introduction of magic into their lives, usually because they've met a magical young woman. The exception of these three examples is Charlie from Anansi Boys, who meets his brother and has his life upset and completely rearranged by the meeting. But even Charlie does an inexplicable thing where he proposes marriage to a woman he's met just once before. It was part of a ruse to get them out of a ( ... )