The Readin Roos

Well, folks, all your happy old blog posts have been copied over to the new server, so you can revisit them anytime! Photos of book covers have been added for a visual reference. All the old posts have my name as the author, so they are each credited with a "Reviewed by" tag at the bottom of the post and the reviewers full name has been used as a tag. I've done my best to standardize tags as well, but if you find any flies in the ointment, just let me know!

Thanks, and happy reading!

Absolutely stunning. I savored every single word, which is unusual for me as I speed through so many books. This one, however, like a superbly crafted meal, invited me to linger and taste the nuances of every flavor on my literary palate. It cast a glorious spell over me. I was so sorry to see it end, and that is also a rarity for me.

The visualizations in my mind were crystal clear. The descriptions of physical things and people were so explicit and rendered in such fluid language that the circus truly lived in my imagination.

Megan Mcafferty, the author of the Jessica Darling series of books, has here crafted a smart and insightful piece of YA chick-lit. However, while the intended audience is clearly tween and teen girls, this book should be read by boys and young men as well. The story is set in a near-future dystopia, where a worldwide virus has rendered most humans incapable of bearing children after the age of eighteen. The story's main characters, twins separated at birth by the names of Melody and Harmony, grow up in very different communities in the United States - one in a closed religious order akin to the Amish or Hutterites, the other in a hyper-secularlized and commercialized open community.

This YA fantasy did not captivate me. I do like some fantasy books, but this one was very strange. The main character, Sojourner (or "Scotch"), was exceptionally compelling - a teenage bi-racial Jamaican immigrant to Canada - and the initial setting was completely realistic. However, fantastic elements start creeping in, and the entire story collapses into a mish-mash of figments of imagination from dreams or nightmares as a large volcano appears in the middle of Lake Ontario. The real problem is the randomness of the appearance of some of the fantastic creatures, and the lack of service of some of them in advancing the story.

One of the paradoxes of popular accounts of mathematics is that they tend to have little mathematics in them. Instead, authors tend to focus on the eccentricities of those who do mathematics. In this book, Marcus du Sautoy does present quite a lot of conceptual material on group theory and its importance in the mathematical expression of symmetry, in addition to the nearly-obligatory accounts of the strange lives of Evariste Galois and Sophus Lie.

Our traveling book award has made a dramatic re-appearance.

The book "Stella Louella's Runaway Book" is now visiting Barb Croft! Barb has done a truly amazing amount of work getting our Readin' Roos blog up and running after a major system upgrade. We would not have this wonderful book review and discussion blog without Barb.

Thank you again, Barb, for all that you do!

I read this book out of a basic curiosity about how Stoic philosophy could apply to modern life. What I learned interested me even more. First, I thought I knew what a Stoic was - and I didn't. Second, I found that Stoic philosophy is a philosophy of life, a practical system that one can use compatibly with most major religious belief systems, or atheism for that matter. I found that Stoicism had parallels with Zen Buddhism, another practice I have studied and admired.

Chester definitely has his own way of doing things, and his friend, Wilson, loves tagging along. All goes well until Lilly, who also has her own unique way of doing everything (talking backwards, cutting sandwiches into shapes, etc), moves into the neighborhood. My daughter loved this picture book and others by Kevin Henkes when she was young, and I sure loved reading it to my 4 year old niece recently. Kevin Henkes does a great job of both writing and illustrating this book!

This is the first in Stephen King's magnum opus, The Dark Tower series, in which Roland, a gunslinger in a world that has "moved on" undertakes an epic quest to find the Dark Tower, which sits at the nexus of time itself. In this volume Roland barely survives a trek across a desert wasteland in his search for the mysterious Man in Black. This book is an interesting fusion of epic fantasy, post-apocalyptic literature, and Sergio Leone westerns.

Reviewed by Buddy Pennington