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Slam
Slam by Nick Hornby Published: 2007 Length: 309 pages I’ve really grown to love Nick Hornby books over the past few years, but this wasn’t one of his best. I believe this was his first attempt at a young adult novel, and while I enjoyed it overall, it felt a little trite. It still has some of Hornby’s hilarious dialogue, and there were a couple of moments that made me laugh out loud, but those moments were spread apart quite a bit. The story is centred around a couple of teenagers who accidentally become pregnant and choose to keep the child. Sam Jones, the male teen and viewpoint character of…
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The Magicians
The Magicians by Lev Grossman Published: 2009 Length: 402 pages Hopefully this is not becoming a theme, but this is another book that I really wanted to love and just couldn’t. People seem to be describing this as ‘Harry Potter for adults’, and I don’t know if I agree. I suppose I took that to imply more depth than Harry Potter, but it seems it’s just labelled as such because there’s some swearing and sex. This is a tricky book to boil down to a basic synopsis, because for the first half of the book there’s very little conflict, and then the second half of the book could essentially be…
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Alice in Wonderland
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Published: 1865 Narrated By: Jim Dale Audio Length: 02:57 I picked this up partly because I wanted something quick and light after The Windup Girl and partly because I was reading The Magicians and had C. S. Lewis on the mind. And until this very day, thirty-two years into my life, I thought it was C.S. Lewis who wrote this book. Wrong Lewis, it turns out. And wrong century. Audiobook fatigue and a case of mistaken identity may not be the best reasons to pick up a book, but I guess that doesn’t really matter in the end. I also picked this up because…
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The Wasp Factory
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks Published: 1984 Narrated By: Peter Kenny Audio Length: 06:11 I’ve been making a point to read more Scottish authors in the last couple of years but hadn’t yet gotten to Iain Banks. He’s been on my mind since he sadly passed away last year from cancer. I knew him as a science fiction author, but it turns out he has many mainstream fiction books as well. He publishes his mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and his science fiction as Iain M. Banks, so it makes his bibliography easy to navigate. This is his fist novel, a novel as Iain Banks, and it was a…
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The Windup Girl
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi Published: 2009 Narrated by: Jonathan Davis Audio length: 19:34 I feel like I should have enjoyed this more than I did. Normally I would say to take my opinions to heart, because I have fantastic taste, but this time it feels like my lukewarm feelings about this may be my own fault. Firstly, I love the setting and the atmosphere. It takes place in a dystopian Thailand, in a future where fuel sources have run out and food has become scarce. Calorie companies control the production of genetically modified food, crops that have been designed to not produce seeds, and this has caused plague…
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July in Review
Books Acquired: Nigellissima: Instant Italian Inspiration by Nigella Lawson The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks Alice in Wonderland (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland #1) by Lewis Carroll Books Read: Saga, Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks Alice in Wonderland (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland #1) by Lewis Carroll The Magicians (The Magicians, #1) by Lev Grossman I managed to only buy one physical book this month (the other three are audiobooks), and that was a cookbook. I’m not sure how to deal with cookbooks in my obsessive online tracking. I add them to Goodreads,…