The Readin Roos

Thomas Dunlap's book presents a history of birding through the context of field identification guides. By examining the interests of birders over time, and the symbiotic relationship between birding as recreation and birding as a spur for action on conservation, he shows how guides changed to reflect needs for greater sophistication in identification, better understanding of where and when species can be found, and the importance of ecosystem beyond individual species survival.

Jake Marlowe discovers that he is the last werewolf on the planet, and sets out to put his affairs in order before WOCOP, the secretive organization that makes it their mission to kill supernatural entitites, hunts him down. As he does so, we ends up getting tangled up with vampires (yep, they exist too) as well as a young woman who holds the key to the survival of his species.

Reviewed by Buddy Pennington

This massive, but massively-entertaining, book tells the story of Aomame, a fitness instructor who moonlights as the occasional assassin, and Tengo, a writer and part-time math tutor, who find themselves in an alternate Japan in 1984. The first clue, things are not normal? There are two moons in the sky. As they both attempt to understand the changed world around them, the story becomes one of loneliness and the power of human companionship, culminating in a satisfying conclusion as the two find each other after decades of separation and vow never to let go again.

I HOWLED the whole way through this short book. Seeing the world through the eyes of 10-year-old Italian boy Felix Funicello (third cousin to the former Mouseketeer) is absolutely magical. The hijinks of the 5th graders at St. Aloysius Gonzaga Catholic School are priceless and read as if they were truly memories instead of made up stories. Rosalie Twerski, Felix's nemesis, is just as real a girl as if she'd lived in my hometown. I haven't laughed this hard at a kid since Dave Barry last wrote about his childhood hinjinks at Harold C. Crittenden Junior High in Armonk, New York.

A Man of Parts is a very interesting look at the life and ideas of H. G. Wells. It does dwell quite a bit on his sex life and Lodge is probably pretty guilty of sensationalizing things.

I am not hugely familiar with Wells' writings, but it did mention quite a few things that I'd be interested in reading. This book is also a good illustration of how people's reputations change over time. Until reading this book, I had only known of Wells as the guy who wrote The Time Machine (etc.), not as a radical socialist and proponent of Free Love.

Lewis Black can pretty much always make me laugh. This was absolutely perfect to read while sitting in the airport waiting for the crew to get the plane's computer fixed so that I could make it back home.

I do like Christmas, but (like most people) I've got some issues with it. Lewis Black is great at finding those issues and making them hilarious. The usual caveats about his humor do apply. He's an angry, foul-mouthed man and that may not put everybody in the Christmas spirit, but it works for me.

I have a lot of catching up to do on this blog, and I do mean a lot. I've been off for a few months doing a number of things, and now I'm back in school working on my Master's, so I have lost tough with the phrase "spare time." Anyway, in the months before starting school, I read a load of books. Here are a few.

I tend to read a lot of chick fic as well as vampire lore, so naturally I was drawn to the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. Holy cow, what a great bunch of fun! I've read the first ... lemme count ... carry the two ...

Peter Grant is back on the case when a body turns up at the morgue and the coroner can hear the song "Body and Soul" when he gets close to it. This one was almost as good as Midnight Riot, but it does have a trope (which I can't describe without giving away the ending) that gets on my nerves a bit. Why don't fictional characters ever take my sage advice when I tell them not to do something?

The characters are still great, but there's something about their dynamic that is slighly less satisfying than it was in the first novel.

The MO Book Challenge presentation at MLA reminded me that I haven't posted reviews for the last two books I read, so I'll try to get caught up now.
 
I really liked this book. It tells the stories of a group of super heroes and their arch-nemesis. Grossman does a good job of balancing the two sides of things and making both sides sympathetic. The narrative does not proceed in a straight shot through time, but uses flashbacks to show what high school was like for the characters (except for the one who can't remember high school because she has amnesia).

The new Harry Dresden novel finally came out! Hooray! I got to pick up my copy at an author event. Double hooray!!

I love this series and this is an excellent installment. It answers almost all of the questions I had left over from Changes and opens up a number of new possibilities for the next book. This isn' t the kind of series that lends itself to readers picking up the books randomly (like I have done with the Discworld novels). It wouldn't make much sense being read out of order.