7. Children of Dune

By Frank Herbert (416 pgs)

Rating: 3

Paul Muab-dib's twins are now children wise far beyond their years. Like their aunt Alia they were awakened to multiple lives of Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers before birth. Leto and Ghanima must face their grandmother Jessica and also struggle to maintain their identities to avoid being labeled Abomination. And all this while sidestepping the machinations of those around them, both well meaning and not.

Children of Dune follows the twins through the crisis of direction left by the death of their father and also through their crisis of identity. Each of them must fight the battle to remain human and themselves. It's a good book but not a great book. It's not as good as Dune but it is better than Dune Messiah. The continuation of the story begins to look like a Roman imperial saga but I still enjoyed it.

Recommended for Dune fans.

6. On Writing (NF 1)

By Stephen King

Rating: 4 (320 pgs)

On Writing is about two thirds memoir and one third instuctional text. The memoir is actually fascinating and I didn't go in thinking it would be. I've never been a huge King fan. I like his books just fine but I never put him on the 'god of horror' pedistal that so many seem to. That being said, I wasn't thinking of him as particularly human either. It was refreshing, to say the least, to discover he was really just a man like I'd always suspected and encouraging to know that he's struggled too. The instuctional third was interesting but nothing particularly new. As most of King's books, On Writing is well written.

Recommended to those who want to write and those who love King.

5. The Historian

By Elizabeth Kostova

Rating: 2 (656 pgs)

Our narrator is a teenage girl being raised by her father, an American diplomat. Through her recollections and the journals of her father, a story filled with mystery and dark overtones emerges. The novel takes us from America to Britain on to Turkey and into the Eastern Bloc. The story is sinister.

The Historian, I'm sorry to say, is a good story crippled by bad structure. Kostova's voice is well developed and engaging but the format she chose for the story hinders momentum and, in some places, breeds confusion. I have a hard time recommending this to people although, as I said, it is a good story. I will definitely pick up her next book, I feel Kostova is an author worth giving a second chance and may very well develop into a very good writer.

Not recommended.

4. Dune Messiah

by Frank Herbert (331 pgs)

Rating 3

Paul Muad'Dib is emperor and working to avert disaster for the human species. His mistress and love, Chani, is unable to conceive. Alia becomes more and more strange. There is a conspiracy a foot. And all of it, virtually every moment of it is foreseen by the emperor Paul. What if there were blind spots though? What if they found a way to get around the prognostication problem?

Dune Messiah is a continuation of Dune. Like Dune, it improves with rereading mainly because Herbert's writing style is so dense. The culture around Paul develops into a high tech cross between ancient Egyptian and Imperial Britain which is an interesting flavor. The story picks up very quickly after the end of Dune. There are a number of somewhat cynical religious themes and and great deal of character development.

Recommended if you liked Dune, if you didn't, you certainly won't see this one as an improvement.

3. The Tent

by Margaret Atwood (158 pgs)

Rating 5

The Tent is a collection of short fiction and essays gathered from a variety of sources. Never having read Atwood before, I can't say how representative these are of her style but I loved them! There's a broad mix of genre and subject matter.

I recommend this book to everyone. :)

2. Timeline

by Micheal Crichton (512 pgs)

Rating 3

Quantum physics allows an unscrupulous billionaire to develop technology that allows time travel. Time travel specifically to feudal France. There are problems though and a archaeological team gets sent into the past to retrieve their mentor. It's not as simple as it seems though. Feudal France was not an easy place to survive in.

Timeline is a pretty typical Crichton book. The plot line was interesting, the characters were plastic, and the science sketchy...at best. That being said, I don't regret reading it. The history was very enthralling and seemed to be fairly well researched. If the characters were a little two dimensional, they were also quite plausible. The end is a little jarring but ties things together fairly well.

Recommended only if you have time on your hands. Not recommended as science fiction.

1. The Stand

by Stephen King (1141 pgs)

Rating: 4

The U.S. government screws up, illicit plague research leaks (literally), over 99% of the world population is dead within a month. Those left are troubled by vivid dreams of evil and good embodied by a scary dark man in old cowboy boots and an ancient black woman living in Nebraska. God and the devil are having a power struggle over the remains of humanity and the survivors have to pick sides.

The Stand is an incredibly long book. It's also pretty good. King uses several characters on both sides of the struggle to move the action forward. Because of the length, most of the characters have a wealth of depth and feel distinct. However, also because of the length there's a definite fatigue factor to consider when reading it. While the narrative drags only briefly in a couple of places, I found myself getting rather tired of reading it after about 600 pages. The supernatural aspects didn't always overlay the apocalypse themes. I was a little uncomfortable with the religious themes at times but didn't find them too overbearing. All and all, it was a good read.

Recommended to horror fans and anyone contemplating a long trip.

The Ratings

To make life easier for me I've also devised a rating system. Every book gets a rating of 1-5 and here's what it means. (adapted from it's original form from the beginning of last year.)

5 - I loved it, I'm going to own it, I am in fact going to buy multiple copies and promote this book by handing them out for free at church socials and company picnics.

4 - I liked it. I definitely want to have a copy in my library and recommend it to most people.

3 - I liked it well enough, if I see a cheap used copy of it I'll snag it for my collection. I would recommend this book to some people or for specific reasons.

2 - I didn't hate, didn't like it either. I wouldn't generally recommend it to most people.

1 - I hated it or severely disliked it. There has to be a serious problem with the writing or the subject matter for a book to get this rating. In the last 2 years I've only run across 2 or 3 of these. The likelyhood that one of these will appear on the blog is pretty low since...why waste time on something so bad?

2006: How it went and how it didn't went and the 2007 challenge!!

Well, I won't call 2006 a flop because I got a lot of good reading done but I most definitely got derailed and didn't even come close to any of my goals. To avoid getting down about it I'm going to go ahead and close out this year a little early and get a jump on 2007.

So how'd I do?
Well I read about 65 books (not counting the ones that are going to end up under 2007 *shush don't tell anyone*). I discovered many new authors that I enjoyed even if I didn't love every one of them. I think I will continue to pursue some of those lists even if I don't do it in such a rigid way.

What went wrong?
Life intruded. It does that. A lot. *rolls eyes* A lot of good things happened for me and a lot of really tough things happened. Taking care of them just came out above reading. While I really enjoy the lists pursuing them the way I did was very rigid and not nearly as pleasurable as I'd thought it would be. I think planning about a month at a time is really all I should be doing.

So on to newer and brighter things...

2007 Challenge!

Pray for me. I'm trying for 200 again. I'm going to try going back to the roots by posting reading lists on a monthly basis and recaps at the end of each month. I'm keeping the rating system I devised for last year (5's really really good...1 is like a screwdriver to the eye)

I might pursue published reading lists but I'm only going to post them once I finish them with a review of the list.

As always I'll start over at book 1 at the beginning of the year for bookkeeping purposes. 20% of them (or 1 out of 5) needs to be non-fiction. I can't reread books from last year and have them count but I can from the year before that (2005) as long as I write a new review with new insights. Children's and Young Adult books are fair game as are manga and graphic novels.

The List of Lists - an Index for 2006

The purpose of this post is to create an index of the lists that I've tackled over the year and provide easier navigation. Click on a list title to take you to see the master post for a list. From there you can view the individual book reviews by clicking on their titles or look at the list review by clicking on the appropriate link at the bottom of the post. Click here to see an explination of this year's challange and the new rating system.

1. Connie Willis: Too Good To Miss -- (review)
2. Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

a: Science Fiction
b: Fantasy
c: Horror

3. Academia: The Joke
4. Mothers and Daughters
5. Friend's List: Ryan L.
6. Friend's List: David L.
7. Dewey Deconstructed

64. A Mother and Two Daughters

by Gail Godwin (544 pgs)

Rating: 3

Nell is the mother, Cate and Lydia are the daughters. When husband and father, Leonard Strickland, dies suddenly the three women are thrown back together and forced to change. Lydia, who is always correct but nevertheless divorcing her husband Max, Cate the hippie/activist that never slows down, and Nell the mother who's never lived for just herself.

Mom and I read A Mother and Two Daughters back in August or so. (Sorry the post is so late.) Mom observed, and I agree with her, that it seems like nothing much happens. This observation is true in a way and false in others. Many things happen in this novel. Many shocking, wonderful, horrible, elating things. What doesn't happen, is all this things being pulled into a single story. The narrative is very 'day in the life of' and I don't think that the author did this by mistake. I don't much enjoy it though. The writing, itself, is masterful and there were many points in the book that I enjoyed.

recommended to people who like slice of life narratives.

63. Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold (352 pgs)

Rating: 4

Susie is dead. She dies horribly and, after she dies, she watches her family come to terms with her death. She sees her family struggle not to fall apart and she follows the affect she had on two friends from school as they grow and become adults. Susie is dead.

The Lovely Bones is a novel that is very interesting for the way that it is told. The perspective of a child's ghost is a bit strange and intriguing. I do have to agree with some of my friends that the voice is somewhat more mature than expected but I find this did not disturb me. The characters are interesting and the family is believable. I'm glad that I read this but I doubt that I will ever read it again.

Generally recommended for those who enjoy reading fiction. Not recommended for young audiences as the first chapter is pretty hard to take.

62. Dune

By Frank Herbert (544 pgs)

Rating: 5

Paul Atreides, son of Jessica and the Duke Leto, has a mysterious and profound destiny. When his family is displaced from his native world of Caladan to the hell planet Arrakis, Paul is 15. Already he has been taught in the arts of sword fighting, mentats, ruling, and the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. It’s this last which is odd.

This is perhaps my fourth or fifth reading of Dune. Obviously, I like it but I admit that the first time I read it, I was none too impressed. Dune is one of those books that almost requires rereading. It is dense, full of philosophy, and packed with foreshadowing and devious plot-development. While it is perhaps not the best book in the English cannon, it is one of the few books I enjoy rereading.

PS don’t bother with they movies…they are all very visually stunning crap in comparison.

Recommended to everyone who reads science fiction.

61. The Hour of the Gate

By Alan Dean Foster (304 pgs)

Rating: 3

In this sequel to Spell Singer, Jon Tom finds himself it a continuing quest to defeat the plated folk and save the warmlands with an ultimate goal of getting back to his own world. Jon Tom and his friends travel through strange places to find allies in people steeped in myth.

Not as engaging as the first book, The Hour of the Gate was still an enjoyable read. The plot was not as strong and it seems Foster sacrificed it for character development. Many of the characters went through a series of startling revelations but many of them seemed somewhat forced and/or predictable.

While I enjoyed this book I wouldn’t recommend it on it’s own. As a member of a series, it is enjoyable and worth reading.

60. Japanese By Spring

by Ishmael Reed (240 pgs)

Rating: 4

Professor Puttbutt is the son of a prominent military family and non-tenured faculty at the Jack London college in California. He is an African American who rants against affirmative action. He is a coward and a radical alternately with one hell of a mean streak.

I am honestly not sure what to make of Japanese By Spring. It was relatively easy to read but the commentary on ethnicity, PCness, and academia is probably going to take a while to sink in. There was a certain preachy feel to the epilogue and I find it very strange that author showed up as a character several times throughout the novel. I suspect that Reed used forms of African and African American story telling that I am just not familiar with. I did tend to identify with the sort of overarching sense of frustration that accompanies discussion of ethnicity throughout the narrative. It’s difficult to glean Reed’s position on many of the topic but I’m leaning to the conclusion that Reed doesn’t have a position on them. It’s possible that the novel is a farce only intended to expose the ridiculousness of the entire current discourse.

As I said. I don’t know. I have no particular insight.

I tentatively recommend the book in a general sense because recommending it to specific people would indicate I understood it more than I really did. But I do recommend it because it is making me think about these topics and I believe that’s a valuable thing.

59. Living Dead In Dallas

By Charlaine Harris (272 pgs)

Rating: 4

Sookie and Bill (the vampire)are being loaned out to a conclave of vampires in Dallas who are in need of some gentle fact finding. Gentle in the no torture sense. Meanwhile a Maenid has turned up in the area and uses Sookie's flesh as a billboard.

The writing in Living Dead In Dallas is more polished than the first book in the series but it still has some large flaws. For example there is a plot element that only appears in the beginning and at the end of the book. This would not be a problem accept that I actually forgot all about it until it appeared to resolve a secondary plot line. I begin to sense some movement towards the supernatural orgies phenomenon and I'm not pleased about it. However, bearing all that in mind, this was still and enjoyable quick read.

Recommended to the vampire fans and anyone who liked the first book.

58. Japanese Women Don't get Old or Fat

By Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle (288 pgs)

Rating: 3

The newest (to me at least) in the *name a cultural group* don't get fat books. This one is a snarky explanation about why Japanese diet is superior to all others. Much like the Mediterranean and the French, it has some very good points. There are some nice recipes and I'm sure the japanophiles will appreciate the cultural superiority.

To me the most useful thing in Japanese Women Don't get Old or Fat are the Japanese breakfasts and special ingredient suggestions. Moriyama also makes an interesting point about the American giant sized dinner plates.

Recommended for people who like the Japanese culture and food. I suspect that this is a 'gateway book' into cooking Japanese food.

57. Dead Until Dark

by Charlaine Harris (304 pgs)

Rating: 3

Sookie Stackhouse is a waitress at a bar in rural Louisiana but she's also a telepath plagued by the constant awareness of everyone's thoughts. Vampires, however, as it turns out are telepathic blanks to her which is much better than knowing what people are thinking all the time and very attractive in a potential mate. Cue Bill the vampire.

Dead Until Dark is part of the new vampire romance/mystery genre. Lucky for us Harris is a decent writer. Sookie and Bill are both immediately interesting characters. The premise is, if not believable, pretty compelling and the mystery was pretty decent although there were not many opportunities for the reader to figure it out ahead of the character. Actually there was no way for the reader to figure it out first, so I would suggest reading this for the mystery aspect. I think the series has potential.

Recommended to people who like the Anita Blake series but got tired of the supernatural orgies.

56. How To Be Good

by Nick Hornby (305 pgs)

Rating: 5

Katie Carr is a doctor. She cares about people. She cares about world issues. She tries very hard 'to be good.' And she is good to. Isn't she? Ok she doesn't invite homeless people into her home or give away all her excess income but she can still be good. Right? Right!? One would think so but when her husband goes from first class prick to reborn secular saint, he challenges her sense of comparative goodness.

How to be Good is hilarious and sad. It challenges ideas of goodness particularly in contrast to meeting one's own needs. While it does make a lot of very good points I think the most interesting facet was in how it pointed out how difficult it is to argue with the righteous. We know that we need to take care of ourselves and deserve to have the luxuries we work for, but it's hard to argue that when someone pulls a 'but people are starving in India.' How do you defend yourself without feeling like a prick and is it even possible to?

Recommended for people who like to dwell on the grey.

Update

Sorry...things have gotten away from me and I'm at least a half dozen book reviews behind.

I believe I'm also seeing the collapse of the list system. It's a lot of fun but it's beginning to feel very restrictive so I may just say I'm going to still be persuing the lists but I think I'll be reading many many things off list as well. I'll start catching up as well over the next few days.