Books, Books, Books (Take Two)

Let's talk about the books I've recently read. There are lots, so hang on tight.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne - This book was surprisingly good. I have to admit that I thought the premise sounded like a series of monotonous events, but no, it's really not!! The plot kept me entertained and curious as to how the narrator could possibly get himself out of the pickle he was in. There's some hoopla over mistranslations in this book, but I guess I wasn't reading carefully enough to notice any problems. I enjoyed it enough to add The Mysterious Island and In Search of Castaways to my Kindle wish list. (I will admit to having skimmed through some of the less titillating parts where he went on and on and on about the marine life. I can't help it. I don't really care about the classification of mollusks.)

Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton - I admit it. I wanted a new vampire series after having read all of Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books. Several reviews suggested Hamilton's Anita Blake series and so I took them up on their suggestions. I don't think Anita and I are going to get along. She seems a bit airheaded and the series is a little too gritty for me. I'm probably not going to consider on this series, but I can see why others may enjoy it.

My Soul to Lose by Rachel Vincent - This book was free to download onto my Kindle, so I put it on. It's about a girl who gets put into a psychiatric unit because she...belongs in a psychiatric unit. I don't get it. Maybe you need to be sixteen to understand this book. I want my three hours back, Rachel Vincent!!

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - I guess my education is lacking because somehow I have missed these brilliant stories all my life. So smart. So interesting. Holmes is a freaking lunatic, but he's genius. Anyway, in case you can't tell, I loved this. I immediately downloaded The Hound of the Baskervilles (it's in the queue) and am going to do more research to read the entire Holmes oeuvre. If you like mysteries or clever riddles, you will love these books. The language is precise, Holmes and Watson are a grumpy couple, and Holmes is a crackhead. Lovely.

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson - I wrote about the first book in this series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo here. I liked the first book, but it took a LONG time for the story to develop. No such buildup here and I LOVED this book. I couldn't put it down. I was reading it when we were traveling and at one point, I made the boy take over driving, not because I was tired, but because I had to finish the chapter I was on. This book is better than the original, the characters are tighter, the story is more compelling (less international subterfuge/murder and more all around what the fuck is going on here), and the whole things kicks ass. The third and final books comes out later this year and I'm so excited. Go read it.

I read the first three books in the Charlaine Harris series about Lily Bard: Shakespeare's Landlord, Shakespeare's Champion, and Shakespeare's Christmas. As is well documented here, I adore Harris. I love the Sookie Stackhouse books, I adore the Harper Connelly series, and I suffered through Aurora Teagarden. But after reading Shakespeare's Christmas, I was quite finished with Lily Bard. She's a caricature of a character and I couldn't force myself to suspend disbelief that all this shit actually happened to her!! I mean, I buy that Sookie gets into messes (vampires, duh) and Harper has a weird, vaguely mystical skill. Even Roe has something compelling (dumpy librarian gets all the hot guys), but Lily? She's nothing. She's flat. She had a traumatic event and we're supposed to believe that this is how she reacts? No. I don't. So. Eh. Don't bother. I'm not going to continue with the series.

I started to read Vanish by Tom Pawlik (free download), but I couldn't read more than about three chapters because I was starting to get nervous it was secretly an Armageddon, end of the world, better convert to Christianity now book. So. Um. I don't know. Read it if you are okay with that kind of stuff?

I also started The Hunters by Jason Pinter because someone I respect very highly said that he liked Pinter books. I read about 15% of the book and just couldn't go on. It's too gritty, too real, too masculine for me. I like my books to be a bit more gentle.

The Crossroads Cafe by Deborah Smith - This was also a free download. It was fine. A good, classic romance novel. The writing was okay, the characters were relatively unmemorable, but the setting was fabulous.

I'm currently reading A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. It's classic young adult literature I somehow missed reading when I was growing up. I don't know how I missed it as it's one of the few books with a female lead that I didn't read, but I gotta say, I'm not loving it. I mean, it's fine, but the characters are so flat. L'Engle just keeps using the same words to describe them, which is violating all kinds of the show, don't tell rules of writing. I'm going to finish it because I feel like I ought to, but there you have it.

Books on the list to read:
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
The aforementioned Jules Verne books
Sherlock Holmes!!
The Magicians Lev Grossman, a book recommended to me by my friend, N

So, any suggestions? A lot of the classics are free to little cost, so if you have any ideas of books that are actually good (if anyone suggests A Separate Peace, just know that you'll get mocked), let me know. I was reading trashy chick lit for so long, it's been a real pleasure to get back to the basics of literature.