The Graveyard Book

The main character of The Graveyard Book, Bod, has brilliant circumstances that make up the entire book.  He himself, however, is a bit of a cliche.  I have been noticing that if somebody wants to really make a clever character in a book, they will make him or her quiet, observant, and full of questions, even though the first and last of those qualifications contradict each other.  Bod exemplifies these traits, just like all of the other characters that are like this in all the other books.  In The Graveyard Book, there seems to ten times the story if one is familiar with all types of mythology.  I am not, but it seemed to be there, just beyond my reach.  I liked the idea of the Jacks as well.  All in all, it has a good premise and has Neil Gaiman's standard wonderful prose, but the main character is a bit too stereotypical for my tastes.

Splash

If you read the back cover of Splash, you'd think that it was a ridiculous book about people killing each other over water guns.  The white chalk outline on the front cover doesn't help, either.  I checked it out from the library because it seemed to have a ludicrous premise.  However, nobody actually gets hurt because of the water gun game in the book.  Splash is fast-paced and fun.  It starts off with far too many characters, but they get eliminated quickly.  While I wasn't exactly gripping the pages with white knuckles, desperately hoping for my favorite character to win, it was fun to see where they would all go.  Once it got down to nine or so players, the action tapered off a bit, but it managed to maintain its pace by introducing a bit of drama.  A decent book overall.

Gone

Janie is very depressed.  This is understandable, considering the events of the book, along with the events of the previous books.  However, it starts out with a vacation scene, where she is getting away from it all, and she's depressed at the slightest things there, too.  For example, when she falls in while water-skiing, she's scared for her life, disgusted with the water, and mad at everybody for making light of it.  The small incident is given as much detail as if she was crashing a plane instead of some water-skis.  Throughout the rest of the book, she tends to be over-the-top unhappy, and though this is sometimes justified, she snaps out at Cabel for no reason every other page.  She also developed a new habit: thinking in circles.  Not just a few circles.  I would expect a tough choice to take up a few pages, maybe even a whole chapter.  People do go over things multiple times when making a hard decision.  Her choice to either isolate herself or stay with Cabel, however, appears to take up more words than the actual plot.  The entire book could easily have fit into fifty or so pages, and seemed to be filled up mostly with whining and her having the same debate with herself over and over again.

Gifted

Gifted appears to be about an extremely Machiavellian boy who learns that being a stuck-up jerk in preparation for future admiration is not as good as being a stuck-up jerk for present admiration.  He flat-out lies several times to further his own ends and is obsessed with two things: himself and revenge on the school bullies.  It's not a dark book, though.  It appears to be quite light and whimsical, in fact.  I actually like that the character is unsympathetic:  it's harder to write and makes for an interesting read.

iDrakula

iDrakula had more fluff per page than any book I have ever read, barring children's picture books.  Most pages had word counts that made Dr. Seuss look like Tolstoy.  The average page consists of an overwhelming amount of white space with a phone in the middle and a text message going on in the screen of said phone.  I haven't read the original Dracula, so I don't know how good of an adaptation it is.  In fact, I don't like adaptations in general, so it's probably a good thing for iDrakula that I haven't read its predecessor.  Expect your hands to get tired of page-turning long before your eyes get tired of word-scanning.

Lost Boys

Lost Boys is both complex and easy to keep track of.  The creep who fantasizes about children and the mentally unstable man who thinks he's a god are both not the serial killer.  I expected it to be one of the two and was pleasantly surprised by it not being either.  Good job for not being predictable, Orson Scott Card.  One of the characters, DeAnne, grated on my nerves whenever the writing was centered around her.  She treated her children like idiots, was unnecessarily preoccupied with keeping them safe (read: not letting the children play near the part of the sidewalk that has a rain gutter on the curb because she's afraid they'll fall in), she got mad at her husband for no reason in particular, and never treated any of her children like human beings.  She is one of the protagonists, and this is seen as a normal, good thing to do.  I'm not quite an adult myself, so maybe I'm a bit biased, but it does not seem correct to act like childhood is analogous to drunkenness: a child is not to be believed or trusted, ever, has to be watched like a hawk to keep from being a complete idiot or getting themselves hurt, and often-times needs to be fed complete lies -- not on sex or graphic violence or anything many wouldn't mind being kept from children, mind you -- because they are too stupid to comprehend even the most simple things.  I really do not like DeAnne.  I read through the entire book hoping that she would be killed off.  Otherwise, it was a wonderful book.  The last twenty pages or so turned the entire plot around. 

Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs

I realize that it's not a novel, or the kind of book I would usually ever touch with a ten-foot stick.  However, numerous websites have told me that this is one of the worst books in existence, so I had to see for myself.  Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs is about a young horse who feels compelled to copy whatever she sees.  She is lured into the "smoking games" and "drinking games" of the malicious Connie.  Luckily, her two wise sisters see what's happening, and knock the bad stuff out of her hoof.  Did I mention that these horses are drawn realistically and not anthropomorphically?  Their hooves must be made of something exceptionally sticky to be able to lift anything.  The prose is simplistic and repetitive.  The horses themselves consist of the cult of people who use drugs and want to convince others to do likewise and the innocent horse family ready to be led by their wiles if weak enough.  A good read for a laugh.

Pebble in the Sky

Well it's written by Asimov, so of course it's good.  I cringed a bit when Schwartz got telepathic powers -- surely Asimov could have invented something else to achieve the same result -- but it was overall a good book.  It did not so much keep me excited for the next page as the next paragraph.  The story was full of wonderful little details, like how people in the distant future have a different skull structure, fewer teeth, and a smaller appendix. 

Equal Rites

I must admit, I haven't read enough of the Discworld series to truly enjoy this.  It didn't really reference much outside of itself, but I felt as if I would have gotten a much richer experience by having read more Pratchett books beforehand.  It had a good combination of humor and plot, as most science fiction or fantasy humor books really try to hit the readers over the head with humor at the expense of the plot.  I hope to read more Pratchett books in the future.

Timeline

Though I'm reviewing two time travel books in a short time, I usually don't read time travel fiction, because there always seems to be a rush on things imposed solely by the author.  There was a fair amount of this in here, but most of it had the explanation that the time machine would disappear in a day.  The plot was decent.  The technology explanation seemed mildly believable, especially when they threw in facts that most people know.  I loved how they had to struggle with the languages of the time.  Most authors seem to think that people all spoke English centuries ago. 

The Red Badge of Courage

It would be hard to find fault with The Red Badge of Courage.  The main character goes from being somewhat of a selfish brat to a worthy man.  The other characters get jumbled up a bit -- I really couldn't keep track of who was who -- but that seems to be how it is in real life, unless someone has some sort of astonishing physical feature.  I've never even considered participating in a war, so I will trust others' accounts on how realistic it is.  From all that I had heard of it, I expected it to cover a longer period of time, but it put enough emotion and detail in the battlefield to make up for it.

The Stranger

The Stranger is a quirky little book about a man with very few feelings who commits a murder.  Nothing seems to matter to him throughout the book, and he is quite detached from everything else, with a vaguely friendly attitude and a willingness to take whatever is thrown at him.  He cares not for extreme happiness or extreme hatred.  The whole thing has a slightly creepy air to it, but it lacks the passion of many books about murders.  The author must be skilled to pull off a first-person perspective about an amiable young man who cares about nothing and kills a man.  I don't quite know what to make of The Stranger.

The Iron Ring

Why, after the failure of The Arkadians, would I read another book by Lloyd Alexander?  First of all, I am trying to go through the "A" section at my local library.  Second of all, authors can write good books and bad books: I loved Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, but I consider The Idiot one of the worst books I have ever read.  The Iron Ring acted similarly.  While The Arkadians was a miserable failure, The Iron Ring was quite good.  The only major flaw was that it had enough characters for a book twice its size, which made those characters a little hard to keep track of at times.  Most of the characters, however, were very different from each other, which made it much less painful than the average too-many-characters book.  The story was quite interesting.  I enjoyed the ending and the nature of Jaya came as a surprise for me.  The entire premise, in fact, mesmerized me from the start.  Though many of the main characters seem to have values that are western as compared to the implied rest of the book's populace, it seems to do this less than most other books.  Tamar only starts to dislike the caste system near the end.  This quirky novel fascinates and compels, and anybody who picks it up will certainly want to follow it through to the end.

The Machine Stops

Have you ever read The World Inside?  The first part of The Machine Stops follows a similar story, but it predates The World Inside by decades.  The Machine Stops was a rare and early version of the story of people relying too heavily on a mechanical device, a story that has grown in popularity in years since.  Its prose is unparalleled, and its story provokes both thoughts and emotions.  The book, in 1909, predicted as strange and futuristic of things as teleconferences and social networking.  The mother, Vashti, expresses the traits that we all have and we choose to ignore.  The fact that we ignore those traits is one of those traits, by the way.  The son, Kuna, is the one we all hope survives, but he seems half-mad, and it is unknown whether his hopeful prophecy at the end is nothing more than a delusion.  The religion is also a nice touch.  If you choose to read The Machine Stops, you will come out glad you read this brilliant and deep little novella.