Monday, June 29, 2009

Weekend!

The Titan's Curse, by Rick Riordan. Some of my all-time top desert-island Juv and YA picks are boy books. I like the action, which is very good in this series-- quick but clear and easy to follow. I like that romance is kept to a minimum, although Percy is starting to reconsider and evaluate his friendship with Annabeth after a visit from Aphrodite. I like that I don't have to fight to get into the books-- they either grab you from the beginning or they don't. 

One thing I don't like about this series is that Percy spends great swatches of time away from camp, at school or living at home, and we don't see that hardly at all. Why do monsters only attack when school is out? That's pretty considerate of them. He is 13, or something like that, but we aren't really seeing his character develop because we rarely see him at all.

Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs. I thought, for multiple reasons, that this would be an exciting and otherwise excellent book: 1) it's written by an anthropologist, so it will be factually correct and informative; 2) I am find anthropology interesting, so therefore, this book should be interesting; and 3) it's the basis for the show Bones which is one of the very few shows I actually try to watch, and which I absolutely adore.

However, this book was neither exciting nor excellent, and I quit on page 88. This book put me to sleep. I started it five days ago! That's way fewer than 20 pages a day. We hardly spend any time in the lab, so the author's experience and knowledge doesn't come through. The story is melodramatic-- the characters and the action swing wildly between extremes. This is like the book version of bi-polar, and the main character lives on the edge of cliche-dom. The author does a good job describing things, but she chooses the wrong things to describe and I find my mind wandering for entire paragraphs. Her characters may be likeable, but her Temperance is not my Bones, and I had a hard time letting her be her own person. Her secondary characters all blend together in my mind-- even this far into the book, they haven't really established themselves as individuals yet and are indistinguishable to me. The expletives feel awkward and unnatural, and the dialog is stilted.

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