Starting off 2012 with a big ol’ geek-out over the first bit of Chapter 2 of The Hobbit. Really, I can’t think of many better books with which to start my 2012 reading. And yeah, I started this in the tail end of 2011 but will be finishing it well into 2012, so I think this still counts!
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
Alert persons will notice that while I barely squeaked over the wire last night with book #100 read of the year, I made it up to only 38 reviews posted. I am sadly, sadly behind on my 2011 book reviews!
Therefore, while I’m not really much of a New Year’s Resolutions type person, I’m going to nonetheless make one to get caught up on my reviews. However, I don’t want this to put me behind on 2012 reviews. So I’m going to keep up with posting the backlogged 2011 reviews–but I’m going to go ahead and start the 2012 reviews as well. I’ll schedule the 2011 reviews so they don’t all hit the blog at once, though.
And the Tri-lingual Hobbit Re-read does not count as book log posts, as those are more word-geekery than actual reviewing of the book. I will of course do a proper review post for The Hobbit when I’m done! And since I’m reading three languages at once I may post very short reviews of the French and German editions as well.
Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’ve posted before about my affection for Elizabeth Lowell’s books, formulaic though they are. Whirlpool is no exception, though it’s an earlier example of a formula she’s used to better effect in more recent books: i.e., an independently operating agency out to recover a Valuable Shiny Thing, a hero who’s a Reluctant Operative of the Agency and who is assigned over his protests to look out for the heroine, and of course a Heroine Who Has the Shiny Thing, and who must be protected from the Bad Guys Who Want the Shiny Thing. In this particular case, the Agency is Risk Limited; the hero, Cruz Rowan; the heroine, Laurel Swann; and the Shiny Thing, a Faberge egg that her father has foisted off on Laurel, an egg with a priceless treasure hidden inside of it. A treasure which, naturally, the Bad Guys are desperate to get hold of.
Here, however, is where the book falls down for me. I had to specifically remind myself of what this book was about, as I remembered very little of it except for the overuse of a particularly annoying trope: i.e., the Bad Guys being signified as the Bad Guys because they’re the ones having lots of kinky sex. This is emphasized almost more than the primary bad guy being obsessed with medical treatments keeping him looking far younger than his actual age, though that was played up a lot too. Overall, though, it was annoying. And there wasn’t much substance in the characterization of the Home Team to balance these problems out.
Lowell’s done better, so if you’d like to see her in better form, there are plenty of other options. For this one, two stars.
Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
Because Carina Press threw me a coupon at the last minute, and well hey, I like coupons!
Therefore, picked up electronically from Carina Press:
ETA: Whoops, I also forgot that I grabbed the novella Magic Gifts from Ilona Andrews’ site, the one set in the Kate Daniels universe. I need to get caught up on those before I read this, but hey, free books are awesome.
Which makes my final 2011 tally 253. Significantly lower than 2010, I believe! We’ll have to see what 2012 brings me in the way of new books.
Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
My first book of 2012 is a good strong start: Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time.
Much has been made over this novel being the “fantasy novel Jane Austen would have written”, and to an extent, I do agree with that. I could certainly see Austen, had she thought to use magic in the stories she wrote, using it the way Kowal does–as a womanly art, employed to enhance the illusion of beauty on a painting, in a room, in an entire house, or even upon a person. Yet at the same time, a comparison to Austen is inevitably going to be a burden against which many books, worthy in their own right, are going to struggle. For my money, Kowal’s prose didn’t quite resonate the same way Austen’s did. Yet this is not to say it’s bad, for it is most assuredly not. I very much enjoyed the read.
I’ve seen Shades of Milk and Honey called out for not having enough of substance going on, that it focuses upon the relationships between the characters and lacks Austen’s social commentary. For me, this charge is unfair; I certainly noted multiple points throughout the book that read as social commentary, such as our heroine’s disdain for the notion of using her talents at glamour to make her nose smaller. Moreover, while most of these characters did not come across to me with the same force as oh, say, the cast of Pride and Prejudice–though yet again, many otherwise worthy novels would suffer in comparison to that particular book–I am honorbound to point out that that very novel focuses quite a bit on the relationships between the characters. And the ultimate main plot does, indeed, come out of that. So too is the case with Shades of Milk and Honey. The eventual unmasking of a callous rogue in the cast livens up the end of the book considerably.
All in all my only lament about this novel is that the relationship between our heroine Jane and her eventual love lacks a certain force, at least at first. So to some readers, it may come across as completely out of the blue. Still, I did quite like this and am looking forward to the next one in the series. Three stars.
Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
Picking up where I left off in Chapter 2 of The Hobbit, the award for “next idiom found” goes to the German edition!
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
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